Historically Thinking

From the 1760s into the 1830s, waves of revolutions rolled up upon the shores of the Atlantic World, confusing or destroying entrenched political and social hierarchies, and ushering in a new era of democratic rule. These of course were headlined by the American and French Revolutions, but there were no less important ones that quickly followed: not only the Haitian revolution, but in the Andes, in Italy, and eventually throughout the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas. It was a period of unprecedented and–perhaps–unmatched political, economic, social, and artistic upheaval. 

This is the canvas for Nathan Perl-Rosenthal in his new book The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It. It spans multiple continents, touching on both familiar and very unfamiliar people and places. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. His previous book was Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution. 

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As I said at the beginning of the conversation, this is one of a series on the revolutionary connections of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For an intro, see my conversation with David Bell in Episode 176. Micah Alpaugh described how certain means were adopted and adapted by revolutionary movements in that era. And Episode 288 with Jonathan Singerton was about the influence of the American Revolution on the Hapsburg Empire.

Today’s guest in our series of conversations on intellectual humility and historical thinking is Leah Shopkow, Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is a historian of the Middle Ages, specifically of medieval France, and she began her career by studying the history written by medieval chroniclers, which led to her book History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Since then she has also edited one of those historical texts, William of Andres' The Chronicle of Andres.  Interest in medieval historiography morphed, naturally or unnaturally depending on your point of view, into an interest in the pedagogy of history. She has written numerous articles on the topic, and was the founding co-director and the principal investigator of the History Learning Project at Indiana University. Most recently she has combined both of these interests in her book The Saint and the Count: A Case Study for Reading Like a Historian, which she and I discussed in Episode 203 of this podcast.

 

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For more on the moves–or dispositions–of historical thinking, go to our series on historical thinking.

Fallingwater, perched above Bear Run in southwestern Pennsylvania is Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, a house perhaps as recognizable as any other in the United States–and it's not even on the nickel. Less known is that it was designed and built at the end of decades of despair and seeming futility in the architect's life, a series of circumstances that would have broken nearly anyone else. Fallingwater is not only an instantiation of Wright’s developing philosophy of architecture, but of his near fanatical determination to prevail against all enemies — often, most notably, himself.  But Fallingwater is also a monument to the Depression era, even though it seems very far removed from our mental images of what "the Depression" was like.

With me today is Catherine W. Zipf, an award-winning architectural historian. She is executive Director of the Bristol, historical and preservation Society in Bristol, Rhode Island, and author of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater: American Architecture in the Depression Era, which is the subject of our conversation today

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Fallingwater

Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin: the one in Wisconsin

Midway Gardens

Wingspread

The classic book to read about Chicago and its hinterland is William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

William R. Drennan, Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders

Wright in Los Angeles, and his "California Romanza": The Hollyhock House, and the Ennis House

This 1996 Library of Congress exhibit, "Frank Lloyd Wright: Designs for an American Landscape, 1922-1932", covers one of the decades that Catherine Zipf and I talked about. It is full of beautiful designs, none of which were ever built. Some of the most impressive things in the exhibit are the meticulous models of the landscape in which Wright proposes to build.

Catherine briefly mentioned that many houses of the 1920s, most of which are in revival style. For proof of this, see the architectural plans sold by Dover Publications

Frank Lloyd Wright explains why he wrote his Autobiography

Lincoln Logs and the Hollywood Bowl

Listeners to recent podcasts will note some resonance with aspects of my recent conversation about Henry Wallace; but attentive long-time listeners will also note some curious resonance over the question of what is natural with Episode 222, about the career and views of Harvey Wiley.

In the summer of 1918, hoping to somehow re engage the Russians in the First World War as the Allied offensive on the western front began, thousands of Allied troops began to land in ports in Russia’s far north, far east, and far south. It was the beginning of one of the most ambitious military ventures of the twentieth century. Following the armistice with Germany, Allied forces in Russian not only remained, but expanded. Eventually 180,000 troops from fifteen different countries would participate. As either a means of bringing Russian into the war, or strangling the Bolshevik regime in its crib, the intervention was a failure, and quickly forgotten in those nations who had participated in it. But it was a long-cherished memory in the Soviet Union, it arguably stoked global turmoil for decades to come, and it remains firmly a part of the “pick-n’-mix, might-is-right narrative” of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. 

Anna Reid was the Kyiv correspondent for The Economist and The Daily Telegraph, from 1993 to 1995. She has written about Ukraine for Foreign Affairs, the Observer, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her books include The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia; Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II; and Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine. Her most recent book is A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention into the Russian Civil War, which is the subject of our conversation today.

For Further Investigation

There are numerous podcasts in the Historically Thinking archive that relate to this one. You might begin with Episode 65: The First Year of the Russian Revolution, before moving on to Episode 193: The Plot to Bring Down the Soviet Revolution, which covers some of the same territory as this conversation.

We talk a little about Siberia; you might also be interested in listening to Episode 212: The Perennial Russian Pivot to Asia

In our latest in the series of conversations on intellectual humility and historical thinking, my interlocutor is Suzanne Marchand. She is Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University. Her interests are within the realm of European intellectual history, but she has ranged more widely than that.

Her books include Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton, UP, 1996); German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Race, Religion, and Scholarship (Cambridge UP, 2009); and Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton UP, 2020), which was the subject of a conversation on this podcast in Episode 190. She has recently been writing a lot about the reception and interpretation of Herodotus from the Renaissance to the present, work which soon promises to become a book.

As is always the case with these conversations, and unlike more typical conversations on the podcast, we will be following a set format of questions…though these might be shaken off, from time to time, by either myself or the guest.

Following the outbreak of the American Civil War, the abolitionist movement underwent an “astonishing transformation”, which would in time alter the direction of the war, the shape of the postwar settlement, and destroy the abolitionist movement itself. As the movement’s moral outsiders found themselves becoming interest group insiders, not only their approach but also their message and ultimately their goals changed. Ideological differences became ideological conflicts, and personal animosities were soon blended into the mix. 

This is the argument of Frank J. Cirillo in his new book The Abolitionist Civil War: The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union. Frank J. Cirillo is a historian of slavery and antislavery in the nineteenth-century United States. He has held positions at the University of Bonn, The New School, and the University of Virginia. This is his first book.

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The photograph is of, from left to right: Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and George Thompson (an English advocate against slavery).

The standard biography of Wendell Phillips is James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); Henry Mayer wrote a popular biography of William Lloyd Garrison titled All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery; for a wider focus, see the second edition of the classic study by Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860

Numerous conversations on Historically Thinking have dealt with related issues. For an overview of abolitionism, see Episode 82: Abolitionism, A Long Conversation. The overlooked importance of Unionism was at issued in Episode 132: Armies of Deliverance and again in Episode 291: True Blue. The drive for black voting rights by American Blacks was the focus of Episode 294: Black Suffrage. And Abraham Lincoln's racial attitudes were the subject of a conversation with Michael Burlingame in Episode 242: Was Abraham Lincoln a Racist?

Henry Wallace was an Iowan, an accomplished geneticist who hybridized corn; an entrepreneur who co-founded Pioneer Hi-Bred to produce seed, still an agricultural behemoth; the third-generation of editors of an influential American newspaper; a mystic who had a mysterious guru; and a “liberal philosopher”, according to no less an authority than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  He was also at various times Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Commerce, Vice President of the United States, and a third-party candidate for President of the United States in the 1948 election. Like America, Henry Wallace contained multitudes. 

With me today is Benn Steil, author of The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century. Benn Steil is a Senior Fellow and Director of International Economics at the Council of Foreign Relations. His previous books have been on the Marshall Plan, and on the financial arguments focused upon the Bretton Woods conference. In this book we have yet another study examining the central moment of the twentieth century–both chronologically as well as in many other ways–but from the extraordinary and idiosyncratic point of view of Henry Wallace.

 

For Further Investigation

For more on Wallace's Midwestern ethos, see my conversations with Jon Lauck about the Midwest: here, way back in Episode 13 (!!!), and again in Episode 299: The Good Country

Benn Steill's previous books are The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, and The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order

Henry Cantwell Wallace (1866-1924): Secretary of Agriculture, father of Henry Cantwell Wallace 

"A Magazine Called Wallace's Farmer"

The connection between George Washington Carver, Henry Wallace, and Norman Borlaug

Some animals—like beavers, nesting ants, bees, and humans—actively reshape their environments to make them more favorable for their own species.  My guest today believes that the same is also true of nations. This, he argues,  is the true meaning of Woodrow Wilson’s phrase “to make the world safe for democracy.” 

But animals also change as they are adapting their own environment. John Owen argues that liberalism has evolved in ways that are no longer conducive to its own survival; and meanwhile autocratic governments in Russia and China are actively reshaping the international environment to favor autocracy. He believes that the way to ensure democracy’s survival in the United States is to reimagine liberalism—to view it as less about disruption and perpetual openness, and more about commitment, community, and country. 

John M. Owen IV is the Amb. Henry J. and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and the Miller Center for Public Affairs, all the the University of Virginia. His latest book is The Ecology of Nations: American Democracy in a Fragile World Order, and it is the subject of our conversation today.

I should add that John is a friend, now of many years standing; and while he might be a thorough-going political scientist, and this is not a work of history, there is a lot of historical thinking in it—but, more importantly, I wanted to have a chance to talk to him for one uninterrupted hour about the book. We recorded the conversation in his study.

This is the first of my interviews with historians touching on questions of intellectual humility and historical thinking. Today conversation is with Jonathan Zimmerman. He is the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor in Education and Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in 1993 from the Johns Hopkins University. His books have dealt with a variety of topics related to the history of education, including sex and alcohol education, history and religion in the curriculum, Americans who taught overseas, and historical memory in public schooling. Jonathan Zimmerman is also I think notable for the vareity of opinion pieces he has published across a range of American publications.

Jonathan Zimmerman has been on Historically Thinking twice, in Episode 188, on the history of the apparently eternal inability of American college professors to teach, and in Episode 205, where we wondered (along with Eliot Cohen, another frequent guest) if there could ever be a civic history, a history for the common good.

For Further Investigation

Jonathan Zimmerman, The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America

The Greater Good Science Center

We’re going to do something a little differently in today’s episode of Historically Thinking, in that it's not an episode of Historically Thinking.

Instead I wanted to share with you a teaser of a podcast that I think you’ll like. It’s hosted by Jason Pack, our guest on episode 337, and it’s called Disorder. It’s produced by GoalHanger podcasts, the UK's number 1 podcasting company, makers of The Rest is History, hosted by friends of this podcast Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.

Disorder is hosted by Jason and former British diplomat Alexandra Hall Hall. The pod tackles small and easy questions like: how did the world get so disordered? What are the fundamental principles behind our current era of geopolitics? And how do seemingly disparate challenges from AI, to Climate Change, to Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, to Tax Havens, to Unregulated Cyberspace all interact with each other and feed into our era of Global Enduring Disorder?

The first full season of episodes are out now – you can find them by searching Disorder or by following the links in the show notes. For me, the Disorder pod hits on many of the same themes as Historically Thinking (that is how a range of of seemingly disparate historical phenomenon are actually interlinked), but tackles this phenomenon through  conceptual investigation with the doers of geopolitics rather than via an interview based podcast with historians.

So since I think you’ll enjoy it, I wanted to give our listeners a little taste of what Disorder sounds like. We are going to tune in to episode 11, where Jason and Alex spoke with Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's former Chief of Staff. They present an overview of  some humorous anecdotes from the Northern Ireland peace process and what they can tell us about what factors lead to successful negotiations and how we might be able to draw upon these lessons in the Middle East and Ukraine. You can find that episode in full as well as Jason's proposed plans for the post-war Govenance of Gaza by following the links in the show notes.

Now over to Jason and Alex for that teaser…

For Further Investigation

Listen to the Disorder podcast here:

Read Jason's ‘The Road to Middle East Peace Runs Through Doha’