Historically Thinking

In 1835, Oberlin College in Ohio determined that it would admit black students. A very few other colleges did at the time, but Oberlin was unique in that it chose to do so as an explicit matter of college policy. At Oberlin, and a few other places both before and after the Civil War, black and white students were allied first in the cause of emancipation, and then for civil rights. 

Yet following the end of Reconstruction, even once revolutionary campuses like Oberlin and Berea College in Kentucky began to have color lines drawn across them. As John Frederick Bell demonstrates in his new book, Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race, while blacks remained in the classroom at Oberlin and Berea, they were gradually discriminated against in every other aspect of college life. Given that these colleges had been established to shape not the mental so much as the moral community on its campus, this amounted to a counter revolution that overthrew the ideals upon which Oberlin and Berea College had been established.

John Frederick Bell  is Assistant Professor of History at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Degrees of Equality is his first book. 

Erratum: At 34:30, John Chapin was named as the fundraiser for New York Central College; John Bell says he should have said William Chaplin. (About whom you can read here on Professor Wikipedia.)

For Further Investigation

In the course of asking "why" I mentioned my conversation with Doug Egerton on the decline and fall of the Adams family; and I should also note an even older conversation with Doug about the history of Reconstruction

The featured image is a late 19th century stereoscope of the campus of Oberlin College

Berea College, according to Professor Wikipedia; and Adam Harris,  "The Little College Where Tuition Is Free and Every Student Is Given a Job". The Atlantic (October 2018)

Nat Brandt, The Town That Started the Civil War: The True Story of the Community That Stood Up to Slavery–and Changed a Nation Forever

Kabria Baumgartner, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America 

Ronald Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning ,and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876

Christi Smith, Reparation & Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education

John Frederick Bell, “Early Black Collegians and the Fight for Full Inclusion” Black Perspectives (May 24, 2022)

“At the start of the twelfth century,” writes Rowan Dorin, “western European rulers almost never resorted to the collective expulsions of wrongdoers from their domains; ecclesiastical authorities evinced little concern about the Jewish communities living under Christian rule; and the church’s efforts to repress usury focused largely on clerics who engaged in money lending. By the late thirteenth century, expulsion had become a recurring tool of royal governance in both England and France; bishops across Latin Christendom were advocating for harsh restrictions on Jewish life; and Popes, theologians, and canon lawyers had recast usury as menacing the whole of society…”

Why and how this dramatic change comes about is the focus of Dorin’s new book No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe. There is much in it which will overturn casual assumptions, and provoke new perspectives on the present–for if the use of expulsion by governments has a beginning, its ending has certainly not yet occurred. 

Rowan Dorin is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. No Return is his first book. (Below are his wonderful suggestions for further reading, complete with Rowan's own summaries.)

 

For Further Investigation

Robert Chazan, Refugees or Migrants: Pre-Modern Jewish Population Movement (2018)–"A wonderfully readable overview of Jewish migrations during antiquity and the Middle Ages that overturns many widespread assumptions about the dynamics of the Jewish diaspora."

Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Expulsion as an Issue of World History,” Journal of World History 7, no. 2 (1996), 165-180–"A provocative and insightful article that outlines the emergence of mass expulsion as a historical phenomenon."

R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (1987; 2nd ed. 2007)–"The book that launched a thousand dissertations - still essential reading for anyone interested in how medieval authorities came to see deviance as dangerous."

Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages, trans. Patricia Ranum (1988)–"A brilliant account of the growing concern with usury and moneylending in medieval Europe, written by one of the twentieth century's greatest historians."

Miri Rubin, Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe (2020)–"For anyone wondering what life was like for foreigners or Jews living in a medieval city, this collection of lectures is the place to start."

Daniel Lord Smail, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (2016)–"A wide-ranging exploration of debt and debt collection in the medieval Mediterranean world."

Francesca Trivellato, The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (2019)–"The histories of Jews and Lombards continued to be intertwined even after the Middle Ages, as Trivellato shows in this masterful study of early modern commercial culture."

On a January night in 1897, a crowded Episcopal church in Philadelphia was the stage for a curious ceremony. In the Church of the Evangelists, located in south Society Hill just ten or so blocks from Independence Hall, a gaggle of clerics unveiled a life-size painting of Charles I, King of England and–so far as the clerics were concerned–saint and martyr. Then Williams Stevens Perry, the Episcopal Bishop of Iowa, ascended to the pulpit to explain to the assembled multitude how Charles I, far from being an absolutist and enemy of liberty, had laid the foundations of American political order.

This striking scene begins Michael Connolly’s description of a curious moment in the history of Anglo-American political thought and sentiment, a resurgent Jacobite movement that championed the cause of the Stuart monarchs as a means of opposing the corruptions of the modern age. It begins his new book Jacobitism in Britain and the United States, 1880-1910. Michael Connolly is Professor of History at Purdue University Northwest; this is his third time on the podcast.

For Further Investigation

Michael Connolly has previously talked on the podcast about American presidents, way back in Episode 2 (!!!) and then in Episode 60

We touched on the execution of Charles I in Episode 127, which focused on the escape of two of the men who signed his death warrant into the wilds of Connecticut

On 11 October 1537, Henry VIII finally received the son for which he had been waiting for decades. The day before the future Edward VI was born, friars, priests, livery companies, and the mayor and aldermen of London all processed through the city streets, praying for the Queen’s safe delivery. With his birth te deums were sung in London’s churches, bells were rung, fires were lit in every street, and volleys of gunfire resounded from the walls of the Tower of London  It was a classic Tudor event, combining as it did fears of a failed royal secession; civic drama; at times contradictory religious impulses and emotions; thrusting military power; and seemingly endless classical images and allusions. 

Tudor England is not composed  simply of the reigns of the Tudor monarchs but by “decades of war and poverty, disease and destruction…a subtle but strong transformation in the nature of government, and complex shifts within economy and society… an outpouring of words [and] an ideological revolution in religious belief…” With me to touch on some of the characteristics of this tumultuous era is Lucy Wooding, Langford fellow and and Tutor at Lincoln College in the University of Oxford, and author of Tudor England: A History.

For Further Investigation

Scott Newstok in Episode 186 on how Shakespeare benefited from an English grammar school education

If you can't get enough of Henry VIII, then travel through time with Dominic Sandbrook in Episode 226

Stephen Berry in Episode 279 explains why he think constant deaths took their toll

Robert St. George, ed., Material Life in American, 1600-1860, for all your atropopaeic needs.

On May 11th, 1745, the British Army went into battle against the army of France near the village of Fontenoy, in what is now Belgium. 15,000  British soldiers marched forward bearing not only their muskets, but the reputation that they had gained in the continental campaigns of John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. But Marlborough had by then been dead for nearly 25 years, and the British Army had not adapted or altered. The result was a humiliating defeat, with 6,000 of those 15,000 British either killed or wounded. Another result was a long process of reform, the creation of new forms of knowledge, new approaches that had to be conceived, innovated upon, and then deployed “in the face of organizational tradition, institutional resistance and personal suspicion of change.”

My guest Huw Davies describes this long process of reform, and the always speedier process of forgetting, in his new book The Wandering Army: The Campaigns That Transformed the British Way of War. It is not only a book about the British Army, the “Second 100 Years War”, the Enlightenment, and the long 18th century, but also one about creating new institutional cultures, change management, and the reform of complex organizations in difficult circumstances.

Huw J. Davies is reader in early modern military history at King’s College, London. His previous books include Wellington’s Wars: The Making of a Military Genius and Spying for Wellington: British Military Intelligence in the Peninsular War.

For Further Investigation

Kutuzov and the military enlightenment in Russia was the subject of my conversation with Alex Mikaberidze

Cathal Nolan described the enduring and nearly always futile quest for a decisive, war-determining victory in battle in Episode 79

The experience of an army learning, and then forgetting; and learning, and then forgetting, was also a focus of Episode 215, on the book The Other Face of Battle

I discussed the Howe family with Julie Flavell when we talked about her book The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain's Wars for America

Welcome to Episode 300 of Historically Thinking! 

Design theorists popularized the idea of “tame problems” and “wicked problems.” “Tame problems” are answers to questions  like how to get to Chicago, or how to increase the battery life of a cell phone. As in mathematics and chess have clarity in their aims and their solutions. “Wicked problems” have neither clarity in their aims or in their solutions.

 But what about wild problems? 

By wild problems, my guest Russ Roberts refers to the problems of who to marry, whether to have children, where to move, how to forge a life well-lived. These are problems that can’t be solved by calculation; in fact, argues Roberts, they are in parts of life that are “outside the reach of science or the scientific mind.” But wild problems are not wicked problems, which are very nearly impossible to solve. Wild problems are the most important struggles of each and every life. They are also, not too surprisingly given the title, the subject of Roberts' most recent book Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us.

Russ Roberts is the President of Shalem College in Jerusalem, and John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and host of the podcast EconTalk. This is his second appearance on Historically Thinking; he previously appeared in Episode 99, when we discussed his essay Gambling with Other People’s Money: How Perverse Incentives Caused the Financial Crisis, and what thinking through the 2008 financial crisis had taught him about intellectual humility.

For Further Investigation

To see if there is any editorial theme at work in this podcast, we suggest you listen to Episode 100 and to Episode 200, after finishing this one of course. Send notes!

You might have noticed that Shalem College doesn't sound much like any college you know about in the United States. But you might also notice that it's beginning to seem that colleges in the United States increasingly resemble one another. Why might this be the case, and how we can do things differently, was the topic of an old conversation with David Staley in Episode 111: Alternative Universities, or, Thinking Way Outside the Box

What lover of American literature doesn’t remember these haunting lines: “Tell about the Midwest. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”

Of course that was, as some of you quickly recognized, a deliberate mangling of a famous passage from William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom. It’s more than a little disconcerting, as I hope you noticed, to substitute Midwest for South. The South is haunted, and mysterious, and interesting. The Midwest…isn’t.

But the charge that Shreve McCannon laid upon Quentin Compson  can be laid upon any historian of any place in any era.  Even the Midwest, as Jon Lauck would certainly agree. He’s the author of The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900. The last time he was on the podcast was way back in Episode 13, when we talked about his manifesto The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History.

For Further Investigation

We haven't had that many talks about the Midwest, or its people; but recently we talked about South Dakota with Jon Lauck's friend and neighbor Ben Jones. Much farther in the rear view mirror is a conversation with Jane Simonsen about Black Hawk, chief of the Saux and Meskwaki tribes, which involved the forced removal of those people from the lands in the Midwest.

The Midwestern History Association

The Midwestern History Association has a journal, the Middle West Review; and a podcast, Heartland History

Was the Midwest the American Boeotia? There's a comparative history question for you.

Episode 294: Black Suffrage

The Town That Started the Civil War was mentioned in the course of the conversation; the book for children or teens I was thinking of is The Price of Freedom: How One Town Stood Up to Slavery

One book to read about Oberlin, Ohio as a utopian community that failed is Elusive Utopia, which focuses on Oberlin after the Civil War

I was trying to remember Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, which focuses on Villisca's Company F (which is the only company in the Iowa National Guard to build its own armory with funds raised from the local community) as well as other units from southwest Iowa that served in the battles for North Africa.

Know Your Memes: "This is Fine"

The Victorians didn’t actually travel to the moon. But they were the first people, observes my guest Iwan Morus, to think that travel to the Moon was not only possible, but that “their science already possessed – or would soon possess – the means of getting there.” This confidence was based on the cascades of “new technologies, new ways of making knowledge and new visions about the future came together during the nineteenth century to create a new kind of world.” In an important sense, then, it was indeed the Victorians who took us to the moon.

Iwan Rhys Morus is professor of history at Aberystwyth University in Aberystwyth, Wales. Among his recent books are Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (20127) and Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future (2019); his most recent book is How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon. 

For Further Investigation

For a related conversations, see Episode 251 on the history of technology, from the early modern world to the present; and Episode 258 with Simon Heffer on the early Victorian era as the "pursuit of perfection"

The Public Domain Review offers "A 19th Century Vision of the year 2000"

An excellent website devoted to the Wright brothers and their achievement

Collections at the Oxford History of Science Museum

"On Verticality": a blog about "the innate human need to leave the surface of the earth"

If the Parthian Empire is known at all, it’s by students of Roman history who see it pop up from time to time, before disappearing once again. Marcus Licinius Crassus, a member of the first triumvirate– consisting of himself, Pompey, and  Julius Caesar– died in battle against the Parthians. At the moment of his assasination, Caesar was preparing for a campaign against Parthia; and  Mark Anthony, of the second triumvirate, was defeated by the Parthians when he attempted to realize Caesar’s dream. The Emperor Trajan some 150 years later finally achieved victories against Parthia, making his way as far as the shore of the Persian Gulf.

But who were the Parthians, on their own terms, not just as antagonists of the Romans? Where did they come from? How did they come to power? What was the extent of their Empire? And how were they integrated with the world around them, apart from their seemingly continual warfare with the ever-growing Roman Empire?

With me to answer these questions is Nicholas Overtoom, Assistant Professor of History at Washington State University, and author of Reign of Arrows: The Rise of the Parthian Empire in the Hellenistic Middle East.

For Further Investigation

Think of this as the second in a series of conversations on the powers and principalities that occupied the territory of Iran. The first of these was with Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, about the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Some time in the next six months we'll get to the Sassanids, who overthrew the Parthians.

For more on the importance of nomads, see my conversation with Pamela Crossley in Episode 185; her book on the importance of nomadic thought and culture for all of Eurasia is Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World.

I can't introduce Cathal Nolan's book Mercy: Humanity in War any better than he does himself, with these words:

This is not a book about war. It is about mercy and humanity… Mercy happens in a microsecond, wrapped inside a surprise moment of mortal danger; it restrains baser instinct and reminds us about higher things. This book shows that mercy limits cruelty in ways laws and honor codes seldom do, because mercy is the highest personal and moral quality any of us achieves. It is above all other virtues, even justice and courage. It is superior to bravery, especially in a soldier. It is the greatest gift we give to those we meet in civilian life who are suffering and for whom it is in our power to aid or harm. Greater still when offered to the defenseless in war.

Mercy is the grace that happens between those who have a fleeting superiority of physical power and those who cannot save or protect themselves. It is greater than a gift to the helpless and the innocent, for as Shakespeare wrote, it elevates the merciful, too.

Cathal J. Nolan is Director of the International History Institute at the Pardee School of Global Studies and Professor of History at Boston University. His most recent book was The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost, which we discussed in Episode 79.