Historically Thinking

The Civil War was incredibly destructive–750,000 dead, according to the latest revision of the numbers, meaning that more Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined. But it also resulted in untold numbers of wounded and maimed. Of all the operations performed in the Civil War, 75% or roughly 60,000, […]

The Civil War was incredibly destructive–750,000 dead, according to the latest revision of the numbers, meaning that more Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined. But it also resulted in untold numbers of wounded and maimed. Of all the operations performed in the Civil War, 75% or roughly 60,000, were amputations. 

Also, for the very first time, American cities stood in ruins. Atlanta; Columbia and Charleston in South Carolina; and Petersburg, Fredericksburg, and Richmond in Virginia looked like the standing stones of some long-lost civilization. Americans no longer had to travel to Europe to meditate upon days gone by. Even forests, in some places, were clear cut.

But...not all of those cities were ruined; only a portion of Richmond was destroyed for example, and many colonial-era buildings survive in Fredericksburg. The little town of Gettysburg had the largest battle in North American history swirl around it for three days, and yet it remains largely in one piece, to the delight of 21st century tourists. Some forest were reduced to stumps, but others in the same neighborhood exist to this day.

How to square this circle? How could the Civil War be destructive, and yet often remembered as even more destructive? How, too, did traces of that ruin so quickly disappear? And what were the longest-lasting memorials to that ruin?

Answering these and other questions is the task of Megan Kate Nelson in her fantastic book Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War. Using a variety of sources, she picks apart the different ways ruin was visited by Americans upon each other, their cities, and their landscape: on cities, the environment, and on their bodies. Enjoy the podcast, and buy the book!

For Further Investigation

Megan Kate Nelson, The Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp

David W. Blight, Race and Reunion

Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War

Jack Temple Kirby, Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South

Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans

Harry Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War

After another hiatus (the last one of the summer–promise!) we return to conclude our conversation with Rick Kennedy on Cotton Mather. His father, Increase Mather (yes, that was his first name; no, we didn’t ask why, and if we ever knew, we forgot), died just five years before Cotton did. So for almost his entire […]

After another hiatus (the last one of the summer–promise!) we return to conclude our conversation with Rick Kennedy on Cotton Mather.

His father, Increase Mather (yes, that was his first name; no, we didn't ask why, and if we ever knew, we forgot), died just five years before Cotton did. So for almost his entire life, Cotton was his father's associate pastor. While Increase was writing sermons, and theology, and  butting into politics, and sailing off to London, Cotton was walking around the North End of Boston visiting the sick, the dying, and all the other "pastoral" things that his father didn't do.

So this week we talk about Cotton the Pastor, and Cotton the Bostonian; as well as Cotton the Harvard Man. Enjoy.

Hello! Historically Thinking today returns from a summer break (or, to be precise, Al Zambone does). Recording far from the Augustana College campus and the studio of WAUG, in a pirate-radio bootleg setup of sorts, we bring you a thrill-ride of a summer blockbuster devoted to…a colonial New England theologian you’ve never heard of. Probably […]

Hello! Historically Thinking today returns from a summer break (or, to be precise, Al Zambone does). Recording far from the Augustana College campus and the studio of WAUG, in a pirate-radio bootleg setup of sorts, we bring you a thrill-ride of a summer blockbuster devoted to...a colonial New England theologian you've never heard of. Probably ever. Unless you're weird. Or over-educated.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was a Boston preacher who was the son of a Boston preacher and the grandson of a Boston preacher. He lived all of his life pretty much in Boston's North End. Yet that life was lived amongst momentous cultural, political, and religious transitions, many of which Mather pushed along for all he was worth in innumerable sermons and writings. (Cotton Mather, you see, had very few unwritten thoughts.)

This week we have a conversation with Rick Kennedy, Professor of History at Point Loma Nazarene College, and author of the recently published The First American Evangelical: A Short Life of Cotton Mather.  This conversation is focused on the big events of Mather's life, most of which (like the Halfway Covenant and the Smallpox inoculation controversy) normal haven't heard of, and one of which (the Salem Witch Trials) they certainly have. Next week we'll be talking about the difference between Puritanism and Evangelicalism, and how Cotton Mather was or was not a part of the Enlightenment. See you then!

Today on Historically Thinking, Al Zambone interviews Lorri Glover on her book The Founders as Fathers. It’s a holiday twofer mashup: a sort of July 4th Founding Father theme, wound around a jumble of Father’s Day parental anxieties. In the course of the interview, the two historians mull over a set of related questions. How did a […]

Today on Historically Thinking, Al Zambone interviews Lorri Glover on her book The Founders as Fathers. It's a holiday twofer mashup: a sort of July 4th Founding Father theme, wound around a jumble of Father's Day parental anxieties.

In the course of the interview, the two historians mull over a set of related questions. How did a man who was almost certainly infertile became so quickly identified as his country's Father? Why did every founder–with the exception of Washington himself–go back home as often as they could? Were their families more important to the founders than the new country? Was there a parenting crisis brought about by the American Revolution? And was Jackie Custis the worst stepson in the world, or what?

Enjoy!

For Further Investigation

George Washington– Ferry Farm and Mount Vernon

George Mason's Gunston Hall

Thomas Jefferson–Monticello and Poplar Forest

Patrick Henry–Scotchtown and Red Hill

James Madison–Montpelier

This week we take a break from fun and games to talk about business and consumerism–which, to be sure, is for some people also fun and games.

As Vicki Howard reminds us in her new book, From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store, it used to be that America was filled with department stores. Congenital nostalgics remember places like Wanamaker's in Philadelphia; they even print books about the big-city department stores of Days Gone By. But that ignores the important place that department stores held in small towns all around the country.

Vicki Howard has already written on the history of the wedding industry. Now she and Al Zambone talk about the department store, how they began, what they offered people that hadn't existed before, and how they were undone by the same forces that created them. Zambone gets a little autobiographical, too, but please forgive him. Enjoy.

For Further Reading

Vicki Howard, Brides, Inc.: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition

Michael J. Lisicky, Wanamaker's: Meet Me at the Eagle

For your late-night browsing pleasure: The Department Store Museum

This week we take a break from fun and games to talk about business and consumerism–which, to be sure, is for some people also fun and games. As Vicki Howard reminds us in her new book, From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store, it used to be that […]