Historically Thinking

In the first months of 1939, before the world changed, Elzbieta Zawacka had an MA degree in Mathematics, and was an enthusiastic instructor in Poland’s “Women’s Military Training” organization, established to prepare women for service in a future war. When that war came, Elzbieta believed from the start that she was a soldier as much as any man. Under Nazi occupation she established espionage networks, and then served as a courier for the Polish Home Army. Sent to England, she there trained as a member of the Polish Special Operations Group known as the “Silent Unseen”; when she returned to Poland she did so as the only woman to arrive during the war by parachute. Elzbieta fought in the Warsaw uprising, and survived its collapse. Following the Soviet takeover of Poland, she became a teacher. But in 1951 she was arrested and tortured by the Security Service, and spent four years in prison before her sentence was commuted. As a consequence her heroism and achievements were erased from national memory, until the fall of the Communist regime. 

With me to discuss the life and achievements of this amazing woman is Clare Mulley, whose books have recovered the stories and experience of women who served during the First and Second World Wars. They have included a biography of the founder of Save the Children; the story of a Polish-born British special agent; and the stories of Nazi Germany’s only two female test pilots. Her most recent book is Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter, which is the subject of our conversation today. 

For Further Investigation

Cichociemni–The Silent Unseen

Silent Unseen: The Polish Special Forces of Audley End

In the sixteenth century wealthy men and women began to collect books. With these they began to furnish a new room in the house which they called the studiolo. In the “little study” one could read in happiness and contentment, safe from an external world beset by wars and plague. They could conduct conversations with their contemporaries by letter, and with the dead of past ages through their reading. The studiolo became an extension of their intellect, and of their personality.

But the studiolo was also a place from which those religious and political conflicts were conducted. And the studiolo was, in the contemporary imagination, a place of potential madness. After all, it was reading in solitude that infected the brain of that noble gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha;  obsessive reading that undermined the power of Duke Prospero of Milan, and resulted in his exile on a far off island with his daughter Miranda; and reading that turned Dr. Faustus to seek power through a diabolical bargain. 

With me to discuss the studiolo in history and literature is Andrew Hui, Associate Professor of the Humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. His most recent book is The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries, which is the focus of our conversation today.

Many college professors like to remind each other that no other nation on earth has the system of collegiate sports that has developed in the United States, one in which the mishaps of a mediocre football team attract much more attention than what goes on in classrooms, labs, and libraries–and yes, I am thinking of the University of Virginia. These professors  love to quote Cornell President Andrew Dickson White refusing to allow the Cornell football team to travel to a game with Michigan: “I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind.” They remember that the University of Chicago had a football team and even a stadium, until President Robert Hutchins killed the program, declaring it an “infernal nuisance.”

But they’re less likely to know that it was that same Andrew Dickson White who nourished Cornell intercollegiate athletics, financially supporting the Cornell crew team so that they could beat Harvard and Yale. And professors are even less likely to contemplate an awful historical truth, that college sports have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship to the university that hosts them, and that they have grown and changed in more or less the same way that the American university has grown and changed. Far from being a peripheral accident of history, college sports reveal important insights into American higher education.

Such is the argument of my guests Eric A. Moyen and John Thelin. Eric A. Moyen is a professor of higher education leadership and the Assistant Vice President for Student Success at Mississippi State University. John R. Thelin is the University Research Professor Emeritus of the history of higher education and public policy at the University of Kentucky. Both of them have written numerous books on both American higher education and college sports. Now they have co-written College Sports: A History.

When did old age in America first  begin? That is, when did we first begin to conceive ideas about a stage of life in which older people no longer participated in the labor force, but nevertheless had a meaningful place in the world, deserving of respect, security, and dignity. 

My guest James Chappel argues that this is an idea that became prominent in the American consciousness at a certain point in time–namely, the 1935 Social Security Act. It was, he believes, one of the key moments in the cultural transformations of how Americans think about old age, and how we treat the aged. These ideas and moments were shaped by activists, practical politicians, medical advancements, and cultural models ranging from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward to the TV show “The Golden Girls.”

James Chappel is the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center. The author of Catholic Modern, his interests are in the intellectual history of modern Europe and the United States, focusing on themes of religion, gender, and the family. He lives in Durham, North Carolina. His most recent book is The Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age, and it is the subject of our conversation today.

Many were shocked in February 2022 by the Russian attempt to seize Kyiv and decapitate the Ukranian regime, thereby ending the war begun in 2014. But this was simply the latest in a long series of Russian attempts to “divide and oppress Ukraine.” Since the 19th century, dominating Ukraine has been a cornerstone of Russia’s national identity. To prevent Ukraine from choosing an alternative, Russian rulers of all ideological varieties have used not only history and cultural destruction as their methods, but executions, deportations, and famine. It is not very surprising, argues my guest Eugene Finkel, that these tools of oppression should be so readily picked up by yet another Russian autocrat. What makes this moment different is that for the first time in its history Ukraine has overcome its internal divisions and united in favor of independence from Russia. 

Eugene Finkel is Kenneth H. Keller Professor of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. The author or coauthor of three previous books, his writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Affairs. He was born in Lviv, Ukraine, and lives in Bologna, Italy. His most recent book is Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two Hundred Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine.

For Further Investigation

Eugene Finkel's previous books include Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017)

This conversation is related in some way to a surprising number of previous podcasts. One with Chris Miller on the perennial Russian pivot to Asia that always fails; you can hear a little about the Russian wars against the Turks for Ukraine in Episode 284, when I discussed the career of Russia's greatest general with Alex Mikaberidze; something about Ukrainian grain in my conversation with Scott Nelson about his book Oceans of Grain; a long conversation about Josef Pilsudski, founder of modern Poland; and Episode 348, about the Russian Civil War.

And of course my conversation with Michael Kimmage in Episode 354 about the immediate antecedents of the Ukrainian War. Listeners who believe in comparing arguments–and you should all believe in that–ought to listen to Kimmage immediately after digesting this podcast.

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, hand pensively on chin, apart from the action of the Federal Convention…Alternatively, they might imagine him in the manner of the musical 1776, strutting across a stage, ever to the right, never to the left, with ruffles aflutter, singing jubilantly about his conservatism. There he at least possesses the virtue of energy. Or they could imagine him as HBO’s pale, sweaty, scowling disbeliever in the American cause, opposite a stalwart John Adams. But none of these images of him is accurate.”

That is if we have any images of him in our heads at all–which, to be honest, is highly unlikely. This conversation aims to change that. 

Jane E. Calvert is Founding Director and Chief Editor of the John Dickinson Writings Project, which under her guidance has produced three of a projected 13 volumes of Dickinson’s prolific output. She is the authority on Quaker political thought, which she has delineated in Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson. Penman of the Founding is now the definitive biography of John Dickinson, and hopefully the basis for much more scholarly work.

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 changes in the practice and beliefs of Christianity, but dramatic social and cultural changes everywhere they occurred.

Even though these changes have usually been told as the story of men, women were often at the heart of these reformations. On every continent with the exception of Antarctica—which, to be fair, was undiscovered and therefore unpopulated—women drove forward the transformations of religious life. From royal thrones and the homes of prominent reformers, to the monasteries in Peru and the shores of the southernmost home island of Japan, the stories of how women participated in these reformations gives us not only a fuller picture of these extraordinary events, but a new way of thinking about them and defining them.

My guest Merry Wiesner-Hanks is distinguished professor of history and women’s and gender studies emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author or editor of thirty books, the most recent of which is Women and the Reformations: A Global History, which is the subject of our conversation today.

 

For Further Investigation

Previous conversations somewhat related to this one are with Ron Rittgers on Luther's reformation; with Tara Nummedal on Anna Ziegelerin and the curious case of the Lion's blood; and with Michael Winship on "the warmer sort of Protestants"

"No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

Herrnhut

Jon Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World

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 sought to encourage the United States to enter the war in 1917, they chose him as one of their principal emissaries, given his intellectual heft and worldwide celebrity.

This was the philosopher Henri Bergson, and if you are an English speaker you might be forgiven for not knowing about him, or having heard the name once or twice, but not being aware of why. He was in many ways emblematic of the Belle Epoque, and as that era was interred in hastily dug trenches during the autumn of 1914, Bergson’s celebrity and influence seemed to be buried with it. But celebrity was not his goal; philosophy was, and his celebrity often obscured his ideas. 

With me to discuss the life, ideas, and world of Henri Bergson is Emily Herring. She received her PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. The focus of our conversation today is her new book Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, which is the first English-language biography of Bergson. 

For Further Investigation

An earlier philosopher who once lived in Clermont Ferrand

Zeno's paradoxes

An essay explaining some of the mysteries of French higher education

An introductory essay by Emily Herring to Henri Bergson

I was ready and waiting for a book on Henri Bergson because of my conversation with Michael Rapport about Paris in Episode 360

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 happened because in two centuries almost nothing has happened in Spain, and the little that has occurred has done so elsewhere.” 

But as my guest Luke Steggeman writes, “Madrid is both heart and head [of Spain], as per the custom of medieval manuscripts where countries were sometimes drawn as bodies with heads and hearts and limbs.” Moreover, “The story of Madrid is the story of power: royal, military, religious, and secular, cultural and economic.” It is  also the story  of power gained, power lost, power regained, power seized, and occasionally power unused.

Luke Stegeman is a writer and cultural historian. Unlike any previous guest on this podcast, he is not only a self-described rural Australian, but a boxing referee. His most recent book is Madrid: A Biography, which is the subject of our conversation today.

 

For Further Investigation

San Lorenzo de El Escorial

Museo Nacional del Prado

Captain Alatriste: I don't often link to Wikipedia, but you should read the section "Adaptations", about why Pérez-Reverte wrote this series of historical novels.

Benito Pérez Galdós

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 has from its beginning enjoyed a good conflict. Modern American cities boil with debates over planning and land use, and such debates have always been a part of its history; as has been a perennial American suspicion towards the very existence of cities. Modern American cities are also places where the past is paved over, and oddly enough, given the depth of its history, this city has also made a habit of forgetting its past.

This city is Philadelphia. From before the founding of the city by William Penn, the region that would become Philadelphia was diverse, and also in conflict. Penn famously designed it to be a “green country town”, but that design has gone through many alterations and changes. And while Philadelphia hosts some of the most significant spots in American history, it has also been good at eliminating and forgetting its own history.

With me to discuss the history of the city of Philadelphia, what makes it like other American cities, and what makes it different from them, is Paul Kahan. A historian and graduate of Temple University–the most Philadelphian of educational institutions–Paul Kahan is author most recently of Philadelphia: A Narrative History. It is his seventh book.