Historically Thinking

Typically the "Scottish Enlightenment" is the term for the great burst of intellectual creativity, centered on Edinburgh and Glasgow and beginning in the 1720's. It saw advances made in philosophy, law,  economics, medicine, and geology,  by such great names as David Hume, Adam Fergusson, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and William Robertson–to name but a few. A typical view sees it as an unlikely event following "a century of relative turmoil" which was capped by the failure of the Darien colony, the Union of Scotland and England of 1707, and the Jacobite rebellions.

However my guest today, Kelsey Jackson-Williams, argues that even amidst the turmoil of Scotland's late seventeenth century, there were still intellectual forces at work without which there would have been no subsequent intellectual explosion. But rather than centered on the Scottish cities and Lothian, this "First Scottish Enlightenment" was focused on  great houses in the northeast of Scotland, and on the city and university of Aberdeen. Rather than Presbyterian, it was Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, and Jacobite. And, finally, it was primarily focused upon untangling the history of the kingdom of Scotland, as well as upon its literary heritage.

For Further Investigation

Kelsey Jackson Williams, The First Scottish Enlightenment: Rebels, Priests, and History

The Website of Kelsey Jackson Williams

Pathfoot Press: "dae ye ken yer ane leid?"

In early November 1831, Thomas Ruffin Gray was searching for a publisher.

He had been one of those whites who had travelled from his home in Richmond to Southampton County, Virginia, to put down the most effective revolt of enslaved persons in the state's history. Gray later returned to Southampton to serve as defense lawyer for the alleged revolutionaries. From November 1 - 3, he interviewed Nat Turner, leader of the revolt, and supplemented that material with interviews of other participants and survivors.

Following these interviews, Gray had quickly written the remarkable story; but in the end he had to ride all the way to Baltimore to get it printed. It sold 50,000 copies.

In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History is in part Christopher Tomlins' meditation on how Turner's story has been told by generations of whites, most notably by Gray and by novelist William Styron. It is also Tomlins' meditation on the meaning and uses of history, and of the craft of historians.

Most important, it is a deeply thoughtful reconstruction of what Nat Turner believed, and how he made sense of the world around him. As Tomlins writes, after years of wanting to write about Nat Turner, "I soon found myself writing about God."

Christopher Tomlins is the Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent book was Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865.

On October 22, 1685, King Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, the decree promulgated by his grandfather Henri IV which provided French Protestants with a degree of limited toleration. The choices facing those approximately 700,000 French Protestants were stark: they could renounce their beliefes and convert to Catholicism; resist, which could lead to imprisonment or death; or leave France, which was itself an illegal act. Ultimately some 150,000 made new homes across Europe, from Switzerland to Berlin, and from Rotterdam to Ireland. Others went even farther abroad, to Virginia, Carolinas, the West Indies, even as far as the Cape of Good Hope.

With me to discuss the Huguenot diaspora, and it changed the society, culture, and politics of the Atlantic World is Owen Stanwood. He’s Associate Professor of History at Boston College, and author of The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire.

For Further Investigation

Oxford, Massachusetts: The Huguenot Fort and the Oxford Colony

New Rochelle, New York

Manakin Town, Virginia

Purrysburg, South Carolina

Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English American in the Age of the Glorious Revolution

Just to remind you, this is Memorial Day weekend–do not be alarmed if you have forgotten that it's a weekend, let alone that it's Memorial Day. As Professor Wikipedia might tell you, Memorial Day was instituted to remember the Northern dead of the Civil War. It then in time became a memorial encompassing the Southern dead, and eventually the dead of other wars. In the modern American imagination, it's increasingly hard to tell the difference between Memorial Day and Veteran's Day, especially since Memorial Day is now the beginning of summer and not at all a time of reverent memory for the fallen.

But given the purpose of Memorial Day, it seems an especially appropriate time to post this conversation about the Battle of Okinawa. If war is hell, then Okinawa is the name of one of Hell's most infernal levels.

On April 1, 1945—not only April Fool’s Day that year but Easter Sunday as well—an invasion force of American and British ships landed an army of four United States Army divisions and three United States Marine Corps divisions on the island of Okinawa. These 180,000 men would fight to gain control of the island, the first of the Japanese islands to be invaded, until June 22. It was the bloodiest battle of the Pacific, a battle that in its cruelty and ferocity was akin to a battle on the Eastern Front or to the most vicious combat of the First World War.

With me to discuss the Battle of Okinawa and its effects is Saul David. He is Professor of Military History at the University of Buckingham; author of numerous works of history, as well as of fiction; and a broadcaster. His most recent book is Crucible of Hell, which is the subject of our conversation today, and which Amazon has designated as a "History Book of the Month" for May 2020.

The story of the picture: Davis T. Hargraves and Gabriel Chavarria at Wana Ridge, 18 May, 1945

The Final Campaign: Marines in the Victory on Okinawa

Saul David on the Battle for Okinawa in the BBC History Magazine

Recent Books by Saul David:

Operation Thunderbolt: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport

The Force: The Legendary Special Ops Unit and WWII”s Mission Impossible

For more about Saul David and his work:

www.sauldavid.co.uk

www.buckingham.ac.uk/research/hri/fellows/david

Imagine, if you would, a world without either money or banks. How could anyone conduct business? How could anyone procure goods and services? How could you have a diversified economy? How could a person plan for the future? 

This was the world of early America, prior the Revolution. One of the many changes brought about by that event was the creation of both money and banks. But neither of them worked in the ways that we now expect. 

With us to explore this strange yet oddly resonant world of money and finance is Sharon Ann Murphy. She is Professor of History at Providence College, and author most recently of Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic, published by Johns Hopkins University Press as part of their series “How Things Worked.”

My guest today is Thomas J. McSweeney, Professor of Law at the William and Mary Law School in Willamsburg, Virginia. He earned both his JD and his PhD in History from Cornell University, and is the author of Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law's First Professionals, which is the subject of today’s conversation.

Most Americans think they know something about the Pilgrims, based on a dimly remembered High School textbook, or perhaps from a second-grade Thanksgiving pageant: that the men wore stove pipe hats with brass buckles, and carried blunderbusses; that they were the first settlers in America, had the first Thanksgiving, got on well with the Indians; that they were uniquely tolerant while others all around them were not; that they were the most important settlers of New England, or the most influential.

And just about all of these things are wrong.

With me to discuss the Pilgrims, their origins, beliefs, settlement, and their importance is John Turner, author of the new book They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty, published by Yale University Press. John Turner is Professor of Religious Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. His previous works include the award-winning Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, as well as The Mormon Jesus: The Place of Jesus Christ in Latter-Day Saint Thought, Artwork, and Sprituality.

Winston Churchill termed the Seven Years War (what Americans think of as the French and Indian War) the “First World War” since its battles took place from Germany to western Pennsylvania to Manila. If that title is accepted, then the “War of the American Revolution” was the Second World War, stretching as it did from the thirteen British American colonies to Europe to India; and thus the Napeoleonic Wars were the Third World War.

But neither of those two previous wars could approach the size and scale of the cataclysm that were the Napoleonic Wars. As my guest Alexander Mikaberidze argues, they were the most consequential events between the Protestant Reformation and the Great War of 1914-1918. And like those events, the Napoleonic Wars had effect which continue to our own time.

Alexander Mikaberidze is Professor of European History at the Louisiana State University at Shreveport, where he is . He has been acclaimed as one of the “great Napoleonic scholars of today”, the author of what has been described as a “masterpiece” The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History, published this year by Oxford University Press. This his second appearance on Historically Thinking; our previous conversation, held five years ago on this topic, is one of our most popular.

Trees, as you may know, have rings. I don't know about you, but I remember the wonder I first felt when my Dad showed me tree rings. He explained that I could tell about the tree's life from the rings; the wide rings were from years of plenty of rain, and the thin ones from years of drought. Those tree rings turn out to be remarkably useful for not just telling us about a tree’s past, but about that of the world in which it grew. Which means, in a funny way, that trees can tell us something about what it meant to be human—and indeed what it means to be human, at least insofar as we can measure in trees the effects of our causes

With me to discuss trees, their history, and human history, is Valerie Trouet. She is Associate Professor and University of Arizona Distinguished Scholar in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, and the author of Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings.

Further Links

Trouet Lab

The amazing bristlecone pine

A.E. Douglas, astronomer and dendrochronology pioneer

The Presidential Cabinet has, it would seem, been a reality of the American republic since soon after its foundation. Yet while executive departments are mentioned in the Constitution, the Cabinet is not. And while the heads of departments were present—or soon to arrive—in New York City when Washington took the first inaugural oath, they did not function as an institution until later

With me today to discuss George Washington’s cabinet, its personalities and personality, its history, and its legacy, is Lindsay M. Chervinksy. Listeners to the podcast will remember that in Episode 118 she and I talked about this book and the research she had done for it, while carefully avoiding as best as we could actually discussing the material of the book. Now the book is done and published: it’s called, surprisingly enough, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, published this week by Harvard University Press.

Apologies, by the way, for the artwork. It's precisely the same artwork used for Episode 118. Curiously enough, it's also the artwork used on the cover Lindsay's book. That's because it's seemingly the only depiction of Washington's cabinet. And it happens to be the cover of a cigar box whose manufacturer was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is why Henry Knox is named "Hendrick". A Dutch Calvinist cigar box cover depicting George Washington's cabinet; it's a strange and wonderful country.