Historically Thinking

When Alexander of Macedonia took the throne of his father Philip, he inherited an expansive and wealthy kingdom; a hardened and meticulously constructed army; and a cadre of aristocrats and nobles who were used to victory, and wanted more of it. Moreover, Alexander was well-educated—in part by none other than Aristotle himself—and a military veteran.

But when Philip took the throne he possessed none of these advantages. It is impossible to understand the campaigns of Alexander against Persia, and how they transformed Eurasia, without first understanding Philip of Macedon and what he accomplished. Such is the premise of Adrian Goldsworthy’s new history, Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors. Adrian Goldsworthy is a prolific historian and novelist, who lives in southern Wales; this is third appearance on Historically Thinking.

Each year tens of thousands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints visit sites across the United States, like the recreated town of Nauvoo on the Mississippi River, or to "This is the Place" Heritage Park, just outside Salt Lake City. Thousands of young church members push handcarts across the plains, or up over the highest nearby hill, dressed in 19th century clothes. Sara Patterson argues that “as the Latter Day Saints community globalized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, its relationship to space was transformed...Contemporary Mormons still want to touch and to feel [the principles of their early church], so they mark and claim the landscapes of the American West with versions of their history carved in stone.”

Sara Patterson is Professor of Theological Studies at Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana. She is the author of Pioneers in the Attic: Place and Memory Along the Mormon Trail, which is the focus of our conversation today.

In Xanadu, Kublai Khan had a leopard. Well, it wasn’t a leopard really, it was a cheetah. And upon that fact, and upon many other anecdotes and material objects, Timothy Brook builds a bridge that connects the history of China to the history of the world around it. He demonstrates in overwhelming and fascinating detail that far from cut off from the world, China has always been in and of the world, and the world has always been coming to China.

Timothy Brook is the Republic of China Chair in the Department of History of the University of British Columbia. The general editor of Harvard University Press' series History of Imperial China, his work has tended to focus on the Ming Dynasty, but has gone back as far at the Mongol occupation of China and forward as far as the Japanese occupation of China. He is particularly interested in China in the world, as attested to by his most recent book, The Great State: China and the World, which is the focus of our conversation today

In 415 BC, Athens sent a fleet of over 100 ships and 5,000 hoplites to attack the city of Syracuse, in Sicily, an expedition that would result in catastrophe. The philosopher Plato writing decades later described a drinks party, held perhaps a few months or weeks before, given by the poet Agathon to celebrate his winning first prize in the Lenaia festival not long before. Among Agathon’s famous guests was philospher and Athenian gadfly Socrates; and coming unvited to the feast later on in Plato’s telling was Alcibiades, the chief mover and proponent of the Sicilian Expedition, and a one-time student of Socrates. Any Athenian who read Plato would have known that; and know also  that Alcibiades had ultimately been exiled from Athens not once but twice; and that Socrates had been executed by the city for having “corrupted the young”, young men like Alcibiades, and others.

With me to discuss what Alcibiades learned from Socrates, and the importance of political ambition, is Ariel Helfer. He is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wayne State University, and author of Socrates and Alcibiades: Plato’s Drama of Political Philosophy and Ambition, published in 2017 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

For Further Investigation

Faulkner, Robert K. The Case for Greatness: Honorable Ambition and Its Critics. Yale University Press, 2008.

Forde, Steven. The Ambition to Rule: Alcibiades and the Politics of Imperialism in Thucydides. Cornell University Press, 1989.

Plato. Socrates and Alcibiades. Plato: Alcibiades I, Plato: Alcibiades II, Plato: Symposium (212c-223b), Aeschines of Sphettus: Alcibiades. Translated by David M. Johnson, Focus Philosophical Library/Focus Pub., 2003.

Plutarch. “Life of Alcibiades.” Lives, vol. 4.  Translated by Bernadotte Perrin, Harvard University Press., 1916.

Romilly, Jacqueline de. Life of Alcibiades: Dangerous Ambition and the Betrayal of Athens. Translated by Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings, Cornell University Press, 2019.

Thucydides. The Landmark Thucydides: a Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War. Edited by Robert B. Strassler. Translated by Richard Crawley, Free Press, 2008.

“Medieval Mediterranean slavery”  is a phrase that might seem a bit puzzling to some listeners—surely there wasn’t slavery in the medieval Mediterrean? Was there?

Indeed there was. For hundreds of years a slave trade existed throughout the Medieval Mediterranean world, taking captives from the shores of the Black Sea to Egypt, and to Italy. The slave traders were from the Republics of Venice and Genoa, and the Mameluk Sultanate. “Late medieval slavery was not an afterthought or an aberration,” writes Hannah Barker. “It lay at the heart of Mediterranean society, politics, and religion. A complex of slavery, captivity, trade, and ransom tied disparate parts of the Mediterranean together.”

Hannah Barker is Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe. Her book  That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500, was this yeear awarded the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize by the Journal of Global Slavery; and it is the subject of our conversation today.

For Further Investigation

Hannah Barker has kindly provided the following list of resources and books, complete with descriptions. You should also go back and listen to Episode 95, a conversation with Daniel Hershenzon on captivity and captives in the western Mediterranean.

Teaching Medieval Slavery and Captivity: "this is a project that I’m leading to provide English translations of interesting primary sources and selected bibliographies to illustrate what kind of scholarship is already available on the topic of medieval slavery and captivity. The primary audience is teachers, but it’s also set up for browsing by the curious."

Jeffrey Fynn-Paul, “Empire, Monotheism and Slavery in the Greater Mediterranean Region from Antiquity to the Early Modern Era,” Past and Present 205 (2009): 3-40.

"He explains how the idea of slavery based on religious difference evolved over the medieval period."

Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (2009)

"I see this book, along with Hershenzon’s, as parallel to mine but focused on the western Mediterranean."

Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006)

"This is a brilliant explanation of why the abolitionist movement emerged and succeeded at the precise moment it did."

Daniel Hershenzon, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (2018)

Eve Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (2003)

"This is also a brilliant book explaining how Ottoman and post-Ottoman elites saw slavery in the context of both colonialism and abolitionist pressure."

In the history of ancient Greece, three cities dominated its politics, society, and culture. Of these, Athens and Sparta are now best known. But set in the plains of central Greece was the third apex of this “fateful triangle”, the city of Thebes. Dismissed by both Spartans and Athenians as rustics, clods, and peasants–“Boeotian swine” according the Athenians–Thebes was nevertheless deeply consequential to the life of those two rival cities. Its myths and legends became the topics of some of the greatest of Athenian drama. Its alliance with Sparta helped tip the balance of the Pelopponesian War in Sparta’s favor. And in the period of Thebes’ greatest power, when it had turned against its old ally, Boeotian armies freed the helots of Sparta in successful campaigns of liberation the like of which would not be see again, until Toussaint L'Ouverture raised up an army in Haiti, and Sherman made Georgia howl.

With me to discuss the city of Thebes is Paul Cartledge, the A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, and the Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture. He is the newly elected President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, and is an Honorary Citizen of (modern) Sparta. Author, editor and co-editor of (by my count) 32 books, his 33rd is Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece, which is the subject of our conversation today.

For Further Investigation

The Archaeological Museum of Thebes

Map of Classical Thebes

Essays by Paul Cartledge at History Today

Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas

In 1763, James Boswell was accompanied by his new friend Samuel Johnson to Harwich, from which the young Scot then travelled to Utrecht in the Netherlands. There he was supposed to study law, which he did with great energy. But he also energetically whored, proposed marriage to eligible young ladies of fortune, and traveled about Europe making the acquaintance of the great and good. One of these was Rousseau; and it was he who suggested that Boswell travel to Corsica, and visit the Corsican revolutionary Pasquale Paoli. So Boswell did, and the book the wrote about his experiences and Paoli made Boswell's career, and made Pasquale Paoli an 18th century celebrity on either side of the Atlantic.

For David Bell, Boswell's biography of Paoli is a significant moment of transition. Here was a man engaged in a democratic revolution, at the beginning of an age of revolutions fighting to establish democratic republics in North America, Europe, the Caribbean, and South America. Yet those revolutions were led by leaders who were literally men on horseback, and who had either nascent or actual cults of personality constructed around them by ardent admirers and zealous followers. So democratic republics, militarism, the cult of the dictator, all emerged simultaneously. For Bell, "the history of democracy is inextricable from the history of charisma, its shadow self."

David Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University. He has previously written or co-edited seven books; Men on Horseback: Charisma and Power in the Age of Revolutions, is his eighth, and it is the subject of this week's conversation.

For Further Investigation

The website of David A. Bell

David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It

David A. Bell, "What Donald Trump and George Washington Have in Common: Charisma doesn’t have to be earned for its impact on democratic politics to be very real." Foreign Policy, August 17, 2020.

This is Nassau Hall. When it was built, it was the largest building in colonial America. Anyone walking through it today when visiting Princeton University might have some strange resonance with their own college experience. There are some differences, but...parts of it look amazingly like a late 20th century dormitory.

Historians are supposed to be chroniclers of change, and sternly against the claim that things are “always that way.” But American dormitory makes one question historicism. Students are now very, very different than their predecessors of even fifty years ago, let alone three hundred years ago. And yet the residence hall remains, and thrives, often in ways that the young men of the College of New Jersey in 1772 might recognize.

My guest Carla Yanni—picking up on the ideas of Marta Gutman—argues that this is because physical space is not simply a backdrop for college students. The two build each other. Or, as the architectural critic Winston Churchill once said, "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."

Carla Yanni is Professor of Art History at Rutgers University, specializing in social history of architecture in 19th- and 20th-century Britain and the United States. Her most recent book is  Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory.

For Further Investigation

Carla Yanni's website

Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson's University

Alan Taylor, Thomas Jefferson's Education

Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History

J. David Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges

This is a bonus episode of Historically Thinking, hopefully the first of several short episodes that will deal with higher ed in the time of COVID. It's changed much else, and it would seem (as the autumn semester of 2020 begins, more or less) that American higher education is going to be very different on the other side of the pandemic. Maybe.

I talk with two people of very different perspectives and ways of thinking and seeing. Holly Taylor is a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health. Carla Yanni is an architectural historian at Rutgers University, whose latest book is on the history of American dormitories. Together they have a interesting take on what's going on now on campuses across the nation, and what isn't going on.

“In terms of time, my work will start with the 140th Olympiad” wrote the historian Polybius at the beginning of his History: 

Before this time things happened in the world pretty much in a sporadic fashion, because every incident was specific, from start to finish, to the part of the world where I happened. But ever since then history has resembled a body, in the sense that incidents in Italy and Libya and Asia and Greece are all interconnected, and everything tends toward a single outcome. That is why I have made this period the starting point of my treatment of world events.

With me to discuss the historian Polybius and his work is Steele Brand. He is Professor of History at The King’s College in New York, and author of Killing for the Republic: Citizen-Soldiers and the Roman Way of War, which he and I discussed in Episode 124.

For Further Investigation

Arthur Eckstein, Moral Vision in the Histories of Polybius 

Frank W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius  

Brian C. McGing, Polybius' Histories 

Bruce Gibson and Thomas Harrison, eds., Polybius and His World: Essays in Memory of F.W. Walbank

Polybius, translated by Robin Waterfield, The Histories 

Episode 45: The View from Thucydides' Tower

Episode 11: The First Historian