Historically Thinking

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 Craig Benjamin, begin a history survey not with Mesopotamia, or ancient China, or even homo sapiens squeaking past homo neanderthalis. No, they begin with the Big Bang...which happened quite some time before there were any humans around to enjoy the show. Big History says that, to understand human history--and humanity--it's first necessary to begin appreciating the size and complexity of the entire universe. In doing that, the argument goes, we will begin to improve ourselves morally and spiritually; or, failing that, we'll have a really fantastic general education course. Please note that these are two very different outcomes.

With us to talk about these outcomes, and to give a lightning fast overview of Big History "from the Big Bang to you" is Craig Benjamin. He is associate professor of history at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan Craig is president (for just one-and-a-half more weeks, he tells me) of the World History Society; he's also a charter member of the International Big History Association. In fact, he's probably the second person ever to teach a course on Big History. As you'll hear, he's a great person to have a chat with; hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

For Further Investigation

The Big History Project: if you take the tests, you'll get a sticker.

David Christian presents the history of the world in 18 minutes

A definitive Big History Course, taught by Dr. David Christian

Or how about these for a Christmas gift or two?

Big History: Between Nothing and Everything

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 born. Yet this seemingly narrow and circumscribed life was full of intense intellectual activity. Bede authored dozens of works: teaching texts to be used for young boys entering the monastery, as he had done; biblical commentaries; arithmetical works; sermons and homilies; and lives of Northumbrian saints. Yet when he is remembered by historians, it is for his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, An Ecclesiastical History of the English People. 

With me to discuss Bede as historian is Rory Naismith, Professor of Early Medieval History and Fellow of Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge. This is his third appearance on the podcast; he was last on Historically Thinking in Episode 343 discussing whether we should talk about the Anglo-Saxons.

 

For Further Investigation

This is one of our occasional podcasts on important historians. For others, see this one on Polybius, and this on another medieval historian, Princess Anna Komnene

The remnants of the monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow

The historical site formerly known as "Bede's World": now Jarrow Hall Anglo-Saxon Farm Village and Bede Museum, reopened after a short closure.

FYI, in contemporary Britain it's probably true that Jarrow is best known for the "Jarrow Crusade" rather than for Bede

A good companion to Bede is, amazingly enough, J. Robert Wright, A Companion to Bede: A Reader's Commentary on The Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Rory Naismith also suggests:

Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People/Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum: "This is available in very many translations, including those of Bertram Colgrave and D. H. Farmer. A scholarly edition, with facing-page Latin and English, is available from Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors."

J. Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986), pp. 1–48

G. Hardin Brown, A Companion to Bede (Woodbridge, 2009)

P. Hunter-Blair, The World of Bede (Cambridge, 1970)

H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (London, 1991)

R. Shaw, The Gregorian Mission to Kent in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History: Methodology and Sources (London, 2018)

A. Thacker, ‘Bede and History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. S. DeGregorio (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 170–89

A. Thacker, ‘Bede’s Ideal of Reform’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. P. Wormald et al. (Oxford, 1983), pp. 130–53

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 book is of course the Bible. On the grounds of sales and publications alone, it has been astonishingly successful. Due to a Niagara of translations and editions, dating back to the first centuries of the Christian religion, it has been a remarkably adaptive host for the ideas and emotions contained within it. My guest Bruce Gordon has written a biography of the Bible that focuses on its flow from the eastern Mediterranean into the farthest corners of the world, writing what he calls “the story of humanity’s grasp for the impossible: the perfect Bible.”

A native of Canada, Bruce Gordon is the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School. Among his many publications are biographies of the Zurich reformer Huldrych Zwingli, and of the Genevan reformer John Calvin, as well as a “biography” of the life of Calvin’s most important production, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. His most recent book is The Bible: A Global History, which is the subject of our conversation today.

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 Spanish officer or a French merchant from Orleans.” Nolan was, in other words, a young man who was used to foreign serpents in the western Eden. Little wonder, then, that in the story he participated in a conspiracy against a United States that he barely knew.

In his new book Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison's America,  Tyson Reeder shows the reality behind a story published in 1863. For over forty years, James Madison was near the heart of American politics, perhaps entitled to be called the chief architect of both the Constitutional system and then of the party system that he had just a few years before decried. Intimately linked with both of these innovations were the influences of Spain, Great Britain and France, all eager to direct the young republic in ways that would benefit their interests in the Americas. 

Tyson Reeder is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He was previously  an editor of the Papers of James Madison at the University of Virginia, and author of Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution (2019).

For Further Investigation

This episode is connected to a great many other episodes in the last year, in one way or another. See Episode 366 with Andrew Burstein; Episode 352, on Tecumseh as a great American strategist; and Episode 344, on America's founding scoundrels

In Early Modern Europe, spying was not really a profession but it certainly was a verb. At times it would seem, from the dark suspicious years at the end of Henry VII’s life, to Cromwell’s protectorate and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, that it was a game that everyone was playing. And in an era in which anyone with a modicum of political power was, figuratively speaking, always looking over their shoulders for rivals, they were literally driven to read each other’s mail.

But reading the mail has its difficulties. How to unseal and reseal a letter so that no one knows that you have opened it? And when you discover the letter is encoded, how to decipher it? And so the game of spy vs. spy went on in the seventeenth century, pretty much as it does now, save for a few technological developments. 

With me to discuss the world of early modern spycraft, mostly in Britain, are Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman, coauthors of Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration. Nadine Akkerman is professor of early modern literature and culture at Leiden University,  and author of the acclaimed Invisible Agents. Pete Langman is an Oxford English Dictionary bibliographer, author of Killing Beauties, and a cricketer.

For Further Investigation

For more on early modern espionage, but conducted on highly professional basis, see my conversation with Ioanna Iordanou in Episode 142

Letterlocking

How to open a locked letter without opening it

How to hide a message in an egg

"Making a wax seal, how hard can it be?"

Cryptiana: Articles on Historical Cryptography

Colonel John Trumbull, Artist

John Trumbull must be one of the only artists in the history of American art to insist upon being addressed by his military rank; he was Colonel Trumbull until he died. But it was not John Trumbull’s feats in battle or in managing administrative correspondence that won him fame among his contemporaries, but what he painted on canvas. Hanging in the rotunda of the US Capitol are four of the paintings in which he sought to preserve memories and paint a history of the American Revolution, but also teach something of the ethics appropriate to war; of democratic and republican virtue; of political  power flowing from a sovereign people; and of the need to relinquish that power when called to do so. To this day some of the most recognizable images of the Revolution are almost certainly something painted by Trumbull–most likely either The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, or the painting known simply as The Declaration of Independence. If occupying space rent-free in posterity's imagination is ever the ambition of an artist, then Trumbull succeeded, and then some. 

With me today to discuss the life, art, and civic teaching of John Trumbull is Richard Brookhiser. Beginning with his 1997 book Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, Richard Brookhiser has written a shelf of books on the American founders, the most recent of which is Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution. 

For Further Investigation

Highly recommended: "Let This Be a Lesson: Heroes, Heroines, and Narrative in Paintings at Yale," a brilliant series of lectures on history painting by John Walsh, from which I've learned a lot. See particularly Lecture 7, on Benjamin West, and Lecture 8, on John Trumbull, focusing on his painting of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

There are many HT episodes on related issues. You might be interested in Episode 163, on Joseph Warren, the first martyr of the American Revolution, whose death is the focus of Trumbull's first history painting; or Episode 176, which focuses heavily on the images of revolutionary victors created by Trumbull and his contemporaries (some of whom were his friends and acquaintances)

Maritime plundering, or piracy, has happened in nearly all regions of the world, in most ages of human history. Yet the image that we have of "a pirate" in our collective imagination comes from one period in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. So "why has that one relatively short moment come to stand for all sea raiding across time and space?"

That is the question with which Richard Blakemore begins his new book Enemies of All: The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Piracy.  To answer it he not only surveys decades of plundering and combat at sea and on land, but also interprets court cases, parliamentary legislation, imperial administration or the lack of it, and the slave trade. For the “golden age of piracy”, like a conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination, at times seems to be connected to pretty much everything else going on at the same time. Except that in the case of piracy from 1650 to 1722, it actually was.

Richard Blakemore is Associate Professor of Social and Maritime History at the University of Reading. Enemies of All is his second book.

For Further Investigation 

We've talked about pirates of the "golden age" with Steve Hahn in Episode 87; and they came up again in, of all places, in the history told by trees in Episode 156

Probably the previous single best book about pirates in the "golden age", both factual and fictional, was David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates (Random House, 1995)

Marcus Rediker provides a view of pirates as proto-Bolsheviks in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age; Peter T. Leeson describes them as highly rational market actors in The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates

And for more on one of the most curious episodes we talked about, see Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates–a great book

There are a lot of bad editions of Charles Johnson, General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, but this is the best one until we can convince Richard Blakemore to produce an edited and annotated version.

How can a new nation establish itself amidst the networks and intrigues of a very old part of the world, while at the same time trying to be different from everyone else? Are these inherently contradictory aims? And how can either–or none–of these objectives be achieved by civil servants who are engaging in, at best, on the job training? 

These are some of the questions that are prompted by studying the First Barbary War, fought by the young United States from 1801 to 1805 along the coast of North Africa. Far from being a story simply of simple and straightforward naval derring-do, it is one of strategic ambiguity, diplomatic finesse, and the ideological aspirations of a new nation set against the backdrop of world war and millennia old customs. 

With me to discuss the First Barbary War is Abby Mullen, Assistant Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy. She is also the impresario of not one but two podcasts: Consultation Prize, a limited run series about US diplomacy from the ground-eye viewpoint of American consuls, and Big If True, a podcast for kids which is co-hosted with her daughter. But today we are (mostly) talking about her new book To Fix a National Character: The United States in the First Barbary War, 1800–1805.

For Further Information

William Eaton is the subject of the portrait above; for a little something about the "Burr Conspiracy", in which Eaton may have participated and against which he then gave evidence, see Episode 344 

As mentioned in the podcast, Daniel Herschenzohn in Episode 95 explained the complex economy in the Mediterranean that centered on the redemption of prisoners. But the only time that consuls have shown up was very recently, in Episode 359. 

Here's a link to Abby Mullen's Consolation Prize, a limited series podcast "about the history of the United States in the world through the eyes of its consuls." And one to Big If True,  "a podcast for kids exploring the truth about big things" co-hosted with her daughter, but which is now alas lapsed into a podcast doze.

For on the American wars on the Barbary coast, see Frank Lambert's The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World; for a now very old book full of swashbuckling derring-do, and not very many strategic complications, see Fletcher Pratt, Preble's Boys: Commodore Preble and the Birth of American Sea Power.

More than any other creature, it has proven itself over millennia to be man’s best and most useful  friend. At first it was just another prey animal, but eventually it became such a close companion and coworker that it seems impossible for many of us to imagine ever eating one–although probably a billion people around the world do so on a regular basis. For thousands of years it remade cultures and societies, even creating new languages. Then, at the moment of its greatest societal impact, it was quickly replaced by the internal combustion engine.

I am of course referring to the horse. And with me to talk about the immense importance of the horse in human history is Timothy Winegard, heard last week explaining the horrible effects of the mosquito in human history. He is Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University, where as a Canadian expat he is by Colorado law also required to coach the college hockey team–which he does. More importantly for our purposes today he is author of The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity.

It is without question the most lethal predator in the history of the planet.  It has killed more humans than any other single cause of death—something around 52 billion over the course of 200,000 years of human history. In 2022 alone, it probably killed 680,000 people—a number much reduced from the carnage it has caused in past centuries. This super-predator is the mosquito, which has since the time of the dinosaurs carried diseases in its tiny body that have destroyed nations and cultures, and altered the destinies of those who survived.

With me to describe the immense historical impact of the mosquito is Timothy C. Winegard.  He is Associate Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University, and author of the 2019 bestselling book The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator.

For Further Investigation

A review of The Mosquito in Emerging Infectious Diseases

The CDC Guide to Mosquitoes

One of the earliest works of animation: How a Mosquito Operates, from 1912

Two videos related to William Crawford Gorgas: one, from the Gorgas House Museum in Alabama, highlights his contribution to the building of the Panama Canal; the other is a one minute clip of a silent movie of Gorgas traveling on a train through the Canal Zone.