Historically Thinking

One of the best known legends of Ancient Rome, perhaps of more importance to subsequent centuries and millennia than even to Rome itself, was the legendary Cincinnatus. An opponent of allowing plebeians to vote in the early republic, he nevertheless returned–twice–to serve as dictator, first when the republic was threatened by a neighboring tribe, and then again to deal with the plot of a Roman. Yet in both cases he held the dictatorship, which made him in effect a king, for not one day longer than required. This selfless service to the republic became especially important in the 18th century, as republics were created and then threatened to potentially become dictatorships.

But was this true? And, if not, why did Romans choose to believe it? Indeed, what does it say about Romans that someone like Cincinnatus, rather than someone like Alexander the Great, became their hero? In part this is a story of the Roman army under the republic. But it's also a story of Roman civic order, or what that order valued. That's the story that Steele Brand tells in Killing for the Republic: Citizen-Soldiers and the Roman Way of War. As you'll hear, Brand believes the lesson of what a citizen-soldier is, and should be, are as applicable to modern republics as they are to ancient one.

Previous conversations about the Roman Republic

Episode 11: Barry Strauss on the Death of Caesar

Episode 63: Julius Caesar, Historian

Episode 93: Mortal Republic–Edward Watts on how the Roman republic fell

The subject for today's "Behind the Book" conversation is flogging. Rather than showing you a depiction of someone having their back flayed with a whip, I instead of chosen to show you the smiling visage of today's guest, Don Hagist. You may thank me.

But, as Don and I discuss, it's awfully hard to find an image of a flogging from the era of the American Revolution, roughly 1770 through 1793. Why might that be? And is flogging what we think it was? Was being sentence to 500 lashes–as Daniel Morgan was in 1755–more or less a death sentence? How often were men flogged? Could they ever be trusted again? And what exactly were they flogged with? And where?

These and numerous other questions are answered by Don, who is I think one of the foremost experts on the life of the British soldier during the American Revolution. Don is an engineering consultant who in his spare time somehow manages to be Managing Editor of the Journal of the American Revolution, and an independent historian. His books include The Revolution's Last Men: the Soldiers Behind the Photographs (Westholme Publishing, 2015), British Soldiers, American War (Westholme Publishing, 2012), and A British Soldier’s Story: Roger Lamb’s Narrative of the American Revolution (Ballindalloch Press, 2004).

Henry Lee III is one of the most interesting personalities of the American Revolution and the early American republic. He was one of the innumerable Lee's of Virginia, sent north for schooling to the College of New Jersey in Princeton, from which he graduated in 1774. The plan seems to have been for Henry–or Harry, as he was generally called–to travel to London to learn law. But the war intervened, and Harry Lee soon discovered that he could be a soldier. Indeed, a very good soldier. By the time he left the war, he was commander of the Second Partisan Corps, a combination of cavalry and infantry.

Peace was not as kind to Harry Lee. True, he excelled politically, serving as Governor of Virginia, and at various times in the House of Representatives. More importantly, he along with James Madison and John Marshall were the chief proponents of the new Constitution at the Virginia Ratification Convention. But Harry was very bad at business of all kinds, including farming and land speculation. To make things worse, he could not resist land speculation. By 1809, he finally was imprisoned for debt. Three years later he was beaten almost to death by a mob in Baltimore. Honor and health ruined, he fled from his ever-growing family to the West Indies, to enjoy both the climate and a refuge from creditors. Eventually knowing that the end was near, he attempted to return to his family in Alexandria. But he died on the coast of Georgia, in the home built by the family of his old commander Nathanael Greene.

It's a sad story, for all sorts of reasons. In a very, very long discussion with Lee's new biographer Ryan Cole, we talk about the strange, stirring, and sad life of Harry Lee. If you thought "founding fathers" were boring men in wigs, you should really get to know Light Horse Harry Lee.

For some reason, South Carolinians love to give their Revolutionary heroes nicknames. Maybe it was Francis Marion who started it, when he was christened the Swamp Fox. But there are others. Thomas Sumter is now known only inside the Palmetto State, but there his nickname of "the Gamecock" now also refers to the teams of the University of South Carolina.

Marion and Pickens fought in the eastern and central parts of South Carolina. The western regions, the far backcountry as it then was, and Upstate as its now known, were home to Andrew Pickens. And his nickname was actually a name the Cherokee gave to him: it is variously spelled Skyagunsta, Skijagusta, and Kittagusa, which seems to have meant "Wizard Owl." Which is an even cooler nickname than Swamp Fox.

Andrew Pickens was a Presbyterian who founded a church wherever he moved. He was a slaveowner who didn't believe slavery was right. He was a man of whom one contemporary said "he would remove words from his mouth and examine them before speaking." The picture of Pickens that accompanies this post is, as his biographer Rod Andrew likes to say, Andrew Pickens at his happiest.

Rod Andrew is a retired Marine who teaches history at Clemson University. His biography of Andrew Pickens is a tremendous book, a model for me when I was writing Daniel Morgan's biography. As it happens, Pickens was perhaps the essential contributor to Morgan's victory at the Battle of Cowpens. So Rod and I have a lot to talk about.

Today's another "Behind the Book" bonus episode, in which I talk with some "subject-matter experts" about a topic related to the life of Daniel Morgan. In this installment (recorded about nine months ago) I talk with the staff of the Clarke County Historical Association, Nathan Stalvey and Mary Morris.

Clarke County wasn't founded until 1836, when it was split out of Frederick County. Most of Daniel Morgan's life was spent in the part of Frederick that became Clarke. He built two houses there, and supervised the building of the mill you see in the watercolor above. Clarke is a lovely place, which I liked long before I knew that Morgan had lived there, or that I would write a biography of him. I'm convinced that to understand Morgan, you have to understand Clarke. You have to know the man's terroir in order to understand the man. So in this episode you'll hear the three of us talking about that terroir, and what it has meant for its residents.

So you can also think of this as one of HT's occasional episodes that investigates concepts of place, like the conversation I had with Thomas Gieryn back in Episode 106 on the importance of place as a way of believing in something. But it's also a return to thinking about the importance of local history with people who actually do local history, and believe in its importance. (For more on local history, see Episode 49, with the great Joe Amato, and Episode 24 with Bob Beatty.)

My guest today is Dr. Marshall Poe. He’s the founder and editor of the New Books Network, a podcast network that each month features at least 125 podcasts on a variety of topics, from genocide studies to folklore to Jewish studies to science, technology, and society...and many, many more topics in which to browse freely. Recently NBN has started to "republish" previous episodes from the Historically Thinking archive on their New Books in History podcast.

But, even if Marshall hadn’t been kind enough to do that, I have long wanted to record a conversation with Marshall for at least three reasons. For one thing, he has one of the most interesting Wikipedia bios of any historian, and that presents a way of talking about history and how someone can fall in love with it; and it says something about higher education, as well. He's also recently published a book called How to Read a History Book, which is something every HT listener is interested in doing, sometimes a lot. So I certainly wanted to talk with Marshall about the book, and what's in it.

But most important of all, he’s just as passionate about communicating to people about history and ideas as I am. This might be a little too much of what some people refer to disparagingly as that type of podcast which is just “dudes chatting.” But what we’re chatting about are some of the foundational ideas behind Historically Thinking, and the New Books Network. So, I think it's important, and I certainly enjoyed it. I hope you do as well.

On a wintry December, a woman clothed in white fled from Oxford Castle. Besieged by her enemies, she took the opportunity of a snowstorm to move undetected through their siege lines, and down the frozen Thames to safety.

This is the most famous incident in the life of Matilda, Empress and Queen of England, featured in countless English stories and legends. But Matilda is much more than that daring escape. She was the daughter of Henry I of England, the granddaughter of William the Conqueror. Betrothed to the Emperor Henry at the age of 8, she had lived in Germany and Italy until the death of her husband, though she retained the title of Empress until her death. Her father made her his heir; and that escape from Oxford Castle was a incident in the war that she waged to maintain her kingdom. She would live to see her son Henry take the throne, and create an kingdom that dominated both the British Isles and France.

With me to discuss one of the most remarkable yet sadly forgotten women of the Middle Ages–or any other age–is Catherine Hanley, author of Matilda: Empress, Queen, and Warrior.

“In 431 BC, the long simmering rivalry between the city-states of Athens and Sparta erupted into open warfare, and for more than a generation the two were locked in a life-and-death struggle. The war embroiled the entire Greek world, provoking years of butchery previously unparalleled in ancient Greece. Whole cities were exterminated, their men killed, their women and children enslaved.” This was the Peloponnesian War, which its historian Thucydides described as “a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it.”

It might seem that a war of approximately 27 years was long enough to be getting on with. But  Jennifer T. Roberts, Professor of Classics and History at the City University of New York has written a history of the Peloponesian War which argues that the war actually went on much longer than that. In her book Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece–issued in paperback this May by Oxford University Press—she traces the war’s titanic influence, not only on the lives of the Greeks, but on the subsquent history of art, architecture, politics, and philosophy—influences that echo down to the present day.

On Saturday, July 18, 1863, the 54thMassachusetts Regiment attacked Fort Wagner, a Confederate fortification defending Charleston Harbor. The assault began at about 7:45 PM. Within two hours, of the 624 men who made the attack, 54 were killed, 149 were wounded, 76 taken prisoner—half the regiment killed, wounded or captured.

But Fort Wagner was not the beginning of the story of the 54thMassachusetts Infantry nor its end. The complete story of both the regiment and the men who formed it is told by Ray Anthony Shepard in his book Now or Never: 54thMassachusetts Infantry’s War to End Slavery, written for middle-readers, but, as one reviewer wrote, “an enlightening read for adults as well.” Ray Shepard has been both a teacher and an editor; this is his first book of creative non-fiction.

In 1573, an alchemist named Anna Zieglerin gave her patron, the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, the recipe for something she called “the lion's blood” which she claimed could “stimulate the growth of plants, create gemstones, transform lead into the coveted philosophers' stone—and would serve a critical role in preparing for the Last Days.” And that was not all that it could do. “Anna proposed that the lion's blood, paired with her own body, could even generate life, repopulating and redeeming the corrupt world in its final moments.”

This is an incredible story about an incredible woman in an incredible time; and I mean incredible almost in the true sense of the word, on the bounds—perhaps beyond the bounds—of the credible. In fact, I haven't even told you the craziest parts in this summary. It is all told by Tara Nummedal in her book Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany, in which she weaves not only biography and history, enabled by meticulous detective work and imagining of what is now nearly unimaginable, but also the histories of gender, early modern science, the Reformation, and European power politics as practiced perhaps in its most vicious form within the principalities of Germany.

Tara Nummedal is Professor of History at Brown University, and is also author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire. She's also recently co-authored with Donna Bilak Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary, an alchemical text with both music and pictures. It's amazing, please do take a look at it: it's even on Instagram.