Historically Thinking

Nov 18 2024 300 ep. 63 mins 1.2k

Historically Thinking Podcast artwork

We believe that when people think historically, they are engaging in a disciplined way of thinking about the world and its past. We believe it gives thinkers a knack for recognizing nonsense; and that it cultivates not only intellectual curiosity and rigor, but also intellectual humility. Join Al Zambone, author of Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life, as he talks with historians and other professionals who cultivate the craft of historical thinking.

History Society & Culture

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Episode 383: Quaker Founder

Nov 18 2024 72 mins

As today’s guest writes in the introduction of her new book Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson, “For more than two hundred years, John Dickinson has suffered from an image problem that no one in his day would have thought possible." In Signers’ Hall at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the statue of John Dickinson stands alone in a corner, h

Episode 382: Women and the Reformations

Nov 08 2024 91 mins

A forensic reconstruction of Saint Rose of Lima From the early 16th century, and for over two hundred years after that, a series of convulsions within the Christian church of Western Europe led to its splintering, but also to an incredibly rapid movement of ideas and practices to the four corners of the earth. These convulsions—or reformations—were responsible not only for cha

Episode 381: Philosophy to the People

Nov 03 2024 80 mins

His lectures at the College de France were so popular that people arrived at the lecture hall at least an hour in advance. When he finally spoke, it was standing room only, with men literally climbing in the windows. During his first visit to New York, his presence on the Columbia University campus caused one of the earliest recorded traffic jams. And when the French government sou

Episode 380: Madrid

Oct 27 2024 76 mins

For nearly five centuries Madrid has been the capital of Spain, and the focus of frequent contempt by foreign visitors, as well as the scorn and hatred of Spaniards. Prime Minister Manuel Azaña Díaz, born just 31 kilometers from Madrid, would write that in “Madrid there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to see. Madrid is a town without history. In Madrid, nothing has hap

Episode 379: Philadelphia

Oct 14 2024 65 mins

It is no longer the largest city in America, or the second largest, or even the fifth largest, but there are still those of us who love it. While modern American cities are all racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse, it has always been so, from before it was even a city. Modern American cities, simply because of size, are also stages for a variety of conflicts, and this city

Episode 378: Old New World

Oct 07 2024 71 mins

For a few hundred years, the New World of the Americas was thought to be genuinely new. But in the course of the nineteenth century, Americans became increasingly uncertain about the ground beneath their feet. Canal building uncovered strange creatures like enormous crabs; seams of coal were determined to be fossilized forests. And while no living mammoths or mastodons were discove

Episode 377: BIG HISTORY (From the Archives)

This podcast originally dropped on December 17, 2015. If we had the reverb and the talent, we'd introduce this week's podcast like one of those guys touting a monster truck event on "SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY." Because this week we're talking about Big History–and calling it Big is actually kind of an understatement. That's because practitioners of Big History, like today's guest

Episode 376: Venerable Bede

Sep 24 2024 59 mins

Generations of college students have probably imagined that his first name was Venerable, and his family name Bede. But Bede–that’s B-E-D-E–was his only name. He was a native of Northumbria, in the north of what we now think of as England. Apparently never going abroad, his life was spent within a few miles of his monastery, and probably just a few miles from where he was bor

Episode 375: Bible History

It is the most influential book in the history of the world, a book that in many ways set the standard for what books would become, but it is also the book at the heart of a world spanning religion. It has never purported to be the words of God, but the result of a complex partnership between God and his creation, the result being a “divine words written by human hands.” This

Episode 374: Serpent in Eden

Sep 04 2024 72 mins

In his long short story or very short novella entitled “The Man Without a Country,” Edward Everett Hale describes his protagonist Philip Nolan as a young man from the Mississippi Valley who “had grown up in the West of those days, in the midst of ‘Spanish plot’, ‘Orleans plot’, and all the rest. He had been educated on a plantation where the finest company was a Spani