The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

“World War II exhausted superlatives,” Victor Davis Hanson writes. But despite the global conflict’s ability to stretch our imagination of what warfare could entail, its spark and preambles look familiar, says Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He explains how the war’s ending might have been predictable—and why he decided to go with the plural in his title. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Second World Wars​: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

The history of paper is a story of technology following a need, argues Mark Kurlansky. The Chinese invented paper to keep records cheaply and easily in a bureaucratic society. It wasn’t until centuries later that the Arabs—adept at mathematics, astronomy, and accounting—had reason to adopt paper. Europeans, plagued by illiteracy, long knew of paper (Arab merchants regularly offered it for sale), but it wasn’t until a thousand years after its invention that Europeans, having adopted Arab innovations in math and science, imported paper to replace cumbersome and expensive parchment made of animal hides. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Mark Kurlansky, author of Paper: Paging Through History. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads looks at the many ways the world connects itself, going well beyond trade routes to tell a story about the energies that shaped the course of history. In moving silk, spices, furs, gold, silver, slaves, religion, and disease on the Silk Road, the West became linked to people and ideas in the region between the Mediterranean and the Himalayas. It’s the origin, argues Frankopan, of our interconnected world. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. In a new book Pulitzer Prize–winning author Stephen Greenblatt takes up the tale of Adam and Eve, the world’s most famous origin story. Greenblatt tracks the tale from its creation, perhaps as a response to the Jews’ Babylonian exile, through its varied interpretations, from the time it was viewed symbolically (as it was by early Christian historians) to its acceptance as a literal event (by no less an authority than Saint Augustine) to its deep influence on Renaissance art and literature and its collision with the modern world, most consequentially with the thought of Charles Darwin. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

In France the period from the summer of 1870 through the spring of 1871 has come to be known as the terrible year: France suffered a humiliating defeat in its war against Prussia, with Paris sieged and the capture of Emperor Napoleon III. Citizens of Paris who refused to capitulate to a new national government in Versailles formed the Paris Commune, which was brutally repressed. One Parisian trying to make sense of it all was Gustave Flaubert, whose novel A Sentimental Education had been published the year before. The novel has come to be seen as prophetic of the events of the terrible year—Flaubert believed the violence of the commune could have been avoided if more people had read his novel. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Peter Brooks, author of Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

The northernmost Civil War battle was fought in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and though Confederate soldiers never came within three hundred miles of Manhattan, New York City was far from untouched by the conflict—the ships dispatched by President Lincoln to quell the rebellion’s beginning at Fort Sumter, for example, sailed from New York harbor. Rebel sympathizers, abolitionists, immigrants, and freed slaves all called the city home and the conflict colored every aspect of New York life. Lewis H. Lapham talks with John Strausbaugh, author of City of Sedition: The History of New York City During the Civil War. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Until the fifteenth century the only sea that mattered (politically, socially, and economically) was the Mediterranean. As sixteenth-century European explorers set sail in search of land and opportunity, it was the Atlantic that carried them from old worlds to new. Since the middle of the twentieth century, argues Simon Winchester, it’s been the Pacific Ocean that dominates trade, travel, and scientific research, and it’s on, in, and under the Pacific that the future of the world will be forged. Lewis Lapham talks with Simon Winchester, author of Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Why did World War I begin? Why did America enter the conflict? What place does the war hold in American historical memory? These are questions historian Michael Kazin asks his Georgetown University students, and many of them are stumped. When Woodrow Wilson plunged the country headfirst into its first European fight, he was met with resistance from nearly every corner of American society—in New York City, a women’s march for peace was organized along Fifth Avenue. Today there is no memorial on the National Mall to the American soldiers who fought in the war, but understanding the complex social, political, and economic forces that birthed the war—and American involvement in it—is more crucial than ever. Lewis Lapham talks to Michael Kazin, author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914–1918. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

The life and thought of Niccolò Machiavelli has been badly misunderstood, argues historian Erica Benner. Far from his usual depiction as a politically amoral henchman, Machiavelli was in fact a prescient critic of princely power and religious zealotry. He lived the problems of government and fought to change a corrupt world. Lewis H. Lapham talks to Erica Benner, author of Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lexicographers write and edit dictionaries, and while they’re becoming a rare breed, language—ever evolving—is a growth industry. There are only some fifty full-time lexicographers in the U.S. They spend their time reading, writing, and synthesizing the words we use, eschew, and transform. Lewis Lapham talks with Kory Stamper, lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and the author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.