The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Susan Dunn, author of A Blueprint for War: FDR and the Hundred Days That Mobilized America. 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.

“Beyond any doubt the decades from the 1800s to the 1900s witnessed many extraordinary and traumatic challenges and wrenching and disorienting changes,” historian David Cannadine writes in the epilogue of Victorious Century, “as expressed and mediated through (among other things) the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, the paintings of Turner and Landseer, the novels of Dickens and Eliot, and even Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas and Oscar Wilde’s brilliantly brittle plays.” But “how far did the men (and apart from Queen Victoria, they were all men) who were ostensibly in charge of the affairs of the United Kingdom and the British Empire understand what was going on and know what they were doing?” The book chronicles many of these events hurtling by those supposedly orchestrating or managing them, starting in 1800 with Ireland being subsumed into the larger kingdom of Great Britain and ending with the general election in 1906, when the Liberal Party squashed the Conservatives for the last time. In this episode of The World in Time, Cannadine explains why he chose those dates as bookends and why the words of Karl Marx and the oft-quoted beginning of A Tale of Two Cities precede his book. Lewis H. Lapham talks with David Cannadine, author of Victorious Century: The United Kingdom: 1800-1906. 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 period of American history that extends from 1865 to 1896, Stanford historian Richard White writes in the introduction to The Republic for Which It Stands, “for a long time devolved into historical flyover country. Writers and scholars departed the Civil War, taxied through Reconstruction, and embarked on a flight to the twentieth century and the Progressives, while only rarely touching down in between. Such neglect has changed with recent scholarship that has revealed a country transformed by immigration, urbanization, environmental crisis, political stalemate, new technologies, the creation of powerful corporations, income inequality, failure of governance, mounting class conflict, and increasing social, cultural, and religious diversity.” In this episode of the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham and White try to dig into as many of these topics as they can, while discussing William Dean Howells’ role in capturing all these moments and whether it is fair to call the current moment the second Gilded Age. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Richard White, author of The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896. 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.

“Two and a half decades after the collapse of the USSR, it seems the strangest of anachronisms that Vladimir Illyich Lenin can continue to draw such crowds,” Victor Sebestyen writes of Lenin’s tomb. “Everyone knows the havoc he wreaked; few people now believe in the faith he espoused. Yet he still commands attention—even affection—in Russia.” That attention also made the historian’s exhaustive new look at the man overshadowing recent Russian history possible. For this episode of The World in Time, he discussed his biography of Lenin and the conclusions he reached about its protagonist: “Even when he was wrong about things, he was often wrong in an interesting and challenging way. But I actually grew to hate him much, much more as I was working on it.” Lewis H. Lapham talks with Victor Sebestyen, author of Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror. 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.

“For over two centuries, this topic has been subject to whitewashing and selective remembering and forgetting,” historian Holger Hoock writes. He is referring to the American Revolution, a war sanitized by sentimentality and historical distance but about as bloody as other moments in the past with a “Revolution” appended to its name. The facts Hoock cites are relentless: “More than ten times as many Americans died, per capita, in the Revolutionary War as in World War I, and nearly five times as many as in World War II. The death rate among Revolutionary-era prisoners of war was the highest in American history. In addition, at least 20,000 British and thousands more American Loyalist, Native American, German, and French lives were lost. The Revolution exacted further human sacrifice when at war’s end approximately one in forty Americans went into permanent exile, the equivalent of some 7.5 million today.” In May 2017, Hoock spoke with Lewis Lapham about his research on the Revolutionary War at an event at the New York Public Library. Listen to their conversation above. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Holger Hoock, author of Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth. 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.

“History does not tell us what to do,” Civil War scholar Eric Foner says, but it does help us understand how the world got this way, as long as you aren’t stuck playing the Great Men greatest hits in your studies. But that’s what most of us learn: a litany of good or important deeds done by familiar names that turns history into a constellation of memorized details instead of a reckoning. This pockmarked understanding of the past, and the efforts to render history into more than a sunny yet useless bit of impressionism, is the theme of Foner’s Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History. The essays within were published in The Nation between 1977 and 2017 and often hit home the stickiness of the past. In a book review about public history and Confederate monuments, he asks, “Why, one wonders, has our understanding of history changed so rapidly, but its public presentation remained so static?” Lewis H. Lapham talks with Eric Foner, author of Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American 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.

“The book teaches me things,” Barack Obama explained to his friends when defending his decision to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “about white people…the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world.” In her introduction to The Dawn Watch, Maya Jasanoff writes that she came to agree with what the future president wrote in Dreams from My Father, that Conrad’s perspective was valuable “not just despite its blind spots but because of them. Conrad captured something about the way power operated across continents and races, something that seemed as important to engage with today as it had when he started to write.” In this podcast episode, the Harvard history professor traces the writer’s past and explains how she followed him across the sea and to the Congo to understand better what he saw and how the imperialism he observed in the nineteenth century evolved into what we see now in the twenty-first century. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826. Reportedly Adams’ last words were “Thomas Jefferson survives”—without realizing his former vice president had predeceased him. Despite the fact that the political colleagues faced off in one of the dirtiest presidential campaigns in American history, the pair ended their lives not only at the same time but as friends who had exchanged letters for years. But their previously acrimonious relationship as leading figures of our first political parties, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Gordon S. Wood points out in his new book, had an immense effect on the eventual shape of the United States’ political fault lines and culture. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Gordon S. Wood, author of Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. 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 Adrian Goldsworthy, author of Pax Romana. 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.

How do you sift through a place’s past once historical memory has settled? Does that process grow complicated when that place is home, and you have to contend with your own memories too? Roger D. Hodge, national editor of The Intercept, tries to get past the clichés that have piled up around Texas to find something new to say about the place he grew up, which has a story layered with the accumulated pasts of many people who see different things when they go on a long drive in West Texas. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Roger D. Hodge, author of Texas Blood: Seven Generations Among the Outlaws, Ranchers, Indians, Missionaries, Soldiers, and Smugglers of the Borderlands. 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.