Historically Thinking

Cultures give us guardrails for behavior, beyond which we can only pass with difficulty. They also give us what to say in a difficult situation, a script that helps us to get the words out, even gives us a template for how to behave. Sometimes these guardrails shift, and the scripts and templates are rewritten.

In her new book, Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity, from the Jamestown Colony to the Jonestown Flood, Cynthia Kierner describes the ways in which people (particularly in North America) gradually began to speak of disaster in the way that we do now. From the "starving time" at Jamestown in 1609, to the Johnstown Flood of 1889, Kierner chronicles not the disasters themselves so much as the response to the disaster. The results might surprise you. "Although how we interpret and respond to disasters has changed in some ways since the nineteenth century, Kierner demonstrates that, for better or worse, the intellectual, economic, and political environments of earlier eras forged our own twenty-first-century approach to disaster, shaping the stories we tell, the precautions we ponder, and the remedies we prescribe for disaster-ravaged communities."

Cynthia A. Kierner is Professor of History at George Mason University, and author of many books including Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello.

Hello, in antebellum and late 19th century New York City, nothing could clear a street faster than the cry of “mad dog!” Rabies was perhaps the most feared disease of the era; and because animals and humans lived in such close proximity, even as New York was growing into a city of millions, that proximity led people to always have in the back of their mind a dread of what might possibly happen to either them or their children.

As Jessica Wang describes in her wittily titled new book Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840-1920, rabies overlaps many areas of transformation in an era of transformation. Medicine, urban politics, urban geography, and cultural imagination all take their turn under her investigative gaze. The result is not a history of a disease, but the history of a society at a particularly important moment in its self-creation.

Jessica Wang is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. She has previously written American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War.

"Of all the ongoing debates over the Civil War," writes my guest Elizabeth Varon, "perhaps none has proven so difficult to resolve as the issue of Northern war aims." Some historians have emphasized, particularly in the last few years, the important point of consensus between many Republicans and Democrats that the Union needed to be saved. Others have emphasized the growth of the antislavery movement in the Republican Party as the force that gave coherence to the North's war effort. But each of these approaches, observes Varon, "focuses on only part of the broad Northern political spectrum."

Varon's suggestion is that "deliverance" is the concept that unites all the different northern perspectives. Northerners believed that they were bringing deliverance to the South: to the poor whites who were economically controlled by the wealthy slaveholders; to a region blighted with chattel slavery; and to the enslaved themselves. And of course Southerners also believed in the narrative of deliverance, only they believed that they were delivering themselves from those who would take their property; and their chief war aim was to deliver the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland from Federal oppression.

Elizabeth Varon is the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of numerous books; Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War is her most recent, and it's the focus of our discussion.

Americans love red meat. More particularly, they love beef. Always have. Archaeology of colonial America shows that British North Americans ate as much beef as they possibly could. Fish? No thank you. Beef? More, please.

This British chauvinism for beef (the French, after all, called the English "les rosbifs") became an American chauvinism. But where colonial Americans ate their beef in a variety of strange cuts, mostly boiled, by the post Civil War having the freshest possible beef became a passion, a health craze in fact.

We've talked about cattle drives in Episode 101 with Tim Lehman. This time, though, we're eating the whole cow. I talk with Joshua Specht, whose new book Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America describes the entire "beef economy" of the nineteenth century–from the seizing of ranch land from Plains Indians, to the dining room tables of New York and Indiana. Along the way he touches not only on cattle drives, but on feedlots, packing plants, and "beef riots" that happened in the most unusual places. It's a delicious podcast, even if you're Vegan.

Today's guest, Johann Neem, has recently written an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Abolish the Business Major”. Here’s a taste:

The business major is for students who want a college degree without a college education. The philosopher Tal Brewer has written that the very notion of business school is an “oxymoron.” The word “scholar” derives from the Greek word for leisure. Colleges are places where people step aside from the world of need — from the world of business — to engage in reflection. “Devoted to discussion and thought unfolding under its own internal demands,” a college cannot with integrity offer “training for the sort of life that has no place for such thought.” Business schooling is “a scholé of the negation of scholé.”

This essay was excerpted from Johann Neem’s new book, What’s the Point of College?: Seeking Purpose in an Age of Reform. It is a provocative collection of short punchy essays, written from the standpoint of a historian, but ranging across the entire terrain of the modern university.  I think that it forms a nice trilogy with previous conversations we’ve had this year with David Staley and Chris Gallagher—and I should note that all of three of these books have been published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Johann Neem is Professor of History at Western Washington University. His most recent book was Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America, and you can listen to us discuss that book in Episode 112.

On January 12, 1865, the Charleston Mercury gave its pronouncement upon plans in the Confederate Congress to enlist Black southerners into the Confederate Army in exchange for their emancipation:

By the compact we made with Virginia and the other States of this Confederacy, South Carolina will stand to the bitter end of destruction. By that compact she intends to stand or to fall. Neither Congress, nor certain makeshift men in Virginia, can force upon her their mad schemes of weakness and surrender. She stands upon her institutions—and there she will fall in their defence. We want no Confederate Government without our institutions. And we will have none.” And, further, “We are free men, and we chose to fight for ourselves—we want no slaves to fight for us…. Hack at the root of the Confederacy—our institutions—our civilization—and you kill the cause as dead as a boiled crab.”

Notwithstanding this pronouncement against the possibility of slaves fighting for an independent South, for decades some have persisted in the belief that by 1865 slaves were already fighting for the Confederacy, and indeed had been fighting for it since the beginning of the Civil War. (One piece of evidence for this is the picture above, which we discuss in the podcast.) The continuing controversy over “Black Confederates” is not only an argument about the Civil War, or civil rights, or the racial history of the United States—important as all those things are. It is at its root also an argument about how to think historically, perhaps even how to read.

With me today to discuss this is Kevin Levin, who has for years been at the center of this argument. Kevin is a teacher, a long time blogger at Civil War Memory, and his latest book is Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth.

Many would-be college reformers, says my guest Chris Gallagher, talk about "unbundling". By this they mean breaking a college into parts to save on costs and increase efficiency. In reality, Gallagher argues, colleges are already far too unbundled; or, perhaps, dis-integrated. What we need he argues are integrated colleges, ones which are coherently designed so that all of their parts fit together and support one another. The ideal result would be an institution that supports a life-long experience, an experience that would necessarily be greater than the sum of its parts. Like our previous guest David Staley, he suggests some audacious reforms; but many of these can be begun by professors at every stage of their career. We discuss these, the first steps that even an assistant professor can take towards making things better.

Chris Gallagher is the Vice Chancellor for Global Learning Opportunities and Professor of English at Northeastern University in Boston. He's taught writing at every level of the college curriculum at Northeastern and elsewhere. The focus of our conversation is his most recent book, College Made Whole: Integrative Learning for a Divided World, now available from Johns Hopkins University Press.

On Tuesday, January 30, 1649, Charles I, King of England, was beheaded. Fifty-nine men had signed his death warrant; and when, after a series of extraordinary events Charles II was restored to the throne, he took revenge against his father’s executioners. Some of them, anticipating this, fled from England by as it were the back door as young Charles entered through the front. Many of these fled to the continent. But three of them braved a 3,000 mile sea voyage to take refuge amongst fellow Puritans in New England.

With me to describe the curious tale of the King’s executioners in America, and the equally curious tale of their legacy in British and American history, is Matthew Jenkinson. He is the headmaster of New College School in Oxford, and author most recently of Charles I’s Killers in America: The Lives and Afterlives of Edward Whalley and William Goffe, published by Oxford University Press

This is another of Historically Thinking’s occasional series on higher education, collectively titled “Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed,” and it could hardly be more timely.  There are few things more genuinely perplexing to any outsider, let alone a prospective undergraduate and said undergraduate’s parents, than the college admissions process. If you have any doubts about that, then you don't know what the words "Varsity Blues" signify.

It's not only perplexing, it can feel demeaning. When you're in the admissions process, you begin to feel like poor Oliver Twist, queuing up for a bowl of gruel. Only it's not a bowl of gruel, it feels like your entire future is on the line. And that's just what parents are thinking. The tensions of the modern admissions process can turn nice families into a tribe of malevolent bickering hyenas.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Brennan Barnard and Rick Clark have co-authored The Truth About College Admission: A Family Guide to Getting In and Staying Together. As a professor of mine used to say of someone who had not only read a lot, but thought a lot and one a lot, “They have a right to their opinion.” Brennan Barnard is the director of college counseling at the Derryfield School and US Performance Academy. Rick Clark is the director of undergraduate admission at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

I think this is one of the most important and helpful episodes of "Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed" that we're ever likely to record, and I think you'll agree. Once you've listened to this conversation, you'll want to go back and listen to the all the others from the beginning. Together they are themselves a unique guide to college, and to keeping sane about higher education.

Samuel Johnson once said "Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen. It is assuming a superiority, and it is particularly wrong to question a man concerning himself. There may be parts of his former life which he may not wish to be made known to other persons, or even brought to his own recollection."

Of course Johnson said that to James Boswell, and had Boswell not asked Johnson plenty of questions, Boswell never would have written his Life of Samuel Johnson. And so I would be unable to give you the anecdote.

My guest today is Dean Nelson, who has written for (among other publications) the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and San Diego Magazine. A PhD in Journalism, he directs the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University. He has won several awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for his reporting, and has written or co-written 14 books, and today we’re talking abou this most recent, Talk to Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro.

As Dean says in the conversation, while he had intended this book to be for journalism students, an editor pointed out to him that all of us have to ask people questions. Since good historical thinking always begins with good questions, that's as true for historians and those interested in history as it is for anyone else.