Historically Thinking

Al Zambone has a cold. It's been going on, it seems, for a year; and the fact that it's really closer to three weeks isn't much consolation. 

This has played merry havoc with the recording schedule of Historically Thinking, because no one wants to listen to sobewome whob talbs lak dis because of a sinus infection. So we're dipping back again into our tiny archive to replay an early interview that didn't get the attention that we think it deserved.

Maybe that's because no one could figure out what fly fishing has to do with history. It doesn't, necessarily. But it does have a lot to do, as you'll find out in this interview, with how humans perceive and love places. "Place" is a special word for us here at Historically Thinking. While some get suspicious when humanists talk about the love of place, and sneer that they're just step away from blood and earth, lebensraum, and the sound of jackboots on the march, we think that people can sincerely and gently love places. We think they call some of these places "home". And if people are what they love, then we'd better figure out what kind of places they love, and why.

Matthew T. Dickerson of Middlebury College and David L. O’Hara of Augustana College (South Dakota) talk with Historically Thinking host Al Zambone about their book, Downstream: Reflections on Brook Trout, Fly Fishing, and the Waters of Applachia. A mix of memoir, narrative, reporting, and meditation, Downstream explores the relationship between humans and the rivers around them. The conversation moves from brook trout and the elemental facts of fly-fishing, to rivers that the authors fish and love. It's also about place. And, if historical thinking is in part the ability "to untangle complex problems that resist easy analysis", then Dickerson and O'Hara are doing some historical thinking. Enjoy it...again. Or for the first time. 

Books, Articles, and Links to Things Mentioned in the Conversation

A River Runs Through It (Book)

A River Runs Through It (Movie)

Wikipedia Bibliography of Fly Fishing

Best Places to Fly Fish (Travel and Leisure website article)

Fly Fishing Reports and Conditions

A Fly Fishing History

The American Museum of Fly Fishing

Take Me Fishing: What is Fly Fishing?

Fly Fishing 101

It’s not often that we’re anywhere near the cutting edge of the news at Historically Thinking (our name kind of indicates that we’re interested in things that have already happened), but every once in a while the blind pig finds a truffle…if that’s the right peasant metaphor. Last month, we scheduled a conversation with Dimitri Nakassis, […]

It's not often that we're anywhere near the cutting edge of the news at Historically Thinking (our name kind of indicates that we're interested in things that have already happened), but every once in a while the blind pig finds a truffle...if that's the right peasant metaphor.

Last month, we scheduled a conversation with Dimitri Nakassis, associate professor of classics at the University of Toronto, who was visiting Augustana College to give our annual American Institute of Archaeology Lecture. Lo and behold! the day  Dimitri arrived in Rock Island, Illinois, the John D. and Catharine T. Macarthur Foundation named him a 2015 Macarthur Fellow.

But even before we learned about this honour, we were very much looking forward to our conversation. He knows a lot of languages, including an uncanny familiarity with Linear B, and he's done a lot of fieldwork in Greece–particularly in the Mycenaean center of Pylos. This work he has combined into a new and controversial theory: that Mycenaean Greece, far from a stratified and centralised oligarchy, was instead a more open and dynamic economic system.

In this conversation, he helps us understand just how far removed and remote the Mycenaean Age is; what separates Mycenaean Greece from Ancient Greece; how Mycenaean Greece was structured; and–perhaps most interesting of all–what evidence we have for these things, where it it is found, and how to interpret it. Enjoy!

For Further Reading

John Chadwick, The Mycenaean World (Cambridge, 1976)

Eric H. Cline, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed  (Princeton, 2015)

Dimitri Nakassis, Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos (Leiden, 2013)

It goes without saying that “culture” is a confusing word, this year or any year. Merriam-Webster offers six definitions for it (including the biological one, as in “bacterial culture”). The problem is that “culture” is more than the sum of its definitions. If anything, its value as a word depends on the tension between them. […]

It goes without saying that “culture” is a confusing word, this year or any year. Merriam-Webster offers six definitions for it (including the biological one, as in “bacterial culture”). The problem is that “culture” is more than the sum of its definitions.

If anything, its value as a word depends on the tension between them. The critic Raymond Williams, in his souped-up dictionary, “Keywords,” writes that “culture” has three divergent meanings: there’s culture as a process of individual enrichment, as when we say that someone is “cultured” (in 1605, Francis Bacon wrote about “the culture and manurance of minds”); culture as a group’s “particular way of life,” as when we talk about French culture, company culture, or multiculturalism; and culture as an activity, pursued by means of the museums, concerts, books, and movies that might be encouraged by a Ministry of Culture (or covered on a blog like this one). These three senses of culture are actually quite different, and, Williams writes, they compete with one another. Each time we use the word “culture,” we incline toward one or another of its aspects: toward the “culture” that’s imbibed through osmosis or the “culture” that’s learned at museums, toward the “culture” that makes you a better a person or the “culture” that just inducts you into a group.

Joshua Rothman, "The Meaning of Culture", The New Yorker (December 26, 2014)

Culture is, as the extended quote above makes clear, is a difficult word to get a hold of–it's like trying to nail jelly to a tree. So imagine how hard it is to define the historical discipline that studies culture.

That's what Marco Cabrera Geserick and Al Zambone try to do this week on Historically Thinking. Not only do they discuss disciplines, but disciplines of sub-disciplines. Wow. And thanks for listening.

For Further Reading

Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York, 1990)

Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (Cambridge, 2004)

Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA, 1983)

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973)

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, 2013)

E. H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, 1969)

Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1997)

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillu: The Promised Land of Error (New York, 2008)

E.P. Thompson, Custom in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1993)

Are games important? They’re certainly profitable and far more pervasive that you might think. Microsoft’s video game Halo, and all its successors, have sold over 60 million copies worldwide, and have grossed $3.4 billion. It’s not outrageous to say that games are just as important and influential–if not more so–than films and television, let alone […]

Are games important? They're certainly profitable and far more pervasive that you might think. Microsoft's video game Halo, and all its successors, have sold over 60 million copies worldwide, and have grossed $3.4 billion. It's not outrageous to say that games are just as important and influential–if not more so–than films and television, let alone books.

But are they useful? Of what practical value could they be for...well, teaching history?

Back from the archives, ready for a new round of listeners, is Mark Carnes, Professor of History at Columbia University, and the creator of a pedagogy known as "Reacting to the Past". He's also the author of Minds on Fire: How Immersive Games Transform College. He and Al Zambone discuss college as professors like to think it is, versus how it really is, and how Carnes sees immersive games as a way of bridging that rather large gap.

For Further Reading:

William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos & Michael S. McPherson, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities

Mark Carnes, Minds on Fire: How Role Immersion Games Transform College

Reacting to the Past–the official mega-site of the Reacting Consortium. Text, videos, and links to games in progress.

The Reacting to the Past Series at W.W. Norton

This week, Al Zambone is deep in the teaching weeds, and we thought we’d bring newer listeners an episode they might have overlooked from our expanding archives. While this is a show called Historically Thinking, it’s put together by people intensely interested (at times self-interestedly so) in the state of higher education. Higher ed is […]

This week, Al Zambone is deep in the teaching weeds, and we thought we'd bring newer listeners an episode they might have overlooked from our expanding archives.

While this is a show called Historically Thinking, it's put together by people intensely interested (at times self-interestedly so) in the state of higher education. Higher ed is often confusing, perplexing, and anxiety-inducing. Often attempts to explain it are well-intentioned but not well-informed; or they're not particularly well intentioned, and play upon fear–the fear of parents that their children might not have a good job in the future, that they will be financially adrift, that there is the right school or the right major that will guarantee future success.

As a way of providing practical wisdom for the perplexed, at Historically Thinking we're recording podcasts that–if they were lined up on a bookshelf like a leather-bound encyclopedia–could be called "Higher Education: A Guide for the Perplexed." We hope they'll be useful for you.

The first of these shows features Dr. Mike Edmondson is the guest on the show. He's the Associate Vice President of Career Development at Augustana College, and the author of Marketing Your Value: Nine Steps to Navigate Your Career. In the course of the interview, Mike and Al Zambone discuss the current and coming job market; explore why someone who has a doctorate in history cares about career services; and talk about why a liberal arts degree can contribute to getting good jobs, and keeping them. Also, the two of them get their Philadelphia on. Stick' em, Bullies.

 For Further Reading

Michael Edmondson, Marketing Your Value: 9 Steps to Navigate Your Career

Scott Jaschik, "The Liberal Arts and Careers"

Katharine S. Brooks, "Close the Gap Between the Liberal Arts and Career Services"

Plato, Charmides

Tyler Cowen, Average is Over

In our continuing tour of the sub disciplines of historical study, today we reach intellectual history–or at least that part of intellectual history that focuses on America. Our guest is Tim Lacy, who among other things is the author of The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer Adler and the Great Books Idea and one […]