Historically Thinking

On a wall outside the reading room of the Museo Correr hangs a map of the world. It is not just any map. The oceans are painted cerulean blue, and on their waves travel ships of every nation. On land, the constructions of every culture are shown: cities and towns, castles and arches, mosques and cathedrals, tombs and towers. Moreover it is a map filled with words, the words written  in Veneziano, the Italian dialect of Venice, with beautiful multicolored penmanship. 

The map was created in 1459 by a Venetian monk, who in doing so produced the most advanced description of the world yet seen in Europe–or, perhaps, anywhere else. It was, argues my guest Meredith Small, a key moment, when maps and cartography became a proto-science–something like we understand it today–rather than the expression of cultural and religious concepts, a view now very foreign to us. 

Meredith F. Small is a professor of anthropology at Cornell University. She has previously written Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization. Her latest book is Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World, and it is the focus of our conversation.

For Further Investigation

For other conversations related to this one, go at once to my conversation with Ioanna Iordanou about the Venetian Secret Service; and my conversation with Catherine Fletcher on the Italian Renaissance. As for mapmaking, this was touched on when Robyn Arianhrod and I talked about the versatile and curious Thomas Hariot.

Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana– the home of Fra Mauro's map

Museo Galileo–Fra Mauro's World Map

The National Library of Australia–"Mapping Our World: From Terra Incognita to Australia"–as video mentioned by Meredith in our conversation, with wonderful details and commentary

San Michele in Isola–the site of Fra Mauro's monastery. While the Venetian congregation of Camaldolese was closed in the early twentieth century, the order of Camaldolese Hermits of Mount Corona continues.

It’s no secret that historians love to create periods and errors, and then physically argue about them. We love to talk about the long 18th century, the short 18th century, the long 19th century, the short 19th century, the short 20th century — and God knows what will say about the 21st, but we will have something to say about it, of that you can be sure.

But often by breaking things into discrete periods such as antebellum, Civil War, and reconstruction, we miss commonalities between periods of time that amount, from the perspective of a medieval or classical historian or anyone focused on the longer duration, to just a few decades.

Paul Escott’s new book The Civil War Political Tradition: Ten Portraits of Those That Formed It likewise refuses to divide things into neat and discrete boxes. Rather it profiles very different people who nevertheless all endorsed or rebelled against a political tradition that emphasized individual ambition, short-term thinking, compromise, and a pragmatic approach to problems—a tradition that did not, however, have the necessary power to resolve the crisis over slavery and race.

Paul D. Escott is the Reynolds Professor of History Emeritus at Wake Forest University. He was last on the podcast in Episode 294.

For Further Investigation

Think of this as a background to last week's conversation about James Garfield; he's an example of a politician whose life and views were completely framed and formed by the Civil War.

We've talked about John C. Calhoun with Bob Elder; and with Michael Burlingame about Abraham Lincoln. Note that Burlingame and Escott have different perspectives on Lincoln.

There is a Papers of Jefferson Davis project, and they have a bibliography of works related to the best qualified American President ever.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, which has an excellent web page on the reach of Uncle Tom's Cabin

Albion Winegar Tourgée (1838-1905)

"The Three-Story Head"

When the Republican convention reconvened on the morning of June 8, 1880, Congressman James A. Garfield of Ohio had precisely two nominations to be the Republican candidate for President. But by the early hours of the next day, on the 36th ballot, following a day unlike that of any political convention in American history, James Garfield was the party’s nominee for the Presidency. 

Late nineteenth century politicians acquired a bad name in their own day, and subsequently have been regarded not only as venal but, perhaps even worse, as boring. James Garfield was neither of those things. Literally born in a log cabin, he worked on a canal boat before schooling made him a teacher. Subsequent time as a student at Williams College revealed him to be a powerful intellect about whom tales were told ever after — for example, that he could write Greek with one hand, while simultaneously writing Latin with the other. He quickly became president of a small college, an itinerant minister for his church, and with the coming of the Civil War he volunteered, was made colonel of the 42nd Ohio Volunteer Regiment, and led an independent campaign which gave him the rank of brigadier general, and the position of chief of staff for one of the most important Union armies.

All of this to say that if James Garfield had never been a politician, let alone been nominated and then elected to the presidency in such a dramatic fashion, he would still have been an interesting and impressive man. Now C.W. Goodyear has told his story in President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier, which just as easily might be subtitled An American Life.

For Further Information

The James A. Garfield Historic Site. Which also has the absolutely best twitter account of any historic site. Really and truly.

The Garfield-Rosecrans Controversy

Why the presidential history might (sigh) be important (this was Episode 2!)

A past conversation which in part dealt with the passion for Union, now somewhat lost to us

Caravaggio, David and Goliath: a dangling self-portrait

My guest Scott Samuelson didn’t visit Rome until he was in his mid 30s. Since then, with COVID exceptions, he has gone to Rome every summer.  These trips, and his thoughtfulness and wonder at what he  has seen there  has resulted in a wonderful and idiosyncratic book. He describes it as “an exploration of both the city and the visions of life inspired by it, an eclectic guide that blends history, art, literature, religion, and philosophy. My aim is to see how much our souls can be instructed not only by thinkers like Cicero, Seneca, and Giordano Bruno but also by sites like the Forum, the Villa Farnesina, and the Galleria Borghese.” The result is Rome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand Tour. 

Scott Samuelson is a professor at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa. He  also works with the Catherine Project—brainchild of friend of the podcast Zena Hitz–where experienced teachers engage great books with a small group of readers for free. For his work in bringing philosophy to the public, he won the 2015 Hiett Prize in the Humanities. This is his third book.

 

For Further Information

If you enjoyed this conversation, and are new to the podcast, then give a listen to my conversations with Zena Hitz (mentioned above), and with Scott Newstok–who introduced me to Scott Samuelson.

And if you are a student, and want to see Rome as Scott Samuelson sees it, why not go with him?. It's too late to do it this year, but there's always 2024...

When on April 9, 1865, Ulysses S Grant received the surrender of Robert E Lee, one of the staff officers who accompanied him was Ely S. Parker.  He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Union Army, an engineer, and a friend of Grants from Galena, Illinois. But he was also a member of the Wolf Clan of the Seneca, one of the Six Nations of the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee. And not only was he a member, but indeed the Sachem of the Six Nations. So it was that a man who was not actually a citizen of the United States drafte

d the official copy of the terms of surrender which Grant and Lee signed.

Parker was one in a lineage of people who shaped the modern conception of the Six Nations. He was preceded by his uncle Red Jacket, and succeeded by his friend and adopted Seneca tribe member Harriet Converse, and his nephew Arthur Parker.  All of them shaped a history of what Arthur Parker– in a ten-volume unpublished work–called “the amazing Iroquois “.

John C. Winters describes their story in his new book The Amazing Iroquois and the Invention of the Empire State. He is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi. 

For Further Investigation

The most recent mention of the Haudenosaunee on the podcast was in my conversation with Dean Snow, an eminent archaeologist who has excavated numerous Haudenosaunee sites in New York State and beyond. An important conversation on reintegrating Native American history into a broader narrative was with Jim Horn, when we had a conversation about the great chieftain Opechancanough. And self-representation by native leaders was the focus of an old conversation with my colleague Jane Simonsen, way back in Episode 58: What Black Hawk Wore

"Red Jacket's Peace Medal returned to Seneca Nation after 116 years at Buffalo museum"

Seneca-Iroquois National Museum

Arthur Parker, Seneca Myths and Folktales

Letter from Ely S. Parker to Harriet Converse

 

Al: So throughout the book, you play around with this idea of Iroquois exceptionalism. If my old [00:02:00] professor, David Hollinger, was on the podcast, he would immediately protest that American exceptionalism is wrongly used. It was invented by Stalin or the head of the Communist Party or something like that.

But we won't get into that. You're enjoying playing around with Iroquois versus American exceptionalism, but defining our terms, what is Iroquois exceptionalism? I trust that it's not that Iroquois lacked a feudal class so that therefore their approach to post capitalism or socialism is different.

John: No. No, not quite. What at this notion of Iroquois exceptionalism is of course at the heart of the book, but it's an invented category though, similarly, so it is really Capturing the idea that the Iroquois have this unique place in American history. If you're walking down the street in New York City or you're moving through New York State and you ask people what do you know of the Iroquois?

Or have you heard of the Iroquois? The responses that [00:03:00] often spring to mind are these exceptional things like the Skywalkers, right? The Iroquoian steel workers most of them Mohawks, who are building the Empire State Building, and basically New York City's skyline, not only using Iroquoian mussel, but also Iroquoian steel.

Some of them who have more like anthropological interests and maybe political theoretical interests are really interested in this idea that the Iroquois in effect invented modern American women's. Rights because as a matrilineal society, the Iroquois had this or granted women this extraordinary and exceptional power.

So during the mid 19th through the early 20th century, we see lots of these suffrage reformers turn to the, I Iroquois to say, if we America, the United States, this progressive white nation can't [00:04:00] even do the same thing that these unquote Savage Indian are. Na, sa quote unquote, Savage Indian neighbors are doing and granting women equal repres...

As the President of the United States prepared to travel to Morocco for a wartime conference, his closest aide and advisor wrote down just why he was going to make the arduous trip. Franklin Roosevelt, wrote Harry Hopkins, “was going to Casablanca ‘because he wanted to make a trip. He was tired of having other people, particularly myself, speak for him around the world. He wanted to see our troops, he was sick of people telling him that it was dangerous to ride in airplanes. He liked the drama of it. But above all, he wanted to make a trip.”

What Churchill called the most important Allied conference took place over ten days in January 1943. In a strange combination of resort accommodations, surrounded by barbed wire, anti-aircraft guns, and sandbags, a no-holds barred exchange laid out plans for the next year, and the years to come. 

James Conroy describes the antecedents to the conference, the lengthy trip to get there, and what happened in his new book The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War. A practicing lawyer until 2020, James Conroy’s first book Our One Common Country, was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize; his second, Lincoln’s White House, shared the Lincoln Prize.

Alice Lloyd: A serious woman

In 1951 the Southern Association of Colleges, an accrediting agency, sent a committee to assess a small two-year institution in the mountains of eastern Kentucky named Caney Creek College. Their final report makes for interesting reading, which you can’t always say about accreditation reports.

“This institution charges no tuition,” they reported. “...The understanding is that students will offer to work in the mountain area, and 90% have done so. There are amazing examples of outstanding service…The President is aged and crippled but otherwise alert, diligent, and confident. She works seven days a week…The fact is, this committees has never seen an institution like this. One must visit to understand and to be able to interpret.”

The President was Alice Lloyd, and she was also the founder of the college–as well as a network of charitable organizations. After her death, the college was renamed in her honor.

Allison Holbrook Southard is Associate Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Alice Lloyd College. She’s with us today to talk about this unique institution, explain what “institutional advancement” is, and the unique challenges that all college advancement officers face, as well as those specific to Alice Lloyd.

For Further Information

If you haven't, you should listen to Episode 311: Knowledge Towns; and give a listen to some other podcasts in our series "Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed"

The Work Colleges Consortium

Having mentioned This is Your Life in the podcast, I am unable to resist linking to the great Sid Caesar spoofing the show with This is Your Story.

Robert Browning, "Song from Pippa Passes"

East of Philadelphia and west of Atlantic City is the city of Vineland, situated in more or less the geographical center of South Jersey. Since the late 19th century, it had been the center of a dispersed community of Jewish farmers. Following the Second World War, a few thousand survivors of the Holocaust decided not to settle in American cities, but like earlier Jewish immigrants became farmers in South Jersey.

Seth Sten’s grandparents were two of these refugees. In his new book Speaking Yiddish to Chickens: Holocaust Survivors on South Jersey Poultry Farms, he tells not only their own story, but that of their fellow immigrants, and of the community in which they settled–one in which previous waves of Jewish immigrants had built and rich network of cultural and religious institutions that Alexis de Tocqueville would have recognized, and admired. Like all new farmers in America, many failed; many regarded it as the worst time of their lives; and others, even those who left the rural life and moved to the cities for jobs and other opportunities, regarded it as their best years in America.

Seth Stern is a legal journalist and editor at Bloomberg Industry Group. He previously reported for Bloomberg News, Congressional Quarterly, and the Christian Science Monitor. This is his second book.

 

For Further Investigation

The Sam Azeez Museum of Woodbine Heritage, in Woodbine, NJ, preserves the history of the earliest Jewish agricultural settlements in South Jersey

The Alliance Jewish Cemetery in Norma, New Jersey, founded in 1882.

Jewish Farming in the Garden State: note the list of Jewish "colonies"

"The History of Jewish Farming in the Garden State"

The South Jersey Culture and History Center has further resources on Jewish settlements

Miles Lerman (1920-2008): an obituary from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The village of Oberstdorf lies in the midst of the Allgauer Alps, not that far from the Austrian border. While other Alpine towns like Garmisch-Partenkirchen, to the east in Oberbayern, or Andermatt in Switzerland benefited from proximity to mountain passes and the trade routes that crossed them, and other towns like Berchtesgaden grew rich from proximity to natural resources, or the development of a unique craft economy, Obertsdorf had none of those things. It was where the road literally ended, and for centuries remained an out of the way community dependent on subsistence farming, and some desultory iron mining. 

But with the arrival of the railroad, and tourism, Obertsdorf began to be connected to a wider world. While some at first attempted to ignore the rise of Hitler and the Nazi movement, that movement eventually captivated many Oberstdorfers as well. 

Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel have co-written A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism. In it they describe the Third Reich as seen from Oberstdorf , and the Third Reich in Oberstdorf. They recount acts of violence, complicity, and various levels of resistance, from the 1920s through to the end of the war–which, for the republic of France, officially ended in Oberstdorf.

For Further Investigation

We covered some of the same ground in the conversation with Peter Fritzsche in Episode 244, in which he focused on Hitler's first hundred days as Chancellor of Germany

Julia Boyd has previously written Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism, 1919-1945

William Hunter was a radical advocate for American democracy. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he was the founder of the second newspaper west of the Alleghenies, and the first newspaper editor to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts. Arguably a Jacksonian Democrat before Andrew Jackson first ran for president, Hunter served the Jackson Administration, and as a civil servant seven successive administrations.

Yet that brief biography obscures his very interesting origins. For William Hunter had been born in New Brunswick, yes, but as the son of John Hunter of the 26th Regiment of the Line. For the first ten years of his life William followed his father as his peacetime service in British America became combat service in the rebellious territory of the new United States. Departing for Britain at age ten in 1778 when his sick father was detached for recruiting duties, William returned to the United States fifteen years later, his father dead, his mother and sister left behind. He was now a committed republican, arriving in Philadelphia in the midst of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. He would never again travel back across the ocean, or see his mother and again.

Gene Procknow describes the ups and downs, and twist and turns of William Hunter’s eventful life in his new book William Hunter Finding Free Speech: A British Soldier’s Son Who Became an Early American. Formerly a management consultant with a global consulting firm, Gene Procknow has become a careful historian of early American history; William Hunter is his first book.

For Further Investigation

Gene's website has some wonderful "behind the book" material

Here's an article Gene wrote for the Journal of the American Revolution on different perspectives on the quartering of British soldiers in New Brunswick, NJ

In the course of the episode, Gene referenced Don Hagist. Here's a conversation with Don about punishment in the British Army during the American Revolution; and here's a conversation with Don that ranges much more widely into the society and culture of the British Army that fought in America

Since Dan Gullotta, friend of the show, used to do a podcast called Age of Jackson, we've tended to avoid American history from roughly 1815 to 1850. But here's an exception to the rule, a conversation about a no less radical Democrat than William Hunter, none other than Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

John Zaborney, Slaves For Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia