Historically Thinking

In 1756 an unmarried Quaker woman wrote “Deborah Morris, her book, 1756” in, of all things, a book entitled The American Instructor, or, Young Man’s Best Companion. That might seem to have been an odd choice. But as my guest Sarah Damiano explains, it was a very useful book for Deborah Morris to have, because Deborah Morris was a landlady, a retailer, and an investor.

In this she was far from alone among 18th century American women, as much as that surprise us. Credit was at the heart of the overlapping circles of finance, law, and sociability. Since early America was cash poor, most transactions were based on credit--simply noted in a ledger, until such time as the creditor required hard cash. Sara Damiano explains in detail how free women in Newport, Rhode Island and Boston used credit in pursuit of profits in her new book To Her Credit: Women, Finance, and the Law in Eighteenth Century New England.  She shows how women were borrowers, lenders, litigants, and even witnesses in the many, many, many court cases that revolved around credit. Sarah Damiano is Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University, and we hope you'll agree that she shows us a whole new way of looking at early America.

Those of us who still carry coins or cash—and I notice that I do that less and less—carry around “a pocket guide to world history and culture.” Money, writes Frank Holt, provides us with a historical record “unrivaled by papyrus, paper and parchment. Coins are perhaps the most sucessful information technology ever devised.”

In his new book When Money Talks: A History of Coins and Numismatics, Holt briskly and whimsically explores the life of coins; the importance of coins; and how to decode the information that coins provide, as well as providing us with a history of the history of doing that. Frank Lee Holt is Professor of Classical History at the University of Houston, with research emphases on the subject matter of the forgotten peripheries of the classical world and on the methodology of cognitive numismatics—of which much more will be said in this conversation.

Nearly every introduction to the Appalachian Trail seems to begin by giving its length (about 2,100 miles) and that it goes from Georgia to Maine. Which is strange, when you think about it. No one much talks about I-95, or the I-10, or the I-5—maybe they should—and when they do they don’t tell us about their length, or where they begin and end. Neither really tell us much about the thing itself.

Philip D’Anieri has done something different. He has written a biography of the Appalachian Trail (it's called, sensibly enough, The Appalachian Trail: A Biography) and done it by writing about the lives of those involved with it, as creators, hikers, planners, and writers—a wonderfully curious collection of Americans. But in the end, these human lives end up becoming the collective life of that 2,100 mile path that goes all the way from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Katahdin in Maine.

 

For Further Investigation

Here's a helpful collection of web-based resources and books about the Trail, put together by Philip D'Anieri

Throughout their history Americans have found themselves fighting “unexpected enemies—foes from different cultural backgrounds, who fought in unfamiliar ways, and against whom they were unprepared to fight.” In the new book The Other Face of Battle: America's Forgotten Wars and the Experience of Combat, a group of military historians has put together three exemplars of such fights, woven together with an analysis of the discontinuity and continuity of the way that Americans have waged such wars.

With me to talk about The Other Face of Battle are three of its four co-authors. They are David Silbey, Adjunct Associate Professor and Associate Director of Cornell in Washington; David Preston, General Mark W. Clark Distinguished Chair of History at the Citadel; and Wayne Lee, Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

This our fourth episode in our year-long series about the skills of historical thinking, and it’s about that terrifying moment which leads to actually writing about history: the question, and the thesis. When we ask historical questions, we’re first asking a bigger question: What questions make historical sense of these documents? Then, in the thesis, we try to answer it, hopefully with a claim that’s worth making.

What good questions are, and what claims are worth making, are some of the things we talk about with Bill Caferro. William Caferro is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he is also Director and Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Studies; and Director of the Economics and History Program in the Department of History. He was last on the podcast in Episode 103 talking about his book Petrarch’s War: Florence and the Black Death in Context. Most recently he has published Teaching History.

In July and August of 1921 a group of young men met in Shanghai to found the Chinese Communist Party. They undoubtedly had great dreams, but even so they might have found it hard to believe that they were initiating the largest revolutionary movement of the 20th century, and that their party would thirty years later rule China.  Certainly they would have scoffed at the idea that, one hundred years after their meeting, their party’s far from doctrinaire Marxist reforms would have not only led to unprecedent economic growth, but to China becoming one of the two great world superpowers.

With me to discuss the history of the Chinese Communist Party is Anthony Saich, the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and Daewoo Professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He is author most recently of From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party. It is not a book about Mao, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping, or any one personality. Nor is it about the Chinese Civil War, or the Great Leap Forward, the Culture Revolution, the economic transformation of the late 20th century, or any one event. It is instead about all those things, as reflected in the one-hundred year life of what is arguably the most powerful and masterful institution anywhere in the world, which has achieved that mastery by being highly adaptable.

Peter the Great is known to history as the ruler who pushed for the westernization of Russia; who defeated Sweden, thereby making Russia a Baltic power; and who then built a great capital on that Baltic Sea to be Russia’s window to the west. Yet on his deathbed Peter was thinking of Asia, dreaming of a passage to China and India through the Arctic Sea.

It's with this vignette that Chris Miller begins his new book We Shall Be Masters: Russia’s Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin. As Miller makes clear, Russia has never been constantly interested in Asia, but cyclically interested. The Tsar's colonized Alaska, California, and Hawaii, and abandoned them all. They leveraged the Qing Dynasty to control the Amur River, imagining that it would be an Asian Mississippi–and then lost interest in it. Most Russian attempts to find security, wealth, and glory in Asia end up being half-hearted, and result in failure. What can explain these cycles of fascination and indifference?

Chris Miller is Assistant Professor of International History at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He was last heard on Historically Thinking in Episode 153 discussing the Chinese surveillance state.

For Russia the year 1837 began with the death of the poet Alexander Pushkin in a duel, and ended with a fire that destroyed the Czar’s Winter Palace. These two happenstance events in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg frame a series of extraordinary changes that occurred that year throughout Russia. For historian Paul Werth these events amount to a “quiet revolution”, one that changed Russia and provided it with features—religious, cultural, intellectual, institutional, political, and ethnic—that are visible to this day.

Paul W. Werth is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The author of numerous studies on religion, religious freedom, and the role of religious institutions in Russian imperial governance, his most recent book is 1837: Russia’s Quiet Revolution, now available from Oxford University Press. Twice he has given conference presentations in verse.

 

For Further Investigation

Paul Werth, "To know Russia, you really have to understand 1837"

Chaadaev, Peter, translated by Raymond T. McNally. The Major Works of Peter Chaadaev. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969

One California afternoon William Damon received a call from his daughter. A sleepless night had led her to do a little internet sleuthing, and the result was Damon discovering that the father he had thought died in World War II had in fact not only lived, but had a career in the United States Information Agency, before dying in Thailand in 1992 after a long illness.

One of the results of that discovery, and the years spent not only learning about his father but reviewing his own life, is Damon’s new book A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present. As one friend of Damon’s has written, it is “a gripping detective story, a deeply touching personal memoir, a critique of developmental psychology, a compendium of life-giving maxims, and a celebration of disciplined life review.” William Damon is Professor of Education at Stanford University, and Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence.

 

For Further Investigation

Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

Joseph Amato, Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History

Episode 50: Family History is Knowing Yourself--a conversation with Joseph A. Amato

Throughout human history, we have been deeply affected by our environment, particularly climate. At certain times there have been such alterations in climate that they amount to cultural shocks, resulting not only in famine, disease, and violence, but also in religious changes.

That's the argument presented by this week's guest, Philip Jenkins, in his new book Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval. We discuss the mechanisms by which the climate is altered, and then alters human history, particularly religious history. Then we move on to discuss several periods of climatic shock that resulted in religious change; and speculate about how future climate change will change world religion. Finally I ask Jenkins for his secrets of being a highly productive historian, and whether or not all of his books are just chapters in an enormous book.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, where he is also Co-Director of the Program on Historical Studies of Religion.