Historically Thinking

At her 80th birthday party Agatha Christie described a conversation she had once overheard about herself. She had been on

a train, and there listened to two ladies talking about her, copies of her latest mystery  perched on both their knees. “I hear,” said one, “that she drinks like a fish.”

Christie’s latest biographer Lucy Worsley begins her new book with that anecdote because for her it so nicely captures at least three things about the author. First, that she told the story on her 80th birthday shows her longevity. Second, that both of the ladies had a copy of her latest book—Christie was a bestselling author of truly titanic  sales records. Third, that Christie was a close observer of life around her, always ready to transmute it into art. And fourth, that in the story Agatha Christie was part of the background, so ordinary as to not excite any interest from anyone—yet, all the while, being quite extraordinary. 

As she describes it, by day, Lucy Worsley is Joint Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces—and by night she enters peoples homes by means of documentary films, and best-selling books–the latest of which is titled, in the United States at least, Agatha Christie: An Elusive Women.

 

For Further Investigation

Lucy Worsley has previously written about another great English author, Jane Austen, in her Jane Austen at Home: A Biography. She has also previously written The Art of English Murder: From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock

Agatha Christie was a surfer, maybe one of the first Britons to learn to stand upright on a board. No, really, it's true.

Lord Flashheart; and Archie Christie. I rest my case, m'lud. Thought Archie does need a bigger mustache, to be quite honest.

If we know Mikhail Ilarionovich Golenischev-Kutuzov, we know him as Tolstoy imagined him, as an old man, before Austerlitz, “with his uniform unbuttoned so that his fat neck bulged over his collar if escaping… in a low chair with his podgy old hands resting symmetrically on its arms'' who begins to snore loudly and rhythmically as his generals plan the battle. Why? Because he alone understands the hand of providence, or the finger of fate; because he alone “recognizes that there are forces in the universe that are ‘stronger and more important than his own will’.” Tolstoy’s Kutuzov therefore decides not to decide; diminishes himself in order to triumph; realizes that he is an observer rather than pretending to be an actor.

But who was Kutuzov really? And how can we know him? Those are the questions at the heart of Alexander Mikaberidze’s new biography Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace. It is as concerned with Russia in the late eighteenth century, and with what was subsequently made of Kutuzov’s legacy–to the very moment we record this conversation–as he is in Kutuzov’s life story.

Alexander Mikaberidze is Professor of European History at the Louisiana State University at Shreveport, where he is also Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair for the Curatorship of the James Smith Noel Collection. This is his fourth appearance on Historically Thinking.

For Further Investigation

Alex Mikaberidize talked about the Napoleonic Wars as a world war in Episode 14,  and then again in Episode 155, after the publication of his book The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (which won the 2020 Gilder-Lehrman Military History Prize)

He also appeared in Episode 241: Doing the Research

Brian Cox seems pretty well-cast as Kutuzov; but if you listened to the podcast closely, you'll see that the makeup people made an error

For centuries the Kingdom of England faced northeast, across the northern seas towards Scandinavia. Indeed, under King Canute, England was part of Scandinavia. But with the Norman invasion–even though the Normans were eponymously “North-men”–that changed dramatically. Within a few decades, the French and English royal trees began to intertwine, to graft branches to one another, to make love and war, sometimes at one and the same time. 

Catherine Hanley's new book Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A History of France and England, 1100-1300 with these words:

This is a book about people.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the personal could influence the political to a great extent, and nowhere is this better exemplified than in the relationship between the ruling houses of France and England, whose members waged war, made peace and intermarried – sometimes almost simultaneously – in a complex web of relationships. These people, these kings and queens, siblings, children and cousins, held positions determined by birth; positions that often involved playing a role on the national and international stage from a very young age. Their life stories, their formative experiences and their interpersonal relationships shaped the context of decisions and actions that had the potential to affect the lives and livelihoods of millions. 

Catherine Hanley was last on the podcast in Episode 122, discussing the Empress Matilda, the subject of her previous book Matilda: Empress, Queen, and Warrior. She was born in Australia, lives in Somerset in the west of England, and when watching cricket supports “Somerset, Australia, and Tasmania—in that order.”

For Further Investigation

Two books by Catherine who are set within the period she chronicles in Two Houses, Two Kingdoms, are the aforementioned Matilda: Empress, Queen, and Warrior and Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England,

For just a taste of what comes after the end of Catherine's book, that whole "Hundred Years War" business, you might listen to Episode 66: A People's History of the Hundred Years War

An introduction to medieval France, from the Metropolitan Museum

Medieval English timeline at the British Library

The Magna Carta Project, which Catherines says "has some good stuff about the early thirteenth century, King John, and Louis’s invasion"

Relevant primary sources for England and for France at the invaluable Internet Sourcebook

For thousands of years humans have in war and peace attempted to poison one another—or, perhaps for variety,  burn each other to death. We might think of poison gas, biological weapons, or the use of unwitting victims to spread epidemics as being modern innovations, but such horrors have been employed since the earliest recorded history.  Moreover, for nearly that entire time humans have debated the morality of employing those weapons. 

My guest Adrienne Mayor describes this history in Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Unconventional Warfare in the Ancient World, now being issued in a revised and updated edition by Princeton University Press, along with her collection of essays entitled Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws. As she does in all of her books, in both of these she travels through that complicated landscape where the borders of history, science, archaeology, anthropology, and popular knowledge all adjoin each other, and seeks there the realities and insights embedded in myth, legend, and folklore. 

Adrienne Mayor’s other books include The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, a finalist for the National Book Award. She was previously on the podcast in Episode 107 discussing her book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology.

In 1815, John Adams wrote to a correspondent of the importance, of all things, of the Boston Committee of Correspondence in the 1760s:

…I never belonged to any of these Committees and have never Seen one of their Letters Sent or received... But in my Opinion the History of the United States never can be written, till they are discovered. What an Engine! France imitated it, and produced a Revolution. England and Scotland was upon the Point of imitating it, in order to produce another Revolution and all Europe was inclined to imitate it for the Same Revolutionary Purposes.

The History of the World for the last thirty Years is a Sufficient Commentary upon it. That History ought to convince all Mankind that Committees of Secret Correspondence are dangerous Machines. That they are Causticks and Inscision Knives, to which Recourse Should never be had but in the last Extremities of Life; in the last question between Life and Death.

My guest Micah Alpaugh believes that John Adams was, despite his typical gift for epistolary hyperbole, absolutely and interestingly correct. And Alpaugh makes that argument in his new book Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. Micah Alpaugh is Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri; this is his second book.

For Further Investigation

The English cartoonist James Gillray, who has claim to be the first great political cartoonist, made the London Corresponding Society a frequent target of his artistic abuse. The "London Corresponding Society, Alarm'd" imagined the members of the corresponding societies as feral subhumans, alarmed at the charges made against Tom Paine for the second part of his Rights of Man. On the other hand "Copenhagen House" was an almost sympathetic depiction of a mass-meeting of corresponding societies–with plenty of dissenters and abolitionists among them.

A related conversation, covering the curious connections between revolutions in Europe and the Americas, was in Episode 176: Men on Horseback, or, What Charisma Has to Do With It.

And for a deep dive into the French Revolution, see the conversation with Jeremy Popkin  in Episode 144: The French Revolution; and Episode 234: The Fall of Robespierre

Well, this is something new. After 279 podcasts, someone is asking Al Zambone questions about the podcast. Carol Adrienne, recently heard talking on Episode 278 about her book Healing a Divided Nation: How the Civil War Revolutionized Western Medicine insisted that it was a really good idea that she be allowed to record a podcast about this podcast. So she did. It turns out to be a pretty good introduction to the podcast, if you're new to the podcast, as many references are made to past episodes. Even if you've listened to most of those 279 episodes, you'll still learn something as Zambone explains  the methods and perspectives that enables him to put together the podcast.

For Further Investigation

Here's the Edmund Morgan quote which still blurbs Charles Royster's book: "[The book] is social history, intellectual history, institutional history, political history, and not any single one of them, which is to say that it is good history."

Boundary crossers Elisabeth Leake and Jamie Belich

Three historians writing one big book in many volumes: Dominic Sandbrook, Tom Holland, and Warren Eugene Milteer Jr.

Multi-lingual historians of the medieval and early-modern Mediterranean World: Hussein Fancy, Daniel Hershenzohn, Hannah Barker

Thomas Gieryn discuss "truth spots" in Episode 106

Based on the advice of Professor Wikipedia, Zambone is forced to withdraw his remarks about Jerusalem Syndrome, despite this Culture Trip essay; or Paris Syndrome. Statistically. given the number of visitors to Jerusalem or Paris, it seems insignificant.

Stephen Berry begins his new book Count the Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death as We Know It with these two paragraphs: 

This is a book about death and data or, more specifically, about the dead as data. The dead and the formerly living are not the same. The formerly living built the Parthenon and the Brooklyn Bridge…[they] also made brutal wars and ghastly decisions we are still struggling to live down. Revered or reviled, however, the formerly living have always counted because we still talk about them. Loved or hated, they built our world.

This is a book about a group that did not count for a very long time—the actual dead—the great ghostly horde who made their mark not in their living but in their collective dying, producing patterns of mortality that proved critical to the systematization of public health, casualty reporting, and human rights…

In Berry's telling, one of the greatest episodes in the history of humanity is the doubling of life expectancy between 1850 and 1950. But for him this is not a story simply of medical progress. It begins with the seemingly simple, mundane, and boring creation of death registration, beginning with the 1850 census when for the first time causes of death were recorded. This, Berry argues, was the foundation of the public health profession, and of the progress that followed. Without knowing a thing, without naming a thing, progress could not be made.

Stephen Berry is a "historian of mortality", which craft he practices at the University of Georgia, where he is Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era. He has authored or edited six books, including House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War, and Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges.

When Confederate cannons fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, the United States Army was comprised of only 16,000 soldiers. Its medical staff was numbered just 113 doctors. And here’s another fun fact: taking into account all of the doctors then practicing in the United States, possibly as few as 300 doctors in the entire United States had witnessed surgery, or seen a gunshot wound. 

Over the next four years all of those numbers would dramatically increase. To meet the unprecedented casualties of the American Civil War, American medicine had to make unprecedented changes. As my guest Carole Adrienne describes in her new book Healing a Divided Nation: How the American Civil War Revolutionized Western Medicine, these changes are reflected “in every ambulance, every vaccination, every woman who holds a paying job, and in every Black university graduate.”

Carole Adrienne received her B.F.A. from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia.  She has organized an archive for Old St. Joseph’s National Shrine, twice chaired “Archives Week” in Philadelphia and has served on advisory panels for the Philadelphia Archdiocesan Historic Research Center, The Mutter Museum’s “Civil War Medicine” exhibit and its “Spit Spreads Death: The 1918 Flu Epidemic” exhibit.  She is working on a documentary film series on Civil War medicine and lives in Philadelphia, PA.

 

For Further Investigation

You might think of this conversation as a prequel to Episode 252: The Great War and Modern Medicine; the Civil War changed the culture of American medicine, and possibly accelerated the postwar changes in the field. The Great War–the First World War–changed nearly everything about medicine everywhere. For another related discussion, this time on rabies and medicine in the late 19th century United States, see Episode 133: Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers.

The United States Sanitary Commission 

Frederick Olmstead and the United States Sanitary Commission

Clara Barton National Historic Site

Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Museum

A video introduction to Thomas Eakins' Portrait of Dr. Samuel Gross (The Gross Clinic)

Dorothea Dix, Social Reformer, Superintendent of Nurses

Cornelia Hancock

On March 15, 1938, Adolf Hitler addressed 250,000 Austrians in Vienna, announcing the end of the Austrian state. Close by on that same day, Nazis entered the apartment of Dr. Sigmund Freud and his family. They were literally bought off when first his wife Martha offered them cash, and then daughter Anna Freud opened a safe and gave them the equivalent of $840. At this point “the stern figure of Sigmund Freud himself suddenly appeared,” writes my guest Andrew Nagorski, “glaring at the intruders without saying anything…They addressed him as Herr Professor, and backed out of the apartment... After they left, Freud inquired how much money they had seized... He wryly remarked, 'I have never taken so much for a single visit'."

It seems astonishing that the author of Civilization and Its Discontents, who seemed to have so few illusions about mankind and its “aggressive cruelty”, should have been there to witness the Anschluss. It’s even more astonishing that even after the Anschluss he continued to insist that his life was safe, and that it was possible to “ride out the storm.” But a circle of friends and disciples not only persuaded Freud to leave, but then arranged his emigration to England, where he lived he last sixteen months of his life.

Andrew Nagorski was bureau chief for Newsweek in Hong Kong, Moscow, Rome, Bonn, Warsaw, and Berlin. Author of seven books, his latest book is Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom, which is the subject of our conversation today.

 

For Further Investigation

One of Nagorksi's previous books is Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power. We discussed a part of that dystopian country's terrain, and how it came into being with horrifying speed, in a conversation with Peter Fritzsche that you can find in Episode 244: Hitler's First One Hundred Days.

The general recommendation for the first place to read Freud are the lectures he gave at Clark University in 1909, published as Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Given the topic of Nagorski's book, you might also want to have a look at Civilization and Its Discontents

The Sigmund Freud Archives in the Library of Congress; and a brief history of the collection

Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna

Freud Museum, London

New college students usually get lots of advice.  “Go to office hours.” “Ask good questions.” “Declare a major as soon as you can.” “Take some time to figure out who you are.” “Get some research experience.” “Get good internships with real-life experience.” “Sit in the front row.” “Avoid procrastination.” Some of this advice is obvious, some of it is contradictory, and some of it is bad.. It almost never explains why, or even how. So the new college student is apt to ignore all of it.

In their new book The Secret Syllabus: A Guide to the Unwritten Rules of College Success, Jay Phelan and Terry Burnham begin at the most foundational level, and work upwards. The result is probably the best book that you could give to a first-year college student–or a second-year college student. Or maybe even a senior who’s finally getting it together. 

 

For Further Investigation

At the end of the conversation, I said that students should be given this book before going to college, while their parents should read Chambliss and Takacs, How College Works. I stand by that recommendation, and to see why you can listen to my conversation in Episode 56, in which I talk to Dan Chambliss.

There are a lot of other conversations about higher ed on the podcast, and here they all are gathered under the title "Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed." Among them are some of the best conversations I've had on the podcast.