Historically Thinking

In the last fifty years in the United States, young adults have undergone a startling transformation. In 1960, 2/3 of all American men and 77% of American women had left home, finished school, married, had a child, and were financially independent. By 2010, these five things were true of only 28% of men, and 39% […]

In the last fifty years in the United States, young adults have undergone a startling transformation. In 1960, 2/3 of all American men and 77% of American women had left home, finished school, married, had a child, and were financially independent. By 2010, these five things were true of only 28% of men, and 39% of women.

These figures are symptomatic of cultural and economic changes around the world—not just in the United States, but in nearly every advanced economy. They are exacerbated by a mysterious lack of purpose, and a widespread anxiety among both young and older adults. How this all came to be is arguable; but the good news is that there is something that colleges and universities can do to correct the situation.

That’s the argument of today's guest, Tim Clydesdale, Professor of Sociology at the College of New Jersey, and author of two important books about American undergraduates. In The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School, Clydesdale developed some unsettling conclusions—at least for parents and professors—about what college students actually learned in their first year of college. Now in his latest book The Purposeful Graduate: Why Colleges Must Talk to Students About Vocation, Clydesdale brings good news: a deliberate attempt to talk about the purpose of human life improves the academic and social life of students while in college, improves the subsequent lives of college students, and also makes colleges more pleasant places to work in for both faculty and staff.

For Further Investigation

The web page of Tim Clydesdale: includes links to reviews and other recorded discussions on Clydesdale's books

Tim Clydesdale, The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School

History is complex, and therefore generalizations are a historian’s inaccurate, crude, and necessary tools. So I’ll make one: The Post-Civil War era of Reconstruction is perhaps the least understood – or, when something is known about it – most misunderstood period in American history.

In addition to knowing little more about Reconstruction than the bare facts presented as a footnote in history surveys, many of us have engravings about it. (Lendol Calder and I explore this in an earlier conversation.) To paraphrase Mark Twain on engravings: It's not the lack of knowledge about history that's the problem; it's what we know about it that "just ain't so." Reconstruction seems to have more engravings per square foot on the American mind that just about any other era.

Our expert witness on Reconstruction is Dr. Douglas Egerton. A professor of American history at Lemoyne College in Syracuse, NY, he has since 1989 produced a literal bookshelf of works on enslavement and liberty. Along with his 2010 Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War and 2009 Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America, his 2014 book The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America's Most Progressive Era forms, to my mind, a trilogy on the African-American struggle for liberty.

This conversation came about as a result of a listener request from Dr. Jerry Herbert. If you would like to hear a conversation about a particular historical event, a historian, a book, a place--or anything else we talk about on this program, I’d welcome your suggestion; please join our Facebook group and post a request. Thanks for listening!

For Further Investigation

• There's no need to provide a long Reconstruction reading list here, since Civil War Memory's Kevin Levin provides such a great one.

• Douglas Egerton's web page at LeMoyne College links to his many books

• HarpWeek is an educational site using the archives of Harper's Weekly, an illustrated news magazine in publication from 1857-1916. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, it featured the art of such giants as Thomas Nast and Winslow Homer, as well as writing dedicated to the Republican and Union cause. The "sub sites" on the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are really features on Reconstruction. (Alfred Waud's illustration "The First Vote"  provides us with the iconic image I include above.)

• More Than Anything Else, by Maria Bradby. Children's literature is often a powerful tool for teaching history. Perhaps with more immediacy than any monograph ever could have, Bradby recounts the experience of a formerly enslaved child (in this case future teacher and college-builder Booker T. Washington), hitherto prevented from reading and learning, as he harnesses the power of words. A brilliant child's-eye view of the power of the Reconstruction era.

History is complex, and therefore generalizations are a historian’s inaccurate, crude, and necessary tools. So I’ll make one: The Post-Civil War era of Reconstruction is perhaps the least understood – or, when something is known about it – most misunderstood period in American history. In addition to knowing little more about Reconstruction than the bare facts […]

We are on another episode of summer vacation, so we’re replaying an episode from the Archives that’s just the thing for parents who are about to send their kids off to college.  It’s another conversation that fits into our recurring series titled “A User’s Guide to Higher Education.”  We’re joined by our friend and Augustana colleague […]

We are on another episode of summer vacation, so we're replaying an episode from the Archives that's just the thing for parents who are about to send their kids off to college.  It's another conversation that fits into our recurring series titled "A User's Guide to Higher Education."

We're joined by our friend and Augustana colleague Mike Edmondson. Mike has a PhD in History (so, obviously, he's a classy guy) from Temple University. He's been on Historically Thinking before, in Episode 8 talking about his book Marketing Your Value: 9 Steps to Navigate Your Career. Now he returns to discuss a new and related title that's just been published, Major in Happiness: Debunking the College Major Fallacies. There are a lot of those fallacies, but we don't talk about many of them. Instead, we discuss the expectations of parents, and, quite frankly, take them to the woodshed. In a gentle, helpful, yet challenging way. We hope.

Thanks for listening!

The year 1453 marked the end of an intermittent yet seemingly endless series of wars between the Kingdom of France and the Kingdom of England that, some four hundred years later, was dubbed the Hundred Years War. Depending on how you count even the most conservative estimate of its beginnings would make it longer […]

The year 1453 marked the end of an intermittent yet seemingly endless series of wars between the Kingdom of France and the Kingdom of England that, some four hundred years later, was dubbed the Hundred Years War. Depending on how you count even the most conservative estimate of its beginnings would make it longer than that. This conflict led to numerous changes in the life of not only Kings, but in those of men and women; of warriors, priests and peasants; landowners, great and small; ladies, nuns, and housewives; and prisoners of war, and the poor in their infinite variety.

Writing in the midst of this turmoil, after the defeat and capture of the King Jean II of France at the Battle of Poitier, a chronicler wrote:

...From that time on all went wrong with the Kingdom and the state was undone. Thieves and robbers rose up everywhere in the land. The nobles despised and hated all others and took no thought for the mutual usefulness and profit of lord and men. They subjected and despoiled the peasants and the men of the villages. In no wise did they defend their country from enemies. Rather did they trample it underfoot, robbing and pillaging the peasants' goods...

With me to explain this dreadful period, and its many consequences  is David Green, author of The Hundred Years War: A People’s History, published by Yale University Press. A Senior Lecturer in British Studies and History at Harlaxton College, he has published several earlier studies on other aspects of the Hundred Years War.

On February 23, 1917, female textile-workers and housewives protested a bread shortage in Petrograd, the imperial capital of the Russian Empire. It was the beginning of twelve days of protests, riots, and political dealing that concluded with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. This was the February Revolution. It was the beginning of the Russian […]

On February 23, 1917, female textile-workers and housewives protested a bread shortage in Petrograd, the imperial capital of the Russian Empire. It was the beginning of twelve days of protests, riots, and political dealing that concluded with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II.

This was the February Revolution. It was the beginning of the Russian Revolution, one of the most important historical events of the twentieth century, second only in consequence to the World War that midwifed its birth. Further along a lengthy chain of cause and effect from that bread protest in Petrograd, by the end of the year a Communist state had been established atop a 1/6th of the world’s territory; revolution after revolution, most momentously the Chinese Revolution, would follow the example of 1917; Fascism would in part arise as a reaction to it; and following 1945 it would for almost fifty years shape international politics.

My guest today to explain the complex events of the first year of the revolution to us is Professor Richard L. Hernandez of the Department of History at East Carolina University. He is particularly interested in the social, cultural, and religious aspects of the Russian Revolution, particularly in rural areas. Currently he is completing a book tentatively entitled Political Religion and Religious Politics: Radical Modernity, Traditional Culture, and the Building of Socialism in Rural Russia.