Historically Thinking

Frederic Tudor was the "Ice King" of early nineteenth century America. It was Tudor who realized that ice, harvested from New England ponds and rivers could be shipped to the Caribbean. Shipping was cheap, because ships often went empty to pick up cargo; insulation could be made from sawdust, a waste product of the New England lumber industry. His first shipment was in 1806; after failure and adaptation, he was shipping ice throughout the Caribbean, and using leftover ice to bring back tropical fruit. In 1833, he began to ship ice to India, which would become his most lucrative market.

Tudor's story is just one of those told by Jonathan Rees in his book Before the Refrigerator: How We Used to Get Ice. It's the third book he's written about what Rees calls "the modern cold chain." That might not sound very exciting. But Rees is describing something very interesting indeed: how complex technological systems can develop without any central controlling force. There were no monopolies in refrigeration, no central government agencies. It just...happened. With a lot of work. How it did is the subject of our conversation.

For Further Investigation 

"Why One Refrigeration History Book Was Not Enough", with Jonathan Rees

Refrigeration Nation: A History of Ice, Appliances, and Enterprise in America

Before the Refrigerator: How We Used to Get Ice

Refrigerator

This is is an artist's imagining of what Washington's second inaugural address was like, not of his only visit to the Senate; if GW had a sword with him on that occasion, he might have thought about using it.

This is is an artist’s imagining of what Washington’s second inaugural address was like, not of his only visit to the Senate; if GW had a sword with him on that occasion, he might have thought about using it.

For hundreds of years, people living on the coasts of  the Mediterranean Sea enslaved one another. Moslems from North Africa captured Italians, French, and Spaniards; and North African Moslems were in turn enslaved by those nations. As prisoners, their ransom and redemption became a form of commerce, which in a curious way created communication […]

For hundreds of years, people living on the coasts of  the Mediterranean Sea enslaved one another. Moslems from North Africa captured Italians, French, and Spaniards; and North African Moslems were in turn enslaved by those nations. As prisoners, their ransom and redemption became a form of commerce, which in a curious way created communication networks that brought together these different peoples. Captivity integrated the Mediterranean.

That is in part the argument of today's guest on Historically Thinking, Daniel Hershenzohn, an Assistant Professor in the Literature, Cultures, and Languages Department at the University of Connecticut. His new book is The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean. It's a book that is the best possible kind of historical revisionism, challenging us to revise the way that we think about an "accepted past."

For Further Investigation

The Barbary Wars at the Clements Library–an online exhibition, by the wonderful research library at the University of Michigan. Focused on period long after that discussed in The Captive, Sea, the wars between the new American republic and the North African states engaged in the trade for captives.

Archivo de la Frontera

Robert C. Davis, Christian slaves, Muslim masters : white slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

Molly Greene, “Beyond the Northern Invasion: The Mediterranean in the 17th Century.” Past and Present 174 (2002): 42–71.

———. Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean. (Princeton, 2010).

Wolfgang Kaiser and Guillaume Calafat,  “The Economy of Ransoming in the Early Modern Mediterranean: A Form of Cross-Cultural Trade Between Southern Europe and the Maghreb (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)” in Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000–1900, ed. Francesca Trivellato, Leor Halevi, and Catia Antunes. 108–30 (Oxford, 2014)

Joshua M. White, Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Stanford, 2017).

Conversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it

Today's guest is Jenny L. Presnell, a Librarian of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Miami University of Ohio. She’s the author of The Information-Literate Historian: A Guide to Research for History Students, the third edition of which was published this year. This gives us both an excuse to talk about how wonderful Zotero is, and the joy of ferreting out primary sources. We also talk about why libraries in the future won't look like Duke Humphrey's Library in Oxford, pictured above.

But we actually spend a lot of time talking about how to be an information-literate citizen. We talk about the value of Wikipedia; how to evaluate websites; and how to identify fake news and misinformation. Historical thinking turns out to be a pre-requisite for a citizen in a republic. And we also talk about "snowballing". But no spoiler alerts; you'll have to listen to find out what that is.

For Further Investigation

Information-Literate Historian Author Page

Bodi, Sonia. “Scholarship or Propaganda: How Can Librarians Help Undergraduates Tell the Difference?” Journal of Academic Librarianship, 21(1)(Jan 1995): 21-25.

Wineburg, Sam and Sarah McGrew. "Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information." Stanford History Education Group Working Paper No. 2017-A1. Posted: 9 Oct 2017.

 

 

Today’s guest is Jenny L. Presnell, a Librarian of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Miami University of Ohio. She’s the author of The Information-Literate Historian: A Guide to Research for History Students, the third edition of which was published this year. This gives us both an excuse to talk about how wonderful Zotero […]

Conversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it