Introduction

In the 1930s, five young men at Cambridge University became members of the Communist Party. This is not too surprising, in retrospect; many others were doing so as well. But these five men were recruited by the intelligence services of the Soviet Union, and for seventeen years they betrayed the secrets of Britain and the United States.

They are now often referred to as the Cambridge Five. They were Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. While their story has been told and retold and retold in Britain, always as a parable of class and the establishment, my guest Antonia Senior observes that very few have looked at the story of the Cambridge Five from the other side of the relationship. “What did Stalin want from them?,” she asks. “How did they fit into Stalin’s vision, and how did they further his cause?”

About the Guest

Antonia Senior is a novelist, reviewer for The Times, and co-host of the podcast History Book Buffs alongside friend of this podcast Roger Moorhouse. Her latest book, Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire, was recently named a finalist for the 2026 Orwell Prize. In this conversation we discuss Cambridge in the 1930s, revolutionary violence, Soviet intelligence recruitment, Stalin’s imperial ambitions, Poland, espionage, ideology, and the enduring temptation to excuse tyranny in the name of an ever-distant utopia.

For Further Investigation

• Antonia Senior, Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire (Basic Books, 2026)

• George Orwell, Animal Farm (Plume, 2003)

• Roger Moorhouse, The Devil’s Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941 (Basic Books, 2015)

• Operation Unthinkable: Documents from The National Archives, London

• Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds., Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939–1957—Selected Documents and Messages (Joint NSA–CIA publication, August 1996), foreword by William P. Crowell.

• Alexander Orlov, “The Theory and Practice of Soviet Intelligence”—Approved for Release, CIA Historical Review Program, Sept 22, 1993

Related Episodes

• Red Hotel: Alan Philps on journalists, propaganda, and survival in Stalin’s Moscow

• How to Win a Power Struggle: Joseph Torigian on elite conflict in the Soviet Union and China

• Agent Zo: Clare Mulley on Elżbieta Zawacka, a Heroine of Poland’s Resistance against Nazis and Soviets

• The Plot to Stop the Russian Revolution: Jonathan Schneer on the attempt to kill Lenin and Trotsky, and stop the Russian Revolution

Tags

Cold War; Soviet Union; Cambridge Five; Espionage; Stalinism; Intelligence History; World War II; Antonia Senior; Historical Thinking; Political Ideology

Introduction

“It was a cold January afternoon when I first came to the ghetto. I got there much later than I’d hoped. I’d spent much of the day elsewhere and had just lost track of time. It was already beginning to get dark. The campo seemed deserted. Shutters were closed, and apart from the tinkling of water in the wells, there was hardly a sound. There were no streetlights, barely even the glimmer of a lamp. But in the branches of the trees, thousands of tiny lights were shining.”

That is the opening paragraph of my guest Alexander Lee’s new book, The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism, in which he traces both the history of the Venetian ghetto and, through it, the history of modern antisemitism. In our conversation we discuss the origins of the word “ghetto,” the peculiar politics of the Venetian Republic, Jewish moneylending and commerce, the arrival of Iberian Jews fleeing persecution, the vibrancy of ghetto culture during its “golden age,” and how following the collapse of the Republic how segregation and antisemitism mutated into the twentieth century.

About the Guest

Alexander Lee is a historian of Renaissance Italy and the author of numerous books, including Machiavelli: His Life and Times. He is also a columnist for History Today.

For Further Investigation

• Alexander Lee, The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (Basic Books, 2026)

• —Machiavelli: His Life and Times

• From Medieval Sourcebook: Lateran IV (1215)—Select Canons

• Franco Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (University of Chicago Press, 1999)

• Thomas F. Madden, Venice: A New History (Viking, 2012)

• Meredith F. Small, Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization (Pegasus Books, 2020)

Related Episodes

• Brother Mauro’s Map: Meredith Small on Venice, medieval cartography, and the birth of modern mapmaking

• Cloak and Dagger and Gondola: Ioanna Iordanou on the Secret Service of the Republic of Venice, and organizing intelligence in the Renaissance

• Medieval Mediterranean Slavery: Hannah Barker on the Black Sea slave trade and the networks that bound the medieval Mediterranean

• Mass Expulsion: Rowan Dorin on how medieval kingdoms came to expel Jews and others they saw as undesirable

• Brilliant Commodity: Saskia Cohen on Jewish involvement in the international gem trade

Tags

Venice; Jewish History; Antisemitism; Renaissance Italy; Early Modern Europe; Venetian Republic; Ghettos; Religious History; Alexander Lee; Historical Thinking

Why This Conversation Matters

The story of classical Greece is often reduced to fragments: Spartan warriors, Athenian democracy, Socrates asking questions, Thermopylae, the Parthenon. Adrian Goldsworthy argues that these fragments only make sense when placed back into the wider rivalry between Athens and Sparta—a rivalry that shaped not just warfare and diplomacy, but the entire Greek understanding of politics, citizenship, and excellence.

One of the most striking themes of the conversation is that neither Athens nor Sparta was inevitable. Both were products of highly specific historical developments, myths, fears, institutions, and pressures. And both cities defined themselves partly by comparison with the other.

As you reflect on the conversation, consider:

• Why did the Greeks remain fiercely attached to their individual cities rather than creating a larger political unity?

• Did rivalry strengthen Greek civilization—or ultimately destroy it?

• And what does Athens suggest about the relationship between military service and democratic participation?

Throughlines

The conversation begins with Goldsworthy explaining why he he thought a new overview of classical Greece was necessary. The problem, he argues, is not lack of interest—though people are more interested in Rome—but fragmentation. Readers can find books on Spartan society, Athenian democracy, philosophy, drama, or art, but often lose sight of the broader historical world that produced these things. Greeks are too often imagined as detached intellectuals rather than farmers, soldiers, traders, and political actors living amid continual conflict.

From there, the discussion turns to origins. Spartan identity, Goldsworthy explains, rests on conquest: the Spartans present themselves as Dorian invaders who subdued the existing population and therefore deserved mastery over the helots. This creates a society intensely focused on cohesion and military solidarity, because the Spartans are always conscious that they are a ruling minority surrounded by people who hate them. Tyrtaeus’s poetry captures this mentality perfectly—not glamorous heroism, but the grim necessity of fighting well because defeat means enslavement and ruin.

Athens presents almost the opposite picture. Athenians claim to have sprung from the soil of Attica itself, cultivating an image of rootedness and antiquity. Yet Goldsworthy notes that Athens also suffered from a kind of insecurity: unlike Sparta or Corinth, it lacked a prominent place in Homeric legend. The Athenians therefore became deeply invested in constructing and elaborating multiple origin stories around figures like Theseus and Solon.

The conversation then shifts into the emergence of Athenian democracy. Solon attempts to reduce aristocratic conflict through reforms tied to property and political participation, but instability continues until the tyranny of Pisistratus and the later reforms of Cleisthenes. What emerges is a remarkably direct political system: every male citizen can vote in the assembly, speak publicly, serve on juries, or potentially hold office. Goldsworthy emphasizes how improvisational and immediate this democracy could be. Decisions become law instantly; assemblies can reverse themselves from one day to the next; enormous juries judge cases collectively rather than through professional judges.

One of the most revealing parts of the discussion concerns ostracism. Rather than treating it merely as irrational ingratitude, Goldsworthy presents it as a safety valve designed to prevent aristocratic rivalries from turning violent. Even figures like Aristides or Themistocles could be exiled temporarily if the political temperature became too dangerous.

The Persian Wars occupy the center of the conversation. Goldsworthy stresses that Persia was not uniquely obsessed with Greece; it was simply an expanding empire dealing with troublesome frontier communities. Marathon therefore appears not as a civilizational showdown foreordained by history, but as a punitive expedition that unexpectedly ran into determined resistance. The Athenians, aided only by tiny Plataea, manage to defeat the Persians through experience, discipline, and tactical flexibility rather than because hoplite warfare automatically guaranteed victory.

At Salamis, Athens becomes something new: a naval democracy. Themistocles persuades the Athenians that their “wooden walls” are their ships, and the entire citizen body becomes implicated in naval warfare. Goldsworthy repeatedly returns to the extraordinary coordination required by trireme warfare and how deeply democratic participation became tied to the fleet.

The conversation culminates with the Battle of Plataea, where the Greeks finally defeat the Persian invasion decisively. Yet even here, Goldsworthy emphasizes confusion, disagreement, and improvisation rather than perfect unity. The Greeks argue constantly; movements become disordered; battles emerge partially by accident. Nevertheless, enough cohesion exists to defeat the Persians.

The final section turns toward the deeper problem of Greek civilization itself: competition. The Greeks excelled at creating fiercely loyal city-states, but they never developed the Roman ability to absorb rivals into a larger political order. Athens and Sparta needed one another as rivals even while fearing one another’s power. And because Greek identity remained tied so intensely to the polis, rivalry remained endemic.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Why does Goldsworthy think classical Greece is often misunderstood or fragmented in popular history?

2. How did Spartan conquest and dependence on helot labor shape Spartan society and values?

3. What anxieties or ambitions are reflected in Athenian origin stories?

4. Why did Athens develop such an unusually direct form of democracy?

5. How did ostracism function as a political “safety valve” within Athenian society?

6. Why does Goldsworthy resist portraying Marathon as an inevitable triumph of “Western civilization”?

7. How did naval warfare transform Athens politically and socially?

8. What does the Battle of Plataea reveal about both the strengths and weaknesses of Greek coalition warfare?

9. Why were the Greeks unable—or unwilling—to create a unified political order comparable to Rome?

10. After hearing this conversation, do you think rivalry ultimately strengthened Greek civilization or fatally weakened it?

For Further Investigation

• Adrian Goldsworthy, Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece (Basic Books, 2026)

• Barry Strauss, The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece— and Western Civilization (Simon and Schuster, 2005)

• Jennifer T. Roberts, The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2017)

• —, Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture (Princeton University Press, 2024)

• Paul Cartledge, The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece (Abrams, 2003)

• Brook Manville, The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (Princeton, 2014)

• Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (University of California Press, 2009)

Primary Sources

• The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (Free Press, 1998)

• Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Robin Waterfield (Basic Books, 2025)

• The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories (Anchor Books, 2009)

• Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Tom Holland (Penguin, 2015)

• Plutarch, Greek Lives, translated by Robin Waterfield (Oxford World’s Classics, 2009)

• Elegiac Poems of Tyrtaeus

• Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution

Related Episodes

• The Forever War—Jennifer Roberts on the Peloponnesian War

• This is Sparta—Andrew Bayliss on whether Sparta was what we think it was

• The Forgotten City—Paul Cartledge on Thebes

• Out of One, Many—Jennifer Roberts on what made the Greeks…Greek

• Athens—Bruce Clark on the long history of the city of Athens

Introduction

The story of classical Greece is often told, rightly or wrongly, as the story of the alliance, competition, and eventual war between Athens and Sparta. Even in antiquity, each city fascinated the other. Athenians imagined Spartans as disciplined, laconic conquerors; Spartans regarded Athens with a mixture of admiration, suspicion, and alarm. Yet despite their differences, both cities shared fundamental Greek assumptions about honor, competition, citizenship, and excellence.

In his new book Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece , my guest Adrian Goldsworthy tells the story of classical Greece through the relationship between these two cities: from their legendary origins, through the Persian Wars, and into the tensions that would ultimately lead to the catastrophe of the Peloponnesian War. Along the way we discuss democracy, slavery, naval warfare, the strange logic of Greek politics, and why the Greeks never succeeded in becoming “Greece.”

About the Guest

Adrian Goldsworthy is a historian of the classical world and the author of numerous books on Greece and Rome, including biographies of Julius Caesar, Augustus, and Philip and Alexander. He was last on Historically Thinking to discuss Augustus. This is his sixth appearance on the podcast.

For Further Investigation

• Adrian Goldsworthy, Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece (Basic Books, 2026)

• The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (Free Press, 1998)

• Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Robin Waterfield (Basic Books, 2025)

• The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories (Anchor Books, 2009)

• Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Tom Holland (Penguin, 2015)

• Barry Strauss, The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece— and Western Civilization (Simon and Schuster, 2005)

• Battle of Salamis

• Jennifer T. Roberts, The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2017)

• —, Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Related Episodes

• The Forever War—Jennifer Roberts on the Peloponnesian War

• This is Sparta—Andrew Bayliss on whether Sparta was what we think it was

• The Forgotten City—Paul Cartledge on Thebes

• Out of One, Many—Jennifer Roberts on what made the Greeks…Greek

• Athens—Bruce Clark on the long history of the city of Athens

Tags

Ancient Greece; Athens; Sparta; Peloponnesian War; Persian Wars; Classical History; Greek Democracy; Military History; Adrian Goldsworthy; Historical Thinking

Why This Conversation Matters

The fall of Constantinople is one of those events that might feel overfamiliar. We think we know it: a tired, decaying remnant of Rome finally collapsing under the pressure of a rising Ottoman power. A tragic inevitability, though long delayed.

Anthony Kaldellis asks us to reconsider that story. What if the fall of Constantinople was not inevitable at all? What if the defenders believed, with good reason, that they might survive? What if the story we tell has been shaped less by what happened than by how survivors later made sense of defeat?

This matters because it raises a deeper historical question: do we too easily confuse outcome with inevitability?

Consider:

• How often do historians—and readers—mistake what happened for what had to happen?

• What evidence would persuade us that a lost cause was not actually lost until the very end?

• And what does it mean for a society to refuse, even in defeat, to consent to its own obsolescence?

Throughlines

The conversation begins by confronting what Zambone typically calls the “standard received view”: Constantinople as a fossilized remnant, a city living on borrowed time, destined to fall. Kaldellis pushes back sharply at this. Such language—“decadent,” “obsolete,” “exhausted”—is rhetorical, he argues, not analytical. It tells a story, but it obscures reality.

In fact, Constantinople in the decades before 1453 was still a functioning, even vital place. It was a hub of trade, especially for Venetian and Genoese merchants; a center of classical learning, drawing Italians eager to study Greek; and a focal point of Orthodox Christianity. It was diminished in population and marked by ruins, but it remained central within its own world.

This reframing sets up one of the conversation’s key moves: the fall becomes something to be explained, not assumed. Kaldellis notes that the city’s survival had already been extended by contingency—by the Ottoman defeat at the hands of Timur decades earlier. It might have fallen long before. It might, under different circumstances, have survived longer. The story is not one of steady decline but of precarious endurance.

The discussion then turns to the siege itself, and here Kaldellis’s reinterpretation is most striking. By reconstructing events day by day from multiple sources, he argues that the defenders were not collapsing into despair. On the contrary, they were holding. The famous walls, combined with naval advantages and careful concentration of forces, allowed a relatively small defending force to resist a much larger Ottoman army.

This produces a surprising picture: not a doomed last stand, but a stalemate. Mehmed II throws everything at the city—artillery, mining operations, naval maneuvers, diversionary attacks—and yet fails to achieve a decisive breakthrough. Over time, the strain may have weighed as heavily on the besiegers as on the defenders. The outcome, in this telling, is contingent, even fragile.

The turning point, as Kaldellis presents it, is not grand strategy but collapse under pressure. The wounding of Giovanni Giustiniani—the Genoese commander holding together the most critical sector of the defense—triggers a chain reaction. His withdrawal is interpreted as retreat; panic spreads; Ottoman forces exploit the breach. A system already stretched thin, with few reserves and no redundancy, suddenly gives way.

Here the earlier theme of contingency returns with force. Had there been more defenders, more ships, more time—or fewer distractions imposed by Mehmed’s diversions—the outcome might have been different. The fall was not foreordained. It was, Zambone quoting the Duke of Wellington, “a damn close-run thing.”

The conversation also pauses on cultural “fluidity”—the overlapping worlds of Greeks, Italians, and Turks—but only to qualify it. Yes, there was exchange, shared practices, even mutual influence. But when the moment of decision arrived, those fluidities hardened into lines. In the end power clarified identity.

And then comes the end—not as abstraction, but as experience. The city falls; the population is rapidly enslaved and dispersed; the urban world is effectively erased in a single day. What follows is not immediate continuity but rupture: an emptied city, later repopulated, reshaped, and repurposed.

Kaldellis’s closing words return us to the ground level. For those who lived through it, the siege was not a symbol. It was stone, iron, bodies, smoke, and noise—a desperate struggle by a few thousand men fighting on ancient walls. Not inevitability, but effort. Not theory, but survival.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. What are the key elements of the “standard received view” of Constantinople’s fall, and why does Kaldellis reject them?

2. How does the evidence of Constantinople’s continued vitality complicate the idea that it was an “obsolete” city?

3. What role does contingency—chance events and unexpected developments—play in Kaldellis’s account of the city’s survival and fall?

4. How does reconstructing the siege day by day change our understanding of the defenders’ prospects?

5. Why does Kaldellis argue that the siege was effectively a stalemate for much of its duration?

6. How did Mehmed II attempt to overcome the defenders’ advantages, and why were these efforts only partially successful?

7. What does the wounding of Giustiniani reveal about the weaknesses of the defense?

8. How persuasive is Kaldellis’s argument that the fall hinged on a failure of redundancy rather than upon the Ottoman’s overwhelming force?

9. In what ways does the idea of cultural “fluidity” help explain the world of 1453—and where does it fall short?

10. After hearing this conversation, how would you now describe the fall of Constantinople: inevitable collapse, contingent defeat, or something else?

For Further Investigation

Primary Sources

• Barbaro, Nicolò, Diary of the Siege of Constantinople, ed. E. Cornet, Giornale dell’assedio di Costantinopoli 1453 (Vienna 1856); English trans. J. R. Jones, Nicòlo Barbaro: Diary of the Siege of Constantinople 1453 (New York 1969)

• Benvenuto of Ancona, Report on the Siege of Constantinople, ed. Pertusi, Testi inediti, 4–5; English trans., M. Philippides, Byzantium, Europe, and the Early Ottoman Sultans, 1373–1513: An Anonymous Greek Chronicle of the Seventeenth Century (Codex Barberinus 111) (New Rochelle 1990)

• Doukas, History, ed. S. Kotzabassi, Ducae Historia (Berlin and New York 2024); English tr. H. Magoulias, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks, by Doukas (Detroit 1975)

• Kananos, Ioannes, The Siege of Constantinople, ed. and English tr. A. M. Cuomo, Ioannis Canani de Constantinopolitana obsidione relatio (Boston and Berlin 2016)

• Nestor-Iskander, The Tale of Constantinople (Of Its Origin and Capture by the Turks in the Year 1453), ed. and English tr. W. K. Hanak and M. Philippides (New Rochelle, NY 1998)

• Tetaldi, Giacomo, Treatise on the Fall of Constantinople, ed. and English tr. M. Philippides, Mehmed II the Conqueror and the Fall of the Franco-Byzantine Levant to the Ottoman Turks: Some Western Views and Testimonies (Tempe, AZ 2007)

Secondary Sources

• Anthony Kaldellis, 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople

• —, A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History’s Most Orthodox Empire

• —, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium

• —, Phantom Byzantium: Europe, Empire, and Identity from Late Antiquity to World War II

• Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (Penguin, 2010)

Related Episodes

• Roads to Rome

• Beauty and Terror: The Italian Renaissance Re-envisioned

• The Gunpowder Revolution

Introduction

On May 29, 1453, the city of Constantine—Constantinople—ceased to exist. For over a millennium it had stood as a center of Roman political power, Greek learning, and the Christian faith. Now its walls were breached, its emperor lay dead among the defenders, and its inhabitants were carried off into slavery.

Yet, as my guest Anthony Kaldellis argues, the city’s final resistance tells a different story from the one we often inherit. Its defenders did not regard their fate as inevitable. “Its fierce resistance at the end,” he writes, “stands as a final protest against narratives that would render it irrelevant… The Romans asserted a right to survive, and, by not surrendering, they refused to consent to their obsolescence.”

In this conversation, we examine the fall of Constantinople not as a foregone conclusion, but as a close-run struggle shaped by contingency, miscalculation, and missed opportunities.

About the Guest

Anthony Kaldellis is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics and the College at the University of Chicago. A leading scholar of the later Roman Empire, his work focuses on Byzantine political culture, identity, and historiography. His most recent book, 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople, offers a new account of the city’s final siege grounded in a close reading of contemporary sources.

For Further Investigation

• Anthony Kaldellis, 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople

• —, A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History’s Most Orthodox Empire

• —, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium

• —, Phantom Byzantium: Europe, Empire, and Identity from Late Antiquity to World War II

• Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (Penguin, 2010)

Reflection Questions

• What changes when we treat the fall of Constantinople as contingent rather than inevitable?

• How does narrative shape our understanding of historical “decline”?

• What does it mean for a society to resist—even when it ultimately fails?

Tags

Byzantine History; Ottoman Empire; Medieval History; Constantinople; Anthony Kaldellis

Why This Conversation Matters

For a brief period—from July 1945 to August 1949—it seemed as if nuclear weapons belonged to one nation alone. But as David Holloway insists, that appearance is misleading. From the beginning, nuclear weapons were embedded in an international world: of shared scientific knowledge, espionage, rivalry, imitation, and fear.

This matters because nuclear weapons are not just weapons. They are systems of relationship. They force states to think about one another in new ways—about deterrence, survival, escalation, and restraint. And they force historians to think differently too. If we treat nuclear weapons as a national story, we misunderstand them. If we treat them as an international one, we begin to see how deeply they have shaped global order.

As you reflect on the conversation, consider:

• Can any technology born in international science ever remain national?

• Does the effort to control nuclear weapons represent cooperation—or managed distrust?

• And is the “nuclear order” a moral achievement, or simply a fragile arrangement among powerful states?

Throughlines

The conversation opens with Holloway’s central framing: nuclear weapons must be understood through international history. That means not just multiple countries possessing them, but a web of relationships—scientific, political, and strategic—from the very beginning. Physics itself was an international enterprise, and when the possibility of a chain reaction emerged, so too did multiple national efforts to harness it.

This leads directly to the early wartime and postwar period, where collaboration and mistrust coexist uneasily. Britain’s role is especially revealing. Initially a partner in atomic development, it finds itself increasingly sidelined by the United States, even as knowledge continues to circulate in less official ways. The figure of Klaus Fuchs embodies this tension: a conduit through which information flows not only to the Soviet Union but, indirectly, to Britain as well. Technology, in this world, does not respect political boundaries.

From there, the conversation moves to what might be called the thermonuclear turning point. The development of hydrogen weapons forces a conceptual shift. By the mid-1950s, leaders such as Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and Eden begin to grasp that nuclear war, at this scale, is not simply another form of conflict. It is catastrophe—so destructive that it undermines its own utility as an instrument of policy. And yet, as you press Holloway, this realization coexists with something else: the continued use of nuclear threats in diplomacy. Eisenhower, even while recognizing the horror of nuclear war, still gestures toward its use in Korea or as a way of reducing conventional military spending. The tension is not resolved; it is managed.

That tension deepens as the conversation turns to nonproliferation. Programs like “Atoms for Peace” appear, at first glance, to spread nuclear knowledge. But they also create frameworks for control—institutions, inspections, and norms that begin to define who may and may not possess nuclear weapons. Kennedy’s fears of widespread proliferation underscore how precarious this effort seemed.

The discussion of Sweden provides a revealing counterpoint. Here is a technologically capable state that seriously considers nuclear weapons and then renounces them. That decision, Holloway suggests, tells us something important: that the nuclear order is not inevitable. It is contingent, shaped by political choices as much as by technical capacity.

The conversation then shifts beyond the Cold War superpowers to South Asia, where India and Pakistan develop nuclear weapons in a very different context. Here, the “nuclear order” looks less stable, more layered. Conflict operates on multiple levels—local, regional, and global—and outside powers play a persistent role. The episode of the “blind eye” reinforces Holloway’s larger point: nuclear arrangements never transcend international politics. They are expressions of it.

The conversation closes by returning to the idea of “international society.” The nuclear order, Holloway argues, reflects an effort by powerful states to manage an existential danger. It is not necessarily just, nor necessarily stable. But it represents a set of shared understandings—fragile, contested, but real.

And your final observation lingers: what once seemed remote now feels immediate again.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. What does it mean to describe nuclear weapons as having an “international history” rather than a national one?

2. How did the international nature of physics shape the development of nuclear weapons programs?

3. What does the story of Britain and Klaus Fuchs reveal about the limits of controlling technological knowledge?

4. Why did the development of thermonuclear weapons force a rethinking of nuclear war among world leaders?

5. How can we explain the coexistence of nuclear restraint and nuclear threat in leaders like Eisenhower?

6. Did programs like “Atoms for Peace” increase the risk of proliferation, or help create the conditions for control?

7. What does Sweden’s decision not to pursue nuclear weapons suggest about the role of political choice in the nuclear age?

8. How does the nuclear dynamic between India and Pakistan differ from that of the Cold War superpowers?

9. What does Holloway mean by saying that the nuclear order does not transcend international politics?

10. Is the nuclear order best understood as a success, a failure, or an ongoing experiment?

For Further Investigation

Primary Sources & Archives

• U.S. National Security Archive Virtual Reading Room (George Washington University)

• Foreign Relations of the United States Series (FRUS)

• International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Archives

• Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet State Microfilm Collection (Hoover Institution)

Secondary Sources

• David Holloway, Nuclear Weapons: An International History (Yale University Press, 2026)

• Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon and Schuster, 2012)

• John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (Penguin, 2006)

• Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton University Press, 1991)

Related Episodes

• Ecology of Nations

• Cold War Analogies

• War and Power

• The Devils Will Get No Rest

• Rivals

• Free Creations

Introduction

For four years—from July 16, 1945, the date of the first atomic test, to August 29, 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device—the history of nuclear weapons might appear to be an exclusively American story. But that is misleading.

From the earliest theorization of the chain reaction, nuclear development was international: a web of scientific collaboration, technological transfer, espionage, and strategic imitation. As my guest David Holloway argues, nuclear weapons have always had an international history—one that can only be understood by examining not just individual states, but their relationships, perceptions, and interactions.

To approach nuclear weapons in this way, he suggests, “requires an effort to understand the different parties involved, their strategies, their policies, their behavior, and, above all, their relationships and interactions.” In this conversation, we explore that history—from Los Alamos to Moscow, from Atoms for Peace to nuclear brinkmanship, and from non-proliferation to whether or not the nuclear question ever transcended international politics.

About the Guest

David Holloway is Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, Professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (Emeritus) at Stanford University. His work focuses on the international history of nuclear weapons, Soviet science and technology, and the relationship between international history and international relations theory. His latest book, Nuclear Weapons: An International History, represents a culmination of decades of scholarship.

Past Episodes

• Ecology of Nations

• Cold War Analogies

• War and Power

• The Devils Will Get No Rest

• Rivals

• Free Creations

For Further Investigation

• David Holloway, Nuclear Weapons: An International History (Yale University Press, 2026)

• Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon and Schuster, 2012)

• John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (Penguin, 2006)

• Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton University Press, 1991)

Reflection Questions

• What changes when we study nuclear weapons as an international system rather than a national project?

• Did efforts at nuclear nonproliferation fail, or succeed more than anyone might have imagined in 1970?

• Does the “nuclear order” constrain politics, or does politics ultimately reshape it?

Tags

Cold War; Nuclear Weapons; International History; David Holloway

Why This Conversation Matters

Roderick Beaton begins with a question that sounds ordinary and turns out not to be ordinary at all: why do we need a new history of Europe? His answer is not publishing boilerplate. We need one, he says, because events have changed the pattern. The present has shifted, and when the present shifts, the past arranges itself differently in our sight. That is not a gimmick. It is one of the things history is for.

This matters because “Europe” is not merely a place on a map. It is an argument about a place, a long-running act of self-definition, and a civilization that has repeatedly imagined itself in different ways while insisting, somehow, that it is still itself. Beaton’s conversation is valuable precisely because it does not let the word “Europe” remain lazy or self-evident.

As you read or think back through the episode, consider these questions:
What if Europe is less a continent than a historical choice?
What if the openness of Europe—its permeability, its inability to seal itself off—has been one of its defining strengths?
And what happens to “Europe” when pressure from east and west forces Europeans to decide again who they are?

Throughlines

The conversation opens with the question of “newness,” and then—rather than marching chronologically through centuries of kings and wars—you and Beaton agree to decorate a kind of conceptual Christmas tree. The first ornament is geography. Beaton begins with a provocation: Europe, objectively speaking, does not quite exist. It is a long promontory sticking out from Eurasia, bounded by seas on three sides but open on the fourth, with no decisive geographical marker separating it from Asia. So from the start, the very idea of Europe is already more than physical fact; it is something people invented in order to describe themselves.

That leads naturally to openness. Europe is not India, with the Himalayas doing some of the work of definition. It is exposed, especially to the east, and that exposure explains much of its history. Beaton stresses the two great routes in and out—across the steppe, and through the Mediterranean and straits—and you push the point that Europe has long been both destination and launching point, a place where peoples arrive, mix, settle, and eventually burst outward again. Before the fifteenth century, the movement is largely inward; after that, Europeans begin crossing oceans and remaking the wider world. Europe, in this telling, is not static but tidal.

From there the conversation turns to idea and institution. Scandinavia becomes European not because a map says so, but because it is drawn into Christianity, urban life, and kingdoms; “Europe,” then, expands by incorporation. That sets up the long discussion of res publica—the public thing—running from the Greek and Roman sense that the polity belongs to all its citizens, through the Roman Empire’s appropriation of the term, into the res publica Christiana, and forward, in altered form, even into the European Union. Alongside this sits the persistent but repeatedly frustrated dream of empire. Europe keeps producing would-be unifiers—Charlemagne, Charles V, Napoleon, Hitler—yet never remains monolithic. Compared with China’s centripetal history, Europe appears centrifugal: broken, various, restless. Beaton is unconvinced by simple national-character explanations and prefers geography, rivalry, and habit.

But he does not finally praise competition in the brutal sense. He prefers emulation: Europeans looking over one another’s shoulders, borrowing, matching, surpassing, and in the process sharing a field of play. That, in turn, shades into Christianity—not as present-day confession, but as the long institutional framework within which Europe was ruled, morally shaped, and intellectually formed. Christianity mattered because in Europe Christians ruled; it was not merely believed, but built into law, power, and social order. Even secular Europe, Beaton suggests, emerged out of that inheritance rather than against it in some simple way.

The conversation ends where the book begins: with events. Ukraine, Maidan, the Russian invasion, Brexit, and the sudden British rediscovery that Europe might be “us” rather than “them.” Beaton’s closing point is that Europe is not only geography or inheritance, but self-definition. People choose it, or refuse it. Under pressure, they are forced to say again what they belong to. And that is why a new history is needed now.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Why does Beaton insist that Europe “objectively” does not quite exist as a continent? What does that claim clarify?

2. How does the openness of Europe’s eastern frontier help explain recurring patterns in European history?

3. In what sense is Europe an idea invented by the people who live there rather than simply a geographical fact?

4. What does the example of Scandinavia suggest about how places become “European”?

5. How does Beaton’s use of res publica deepen or complicate modern ideas of democracy and republican government?

6. Why has Europe repeatedly produced empires or would-be empires without remaining permanently unified under one?

7. Beaton prefers “emulation” to a harsher idea of competition. Is that distinction persuasive?

8. How does Christianity function in this conversation: as faith, as institution, as inheritance, or all three?

9. What does Ukraine’s insistence on being European reveal about Europe as a matter of choice and self-definition?

10. After hearing this conversation, what now seems “new” to you about Europe—and what merely seems newly visible?

For Further Investigation

• Roderick Beaton, Europe: A New History (Basic Books, 2026)

• —, The Greeks: A Global History (Basic Books, 2021)

• John Rigby Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (Scribner, 1995)

• Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (Vintage, 2000)

• Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin, 2006)

• Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Scribner, 2016)

• Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (Princeton University Press, 2019)

• Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books, 2019)

Past Episodes

• The Greeks

• The Greek Revolution and the Birth of Nationalism

• Prague: The Heart of Europe

• Roads to Rome

• Edges are Interesting: A History of Eastern Europe

• The World the Plague Made

• Civic Bargain

Introduction

At the very beginning of his forthcoming book Europe: A New History, my guest Roderick Beaton asks a simple but disarming set of questions: Why a “new” history of Europe? Why might we need one? And what makes this history new?

His answer is not merely about newly discovered facts, or even reinterpretations of old ones. It is about events. “To study history,” he writes, “is to look for patterns to make sense of the things that happen…When things change, when new and unexpected events suddenly reshape the world that we thought we knew around us, the effect is like the turning of a kaleidoscope—the whole pattern changes.” The present does not leave the past untouched. It rearranges it.

So we need a new history of Europe not because the past has changed, but because our vantage point has. “The story told in this book,” Beaton writes, “has been shaped by the changed and changing perspective of the mid-2020s; it could not have been told this way before.” In this conversation, we explore what it means to write history under those conditions—and what Europe looks like when its past is seen anew.

About the Guest

Roderick Beaton is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek & Byzantine History, Language & Literature at King’s College London. A distinguished historian of Greece and Europe, he was knighted by King Charles III in 2024 for his services to history. He previously appeared on Historically Thinking to discuss The Greeks: A Global History.

Past Episodes

• The Greeks

• The Greek Revolution and the Birth of Nationalism

• Prague: The Heart of Europe

• Edges are Interesting: A History of Eastern Europe

• The World the Plague Made

• Civic Bargain

For Further Investigation

• Roderick Beaton, Europe: A New History (Basic Books, 2026)

• —, The Greeks: A Global History (Basic Books, 2021)

• John Rigby Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (Scribner, 1995)

• Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (Vintage, 2000)

• Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin, 2006)

Reflection Questions

• What does it mean to say that the present reshapes our understanding of the past?

• Can there ever be a “definitive” history, or are all histories provisional?

• How should historians respond to moments when events seem to reorder the past?

Tags

European History; Historiography; Intellectual History; Modern Europe; Roderick Beaton

Episode 451: Terrible Intimacy

Why This Conversation Matters

We often imagine slavery at scale: vast plantations, hundreds of enslaved people, distance between enslaver and enslaved measured in fields and overseers. But what happens when that distance collapses?

What if slavery is not impersonal—but proximate? Not bureaucratic—but domestic?

This conversation asks you to reconsider where the system was most human—and therefore, perhaps, most revealing.

• Does closeness mitigate cruelty, or sharpen it?

• What does power look like when it lives under the same roof?

• And how should we think about a system that depended not only on domination, but on constant, daily negotiation?

Throughlines

Melvin Patrick Ely’s work, now in his latest book A Terrible Intimacy turns our attention away from the grand plantation and toward what he shows was, in Virginia and much of the Upper South, the modal experience of slavery: small-scale holdings, often with fewer than twenty enslaved people, and sometimes far fewer.

In these environments, enslavers and enslaved people lived in close physical proximity. They saw one another daily, often constantly. There was no managerial buffer—no overseer class to mediate relationships. The enslaver was not an abstraction. He (or she) was present: in the yard, in the house, at the table, in moments of discipline, and sometimes in moments of uneasy familiarity.

Ely emphasizes that such proximity did not soften slavery. If anything, it made its contradictions more visible. Enslavers often knew the individuals they held in bondage—their skills, personalities, families. Yet this knowledge coexisted with, and indeed enabled, exploitation. The system required a kind of moral partition: recognition without acknowledgment, familiarity without equality.

For the enslaved, this closeness created a different set of possibilities and constraints. On the one hand, small-scale settings could allow for negotiation—over work, over family life, over limited forms of autonomy. On the other hand, they offered little refuge. Surveillance was constant because it always is in small places. Resistance, when it occurred, was immediately personal.

The phrase that emerges—“terrible intimacy”—captures this paradox. Slavery in these contexts was not distant or anonymous. It was immediate, relational, and inescapable. But it could be no less terrible. Even though, the case Ely and Zambone discussed, the enslaved man Tom had the scale of justice weighted in his favor such that he escaped execution, he was still transported away—possibly to a death on a plantation in Brazil.

Ely also gestures toward a broader historiographical implication: that understanding slavery requires attention not only to its largest and most visible forms, but to its most common ones. If nearly half of enslaved people lived in such conditions, then any account of American slavery that centers only on the plantation risks distortion.

In this sense, the conversation is not merely about scale. It is about perception. What we imagine slavery to have been shapes how we interpret its legacy. And Ely asks us, to imagine it differently.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. How does beginning with Tom—and a specific act of violence—change your understanding of slavery compared to starting with laws, statistics, or large plantations?

2. In Tom’s case, how are we meant to understand his act: as crime, resistance, desperation, or something else? What categories are available—and which ones fail?

3. What does the community’s response to the homicide reveal about how enslaved people were perceived: as property, as persons, or as something unstable in between?

4. How does the legal handling of Tom’s case expose the tensions within a system that must treat a human being simultaneously as accountable subject and owned object?

5. In a small-scale setting where everyone knows everyone, how might testimony—who speaks, who is believed, who remains silent—be shaped by proximity and dependence?

6. Does the closeness between enslaver and enslaved in Tom’s world make the violence more shocking, or more predictable?

7. Ely suggests that such environments involved constant negotiation. What happens to those negotiated understandings when they break down—as they seem to have in Tom’s case?

8. How does the idea of “terrible intimacy” help explain not just daily life under slavery, but moments when that life erupts into violence?

9. If cases like Tom’s were not structurally unusual, why do they feel exceptional to us? What does that say about how slavery has been remembered or simplified?

10. After hearing this conversation, how would you now describe the “typical” experience of slavery—and what role should stories like Tom’s play in shaping that description?

For Further Investigation

• Commonwealth v. Tom, County Court Order Book 21, pp. 274, 275, and 281–84; Co Ct 1825 November.

• Melvin Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War. Knopf, 2004.

• Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books, 2014.

• John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. Oxford, 1972.

• Bertram Wyatt Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the American South. Oxford University Press, 2007.

• Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

• Charles B. Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge. Norton, 1994.

• —, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. University of Virginia Press, 2001.

• Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. Vintage, 1967.

• —, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. Pantheon, 1974.

• Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Harvard University, 1999.

• —, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Belknap, 2013.

• Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860. Yale University, 2015.

• Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South. University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

• James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. Knopf, 1982.

Related Episodes

• Free People of Color

• American Slavery

• Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery, with Cara Rogers Stevens

• Denmark Vesey’s Bible

• In the Matter of Nat Turner

• Stolen

• Virginiana

Introduction

In the generation just before the Civil War, something like one-quarter of America’s enslaved people lived on large plantations with fifty or more forced laborers—in essence, work camps, where contact with whites might be limited and mostly utilitarian. Another quarter lived on plantations where twenty to fifty persons were held in slavery. The typical owner of, say, thirty captive Black workers knew his enslaved people individually, even if their true feelings often remained hidden from him.

That leaves half the South’s enslaved population living on properties where fewer than twenty Black people were held in bondage. Households that included five or ten enslaved people were very numerous. Callousness and exploitation were baked into the system, but slavery on this scale also required physical closeness between white and Black. In A Terrible Intimacy, Melvin Patrick Ely uses the court records of Prince Edward County, Virginia to reconstruct what that closeness meant in practice—and what it reveals about power, knowledge, and human relationships within slavery.

About the Guest

Melvin Patrick Ely is an eminent historian of slavery and the American South. He is the author of Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Freedom from the 1790s to the Civil War, which received the Bancroft Prize in 2005. His latest book, A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South, draws on decades of archival work, particularly in the court records of Prince Edward County, Virginia.

Reflection Questions

1. What does “intimacy” mean in a system defined by coercion and inequality?

2. How does proximity shape power—does it soften it, obscure it, or intensify it?

3. What kinds of knowledge did enslavers possess—and what remained beyond their reach?

4. How does a “think aloud” help you understand how a historian thinks?

Related Episodes

• Free People of Color

• American Slavery

• Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery, with Cara Rogers Stevens

• Denmark Vesey’s Bible

• Stolen

• Virginiana

For Further Investigation

• Commonwealth v. Tom, County Court Order Book 21, pp. 274, 275, and 281–84; Co Ct 1825 November.

• Melvin Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War. Knopf, 2004.

• John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. Oxford, 1972.

• Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

• Charles B. Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge. Norton, 1994.

• Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. Vintage, 1967.

• —, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. Pantheon, 1974.

• James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. Knopf, 1982.

Tags

Slavery • American South • Civil War Era • Social History • Race • Virginia • Historical Thinking

Why This Conversation Matters

We are perhaps accustomed to thinking about firearms as instruments of war, or as objects of political controversy. Catherine Fletcher invites us to entertain more unsettling ideas. What if firearms are best understood not primarily as weapons, but as social technologies? That is, as objects that reshape everyday life, reorder authority, and redefine violence?

Her argument turns on a historical shift that she carefully documents, when the handgun (any gun that could be carried) moved from novelty to normality. That transition forced societies to answer new questions: who may carry weapons, under what conditions, and with what expectations of restraint? In answering those questions, states did not simply suppress violence—they reorganized it.

As you read, or listen, consider these questions:

• When a weapon becomes ordinary, does it stabilize or destabilize society?

• Is state control over violence a sign of increasing order, or simply a more efficient form of coercion?

• How did firearms violate certain principles of the culture of the Renaissance? What does that indicate about the relationship between technology and culture?

Throughlines

Fletcher’s argument proceeds by tracing a transformation that is easy to miss precisely because it is so gradual. Firearms did not suddenly revolutionize society; they seeped into it. What begins as a specialized military technology becomes, over the course of the sixteenth century, an object increasingly present in civilian hands.

At first, handguns were unstable tools—dangerous, unreliable, and in many ways suspect. They lacked the cultural legitimacy of older weapons. Yet that very instability made them socially significant. Firearms did not require the same degree of training or physical conditioning as traditional arms, and so they had the potential to unsettle established hierarchies. The question was not simply how they were used in war, but who would be permitted to use them at all.

States responded not by eliminating firearms, but by attempting to regulate their presence. Fletcher emphasizes that the spread of guns produced a parallel expansion of rules governing them. Authorities became increasingly concerned with when firearms could be carried, where they could be discharged, and by whom. This was not merely about public safety; it was about asserting jurisdiction over violence itself.

In this sense, the firearm sits at the intersection of three larger processes: military change, state formation, and social discipline. Governments recognized the utility of firearms even as they feared their disruptive potential. The result was not a simple monopoly on violence, but a managed distribution of it. In some contexts, civilians were encouraged—or even required—to bear arms; in others, restrictions tightened. The pattern varied, but the underlying dynamic was consistent: firearms forced states to define the boundaries of legitimate violence more precisely.

This is where Fletcher’s argument engages most directly with the idea of the civilizing process. If, as Norbert Elias argued, early modern Europe saw a gradual internalization of restraint and a reduction in overt violence, firearms complicate that narrative. On the one hand, they increased the capacity for sudden, lethal force. On the other, their regulation required new forms of behavioral control. The presence of guns did not simply make societies more violent; it made them more attentive to violence—more concerned with when, where, and how it could occur.

Crucially, Fletcher does not present this as a linear story of progress. The spread of firearms did not inevitably produce greater order. Instead, it exposed tensions between individual agency and collective authority, between the desire for security and the fear of disorder. Firearms became embedded in everyday life, but always as objects that demanded interpretation—tools whose meaning depended on the frameworks built around them.

Seen in this light, the “firearm revolution” is not just about technology. It is about the slow construction of a world in which violence is both more accessible and more tightly regulated—a paradox that remains with us.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Fletcher argues that firearms became “everyday objects” in the sixteenth century. What changes—social, cultural, or psychological—when a weapon becomes ordinary rather than exceptional?

2. What changes when any technology becomes ordinary rather than exceptional? What is required of a society and culture to make that change?

3. How did the spread of firearms challenge older social hierarchies based on strength, training, or status? Did it democratize or simply redistribute violence?

4. Does the spread of the technology come first, or does the state’s attempt to regulate it precede the spread of a technology?

5. In what ways do early modern governments resemble modern ones in their efforts to regulate weapons? In what ways might they be fundamentally different?

6. Norbert Elias’s “civilizing process” suggests a long-term reduction in interpersonal violence. Do firearms support that thesis—or complicate it?

7. Is the regulation of violence best understood as a moral achievement, a political necessity, or a strategy of control? Can it be all three at once? If not, why not?

8. How does thinking about firearms as a “social technology” change the way we understand other technologies, past or present? What are “social technologies” that do not look like technologies, but are techniques or institutions?

9. The episode suggests that firearms required new habits of restraint and new expectations of behavior. What does that tell us about the relationship between technology and character?

10. If the firearm revolution created a world in which violence was both more available and more regulated, are we still living in that world—or have we moved beyond it?

Related Episodes

• Beauty and Terror: The Italian Renaissance Re-envisioned

• Roads to Rome

• The Gunpowder Revolution

• The History of Technology, from Leonardo to the Internet

For Further Investigation

• Catherine Fletcher, The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires (Princeton, 2026)

• Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Second Edition)— one of the books that when I read it lit a fire inside my mind

• Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 — the classic argument on early modern military change

• Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History — for a broader, comparative perspective on firearms and state power

Introduction

“Over the course of the sixteenth century,” writes Catherine Fletcher, “the handgun made a transition from a novel and decisive military technology to become an everyday object, in use across society and carrying a new set of cultural associations that would persist through the coming centuries.”

This was the firearm revolution.

In this conversation, Fletcher explores how an evolving technology became a transformative one—not simply changing warfare, but altering the structure of society itself. Guns moved from battlefields into cities, homes, and daily life. In doing so, they reshaped how states exercised power, how individuals understood violence, and how social order was enforced.

Fletcher brings together three major frameworks for understanding early modern Europe—the rise of the state, the enforcement of social discipline, and the so-called civilizing process. Where these overlap, she argues, “In the space where they overlap,” she argues, “we find—and the people of early modern Europe found—a gun.”

About the Guest

Catherine Fletcher is a historian of the Renaissance and early modern Europe, and is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of numerous books, including The Roads to Rome and The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance. This is her third appearance on Historically Thinking.

Reflection Questions

1. What does it mean for a technology to become “everyday”? And how does that shift its social and political significance? Does the technology have to change for this to happen, or the culture that adopts and adapts the technology?

2. How does the spread of firearms complicate or reinforce the idea of a “civilizing process”?

3. What does Fletcher’s argument suggest about the relationship between state power and private violence?

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Related Episodes

• Beauty and Terror: The Italian Renaissance Re-envisioned

• Roads to Rome

• The Gunpowder Revolution

• The History of Technology, from Leonardo to the Internet

For Further Investigation

• Catherine Fletcher, The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires (Princeton, 2026)

• Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Second Edition)— one of the books that when I read it lit a fire inside my mind

• Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 — the classic argument on early modern military change

• Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History — for a broader, comparative perspective on firearms and state power

Tags

early modern history, firearms, state formation, Renaissance, military history, political history, Catherine Fletcher

It’s already April but I still find myself occasionally thinking about my conversation in December with Lindsay Regele about Joel Poinsett, and some of you have told me that you’ve done the same. My thinking basically turns around Poinsett’s status as the consummate outsider—and how outsiders like him are necessary in any institution or organization, but how rarely they have ascended the heights of American political culture that Poinsett did.

My thoughts are mingled with some embarrassment at how I’ve been ignorant of his story. While I knew a little about Poinsett, that was mostly about his role as one of Tocqueville’s informants—which turns out to be one of the smaller episodes of his life. I had no idea at all about this first thirty years, and how un-American he literally was—certainly how un-Carolinian.

Poinsett’s family—and I don’t think I can emphasize this strongly enough—were on the losing side of the American Revolution. You do not leave Charleston and go live in England for seven or eight years if you were on the winning side. You do not do it even if you are a neutral, if there were any left in Charleston by 1782. The only reason that you leave Charleston for England, and stay there for nearly a decade, is if you fear the consequences of what will happen to you when the rebel army and government finally reenter Charleston.

The return of the Poinsett’s to America highlights one of the curious dynamics of the American Revolution and post-Revolution era. For some decades there has been a stronger emphasis on the violence of the American Revolution, and that it was a civil war. This has been a necessary correction to the historiography.

But often in trawls through the archives, looking for something else, I come across indications that the story is even more complicated than that. The Poinsett family’s experience demonstrates that. Had South Carolinian revolutionaries been Jacobins or Bolsheviks, they would certainly have seized and redistributed Poinsett property in their absence—and indeed they did seize the property of prominent Loyalists. But the Poinsetts held on to it, somehow, and the leases on their Charleston properties allowed young Joel to become a young gentleman of leisure. Because they held on to that property he was able do do things like study medicine in Edinburgh, spend time in Paris, relax in Switzerland, and do absolutely mad things like travel down the Volga to the Caspian Sea. The Poinsett experience proves that Loyalists could go home again, and I suspect that was a small but important current of life in the early American republic. Jeffersonians always claimed that Federalists had at their heart a coterie of former Loyalists, and the Poinsetts provide a point on the graph in the Jeffersonians’ support.

The next thing that sticks with me about Poinsett is the he was always and everywhere an outsider. In the first part of his life he was an American boy in England. Coming briefly back to South Carolina as a boy, he must have seemed thoroughly English to those who met him. And, whatever his accent was when he attended school in New England, or whether they saw him as English or Carolinian, he remained an outsider there. He was certainly no Yankee. Yet during his travels through Europe part of his charm to Europeans must have been that he was American—an American who could speak fluent French, and been educated in Britain. But what did being American mean to Joel Poinsett at that moment?

When he returned to South Carolina he was cosmopolitan and traveled in a way that most Americans could not afford to be, not even wealthy ones. Yet that does not seem to have hurt him. Quite the contrary. He must have succeeded in his initial forays into South Carolina politics because the South Carolina elite were impressed by his travels and experiences, rather than intimidated by them. Decades later the South Carolina elite were very proud of J. Johnston Petigrew’s book about his travels in Spain—if Pettigrew could milk a book out of a summer vacation to Spain, imagine what Poinsett could have produced from travels that ranged from Persia to Chile. But book or not, he had seen things that no American ever had; so that experience must have given him an entree into respectable Carolina politics.

Yet, because he was still an outsider, once he was in politics he had no base on which to build his power and ascent. When he did that, he did it because he was still an outsider, the most prominent of the South Carolina minority who were opposed to nullification and the confrontation with the Federal government. Poinsett might be hated by the majority, he might only be leader of a minority, but at least it was some sort of base—even though, by that choice of his, he had “outsider” practically burned onto his forehead.

That political base might not give him power in South Carolina, but it gave him national prominence and signified his political benefit to the Democratic Party. Hence he was a logical selection to be Secretary of War in Martin van Buren’s administration. He was not the only Southerner in van Buren’s cabinet—there were two Kentuckians in the cabinet, as well as a Georgian. Yet among that group Poinsett must still have seemed an outsider, a recent convert to the Jacksonian faith with suspiciously stronger Federalist attachments than any other member of the cabinet. I wonder if any of them knew about the Poinsett family’s sojourn in Britain, or when it began.

Other men have come to America as immigrants and rose to positions of power—Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury for Jefferson and Madison was in his 20s when he wound up in southwest Pennsylvania and became a local politician. Carl Schurz was a German ’48-er who was in turn a Union general, Senator from Missouri, and Secretary of the Interior.

But Poinsett was not really an immigrant. He was perhaps more like William Short, the Virginian diplomat, protege of Jefferson, who spent exciting decades in Europe and yet never seemed to find his place in the United States when he returned. Or Henry Adams, who enjoyed (as much as he enjoyed anything) his times sojourning in Europe, or in Japan, and seemed to return and dwell in the United States as a kind of grim duty to the shades of his forbears.

But Poinsett was not like them, either. He was a man who was unquestionably one of the most cosmopolitan Americans of his age, yet when he returned to America he fought with great and protracted determination to establish his place in South Carolina and the United States. In doing so he became a (sort of) nationalist, an advocate of the American Union against regional particularity. I can think of no other public personality in American history quite like him. And I have been trying to since December.

For Further Reading

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism (University of Chicago Press, 2023)

I. Introduction

This week, instead of a Friday Reflection, I’m publishing the second Historically Thinking Field Guide—on Intellectual Humility, a habit of mind that underlies every serious engagement with the past. These Field Guides are meant not simply to collect conversations, but by collecting them together cultivate ways of thinking about the past.

This is very true about this week’s Field Guide. Since its beginning, Historically Thinking has been based on a simple claim: that history is more than stories about the past. It is a way of seeing the world, one that cultivates rigor, curiosity, and intellectual humility.

While other Field Guides are assorted conversations unified for the first time, this Field Guide was originally a series. Thanks to a grant from the Greater Good Science Center at Cal Berkeley, I was able to explore the relationship between historical thinking and intellectual humility: why they belong together, how they work together, and what they can teach us about navigating a world of uncertainty.

To do that I began by recording conversations with a few people who had thought a lot about intellectual humility, and one who has thought a lot about historical thinking. Then I talked to historians, just about all of whom were previously on the podcast. I asked them about their life with history: how it started, how it became serious, what the relationship is like at this point in their life. Most of all I ask them how they do history, as a way of getting at how every historian has to deal with the inevitable limits of knowledge that we all face. How do they deal with that? How do they acknowledge it? How can a historian acknowledge the limitations of knowledge but still make claims and arguments, still take intellectual risks?

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II. Episodes in the Series

A. Introduction to the Topic

Intellectual Humility and the “Internet of Us”

Guest: Michael Patrick Lynch
About the Guest: Lynch is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and Director of the UConn Humanities Institute. His books include Truth as One and Many, The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data, and Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture.
What it’s about: Truth, arrogance, and thinking historically in the digital age.
Listen for: Lynch’s “no-internet” exercise
Originally published: April 3, 2023 (Episode 310)

Intellectual Humility, Social Psychologically Speaking

Guest: Igor Grossmann
About the Guest: Igor Grossmann is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo and Director of the Wisdom and Culture Lab.
What it’s about: What is intellectual humility when you measure it in the lab and trace it across cultures?
Listen for: The crippling effects of overconfidence (without which prediction markets and sports gambling couldn’t turn a profit)
Originally published: April 17, 2023 (Episode 313)

What’s Historical Thinking Got to Do With Intellectual Humility?

Guest: Lendol Calder
About the Guest: Lendol Calder is Professor of History at Augustana College. Recognized for his contributions to teaching and pedagogy, he coined the influential term “uncoverage” to describe a model of teaching survey courses that emphasizes historical thinking over “coverage” of content.
What it’s about: A review of the “moves” of historical thinking, and the need for intellectual humility to be one of them.
Listen for: How Calder came to think of intellectual humility as one of the moves of historical thinking
Originally published: September 28, 2023

B. Conversations with Practitioners

Jonathan Zimmerman

About the Guest: He is the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor in Education and Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in 1993 from Johns Hopkins University. His books have dealt with a wide range of topics related to the history of education, including sex and alcohol education, history and religion in the curriculum, Americans who taught overseas, and historical memory in public schooling.
Listen for: If and how acknowledging the limits of our knowledge make us better educators, students, and citizens
Originally published: December 21, 2023

Suzanne Marchand

About the Guest: Suzanne Marchand, Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University. A scholar of European intellectual history, Marchand has also ranged widely: from studying the study of archaeology, to Orientalism, to porcelain (which we previously discussed on the podcast), and most recently to Herodotus. She is the 2026 President of the American Historical Association.
Listen for: Can a long view of ideas—from Herodotus to Orientalism to porcelain—help us see the limits of our own assumptions?
Originally published: February 2, 2024

Leah Shopkow

About the Guest: Leah Shopkow is Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington. A historian of medieval France, she began her career by studying the history written by medieval chroniclers, resulting in her book History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. She has also edited William of Andres’ The Chronicle of Andres, and most recently written The Saint and the Count: A Case Study for Reading Like a Historian.
Listen for: What can students gain from “reading like a historian,” and how does that connect to intellectual humility?
Originally published: February 27, 2024

Mark Carnes

About the Guest: Mark Carnes is Professor of History at Barnard College. His academic specialty in nineteenth century American history led to his book Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (Yale University Press, 1989). His interest in how history appears in forms other than history books led him to edit Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies and Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other). In 1995, Carnes pioneered a role-playing pedagogy—now known as Reacting to the Past (RTP). He has written several of the games in the RTP series as well as Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College (Harvard, 2018), which he and I discussed long, long ago.
Listen for: Does role-playing help students practice humility as they step into the minds of people from the past?
Originally published: March 14, 2024

Joseph Manning

About the Guest: Joseph Manning is the William K. and Marilyn Milton Simpson Professor of Classics and History, Professor in the Yale School of the Environment, and Senior Research Scholar in Law. His historical work specializes in Hellenistic history, with particular focus on the legal and economic history of Ptolemaic Egypt.
Listen for: How should historians balance humility with bold claims about something as vast as climate’s role in shaping civilizations?
Originally published: May 20, 2024

Alexander Mikaberidze and Scott Eric Nelson

About the Guests: Alex Mikaberidze is Professor of History and Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. Dr. Mikaberidze specializes in 18th and 19th century Europe, particularly the Napoleonic Wars. He has written or edited some two dozen titles, including the critically acclaimed The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History and most recently the critically acclaimed Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace.

Scott Eric Nelson is Georgia Athletic Association Professor at the University of Georgia. Scott writes about the 19th century history, including the history of slavery, international finance, the history of science, and of global commodities. His first book was Steel Drivin’ Man: The Untold Story of an American Legend, about the black folklore legend John Henry, which won four national awards. More recently, he authored Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World
Listen for: The very interesting ways in which both these historians came to studying the past for very personal reasons

How to Use This Series

• For classrooms: Each episode comes with questions designed to spark discussion.

• For book clubs or seminars: Use the accompanying bibliographies in each episode as jumping-off points for deeper exploration.

• For personal reflection: Each episode can be read or listened to on its own, but taken together they build a larger argument for the necessity of humility in thought and action.

Keep Exploring

• What is Historical Thinking? (Episode 39)

• Friday Reflections — weekly essays that extend the conversation.

Why This Conversation Matters

Modern Syria is often treated as a problem to be explained rather than a history to be understood. Its past is compressed into a few familiar episodes—imperial division, authoritarian rule, civil war—and then left there.

But what if that compression is itself the problem?

• What do we miss when we begin Syria’s history with European intervention rather than with late Ottoman reform?

• How does a history change when we take seriously the people who lived it, rather than the borders that contained them?

• And what does it mean to recover human dignity and agency—not as rhetoric, but as a historical force?

Throughlines

Daniel Neep begins by questioning the conventional starting point for modern Syrian history. Too often, he argues, the story begins with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire or the imposition of European mandates, as if Syria itself only came into being through external intervention. This perspective, while not wrong, is radically incomplete. It obscures the late Ottoman period, when significant changes were already underway—administrative reforms, infrastructural development, and new forms of political and social organization.

In this earlier period, figures within the Ottoman system were actively engaged in reshaping governance and society. Roads, railways, and communication networks were built; institutions were reformed; and new forms of identity began to emerge. These were not simply imposed from above or from outside, but developed through the work of local actors who were both participants in and critics of imperial structures. The result was not yet a modern nation-state, but it was something more than a passive province awaiting division.

Neep also emphasizes that the drawing of borders in the early twentieth century, while undeniably influenced by European powers, was not a purely external act. Syrians themselves—elites, activists, and local leaders—played roles in negotiating, contesting, and shaping the political realities that emerged. The boundaries of modern Syria, therefore, cannot be understood solely as arbitrary lines on a map; they were also the product of local ambitions, compromises, and constraints.

A central theme of the conversation is the persistence of Syrian society in the face of repeated political upheaval. Neep returns several times to the idea that Syrians have consistently asserted a desire to live with dignity, even under conditions that have made that aspiration difficult to realize. This is not presented as a romantic claim, but as an observable pattern across different periods: in late Ottoman reforms, in responses to colonial rule, and in more recent political struggles.

The conversation also highlights the importance of moving beyond narratives that reduce Syria to a site of conflict. While violence and repression are undeniably part of its history, they do not exhaust it. To focus exclusively on these elements is to overlook the social, cultural, and intellectual life that has persisted alongside them. It is also to miss the ways in which Syrians themselves have interpreted and responded to their circumstances, rather than simply enduring them.

Finally, Neep suggests that writing a modern history of Syria requires holding together multiple scales of analysis. External forces—empires, mandates, geopolitical pressures—must be taken seriously. But so too must internal dynamics: the actions of individuals, the development of institutions, and the formation of identities. Only by attending to both can we arrive at an account that does justice to the complexity of Syria’s past.

Questions for Reflection & Discussion

1. When historians choose a starting point for a narrative, what do they include—and what do they exclude?

2. How does focusing on late Ottoman reforms change our understanding of the modern Middle East?

3. In what ways can infrastructure and administration shape identity and political life?

4. What does it mean to say that borders are both imposed and negotiated?

5. How can historians recover agency without minimizing the power of empires and external forces?

6. What role does the concept of dignity play in historical explanation?

7. Why do some historical narratives become dominant, even when they are incomplete?

8. How might a fuller history of Syria alter contemporary discussions about the region?

For Further Investigation

• Daniel Neep, Syria: A Modern History (Basic Books, 1926)

• James L. Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History (Oxford, 2020)

• Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (Basic Books, 2016)

• Elizabeth F. Thompson, Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Harvard, 2013)

• Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920-1945 (Princeton, 2016)

Introduction

The history of modern Syria is often reduced to a familiar and rather narrow story: autocracy, repression, and periodic revolt. It is a short narrative, typically beginning with the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire, or perhaps with the secret arrangements of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided the Near East between Britain and France. In this telling, Syria appears less as a historical actor than as the product of imperial design and political dysfunction.

But as my guest Daniel Neep argues, this account is incomplete. It overlooks the late Ottoman reformers, infrastructure builders, and identity entrepreneurs who laid crucial foundations for modern Syria. It neglects the role Syrians themselves played in shaping borders and political life. And it misses something essential: the persistence with which Syrians have insisted on living with dignity, even amid upheaval. These are the arguments at the heart of his new book, Syria: A Modern History, and of our conversation today.

About the Guest

Daniel Neep is Senior Editor at Arab Center Washington DC and a non-resident fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He has taught Middle East politics at George Washington University, Georgetown University, and the University of Exeter, and previously served as Syria research director with the Council for British Research in the Levant. He has lived in Syria for five years, including during the first year of the uprising, as well as in Amman and Beirut. He is the author of Syria: A Modern History.

Reflection Questions

• What is lost when modern Syria is understood primarily as simply the product of colonial borders and authoritarian rule, and the decisions of those far away?

• How does recovering late Ottoman reform and local agency change our understanding of the modern Middle East?

• What does it mean to write a national history that takes seriously both external forces and internal aspirations for dignity?

For Further Investigation

• Daniel Neep, Syria: A Modern History (Basic Books, 1926)

• James L. Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History (Oxford, 2020)

• Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (Basic Books, 2016)

• Elizabeth F. Thompson, Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Harvard, 2013)

• Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920-1945 (Princeton, 2016)

Related Episodes

• The Damascus Events—Eugene Rogan on the 1860 Massacre and Its Legacy

• Peerless Among Princes: Kaya Şahín on the life and times of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent

• Empire and Jihad: Neil Faulkner on Anglo-Arab wars, imperialism, and the roots of the modern Middle East

Tags

Syria; Middle East; Ottoman Empire; Colonialism; Modern History; Political History; Daniel Neep; Historical Thinking

Introduction

About a century before the birth of Jesus, during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, a remarkable man began a nearly unprecedented intellectual endeavor. Sima Qian, like his father before him, was an official in the imperial court. Working on a plan left behind by his father, Sima Qian began writing a history of China for the two thousand years before his own time. The scope of his labors, and the historiographical discipline and philosophy of history that he brought to them, make him a sort of combination of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Plutarch. Yet in many ways, his personal life was just as extraordinary.

With me to discuss this monumental figure in the writing of history, either in China or anywhere else, is Andrew Meyer, Professor of History at Brooklyn College, and an expert in early Chinese intellectual history. He was recently on the podcast discussing his book To Rule All under Heaven: A History of Classical China, from Confucius to the First Emperor.

About the Guest

Andrew Meyer is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and a specialist in the intellectual history of early China. He is the author of The Dao of the Military: Liu An’s Art of War and co-author of The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China. His most recent book is To Rule All under Heaven: A History of Classical China, from Confucius to the First Emperor.

For Further Investigation

• Andrew Meyer, To Rule All under Heaven: A History of Classical China (Oxford, 2026)

• Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, translated by Burton Watson

• Mark Edward Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (Harvard, 2010)

• Michael Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics (Yale, 2008)

• Stephen Durrant, The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian (SUNY Press, 1995)

Reflection Questions

1. What distinguishes Sima Qian’s approach to history from earlier traditions of record-keeping or storytelling?

2. How does personal experience—especially suffering—shape a historian’s understanding of the past?

3. What responsibilities does a historian have when writing about power, failure, and moral judgment?

Tags

Sima Qian; Andrew Meyer; Chinese history; historiography; Han Dynasty; classical China; history of history; intellectual history

Published on

I. Introduction

This is the first-ever Historically Thinking Field Guide. These will be a guide to a set of episodes on a topic, a historical problem, or a habit of historical thinking. In time we plan for these to be classroom companions for high school and college teachers.

For our first Field Guide, I’ve chosen the Second World War. This is a somewhat curious choice, as I haven’t done that many conversations on it. Admittedly this is because I am pig-headed and contrarian, and when I see lots of book pouring off the press on the Second World War, I look around for a really interesting monograph on the social history of south India, or something equally out of the way. Moreover there are some very good podcasts that have quite a lot to say about the Second World War; more than one, in fact. But since July we’ve had a number of conversations on the Second World War, so many as to make me a little uneasy. I thought that I might connect all of these with all the previous conversations, to have them in one place. And to see if there are any discernible threads between them.

A couple of these episodes are straight-up military history. But what’s interesting to see is that many of these conversations are about small places and “small people”, caught up in overwhelming events. Or about how those events overwhelmed those places and people.

And then there are the meta-episodes, in which we learn something from this era. Or, which is perhaps more likely, we don’t.

II. Episodes

A. How the Third Reich Was Built

Hitler’s First One Hundred Days

Guest: Peter Fritzsche, University of Illinois
What it’s about: Understanding how speed of implementation, creative improvisation, and public enthusiasm (not merely fear) shaped the Hitler regime.
Listen for: How quickly everyday Germans rationalized the new order.
Originally published: January 27, 2022

Third Reich Village

Guest: Julia Boyd
What it’s about: Seeing how local life doesn’t “pause” under dictatorship—people adapt, ignore, collaborate, resist, or simply carry on.
Listen for: How ideological battles came to define the social and human terrain of a very remote Alpine village
Originally published: May 25, 2023

Saving Freud

Guest: Andrew Nagorski
What it’s about: How Sigmund Freud—one of the most famous Jews in the world—was brought out of Austria by his friends and followers after the Nazi Anschluss.
Listen for: How the man who wrote Civilization and Its Discontents, and taught the world about “id” and “ego”, could refuse to believe that Nazis would ever do him harm.
Originally published: August 29, 2022

B. World at War

1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe

Guest: Peter Fritzsche
What it’s about: Grasping the extraordinary events of the hinge year, the year when regional wars in Europe, Asia, and Africa became one enormous war
Listen for: The movements of whole populations, as refugees, internees, workers, or soldiers; the ways in which other pre-war concerns merged with the war itself
Originally published: October 1, 2025

Wolfpack

Guest: Roger Moorhouse
What it’s about: The story of the undersea war from within the German Navy’s U-boat service: how they were selected, what submarines were like, what life on them was like, and the terrible danger they faced at sea
Listen for: How Nazi was a U-boat crew? And how did Nazi Germany think of the highly-trained sailors fighting for the survival of the regime?
Originally published: October 22, 2025

Phantom Fleet

Guest: Alexander Rose
What it’s about: You want swashbuckling daring on the high seas? This is the podcast for you. Not a lot of high strategy or social history are referenced in this podcast!
Listen for: What it takes to bring a U-boat to the surface, and then board it.
Originally published: July 16, 2025

Agent Zo

Guest: Clare Mulley
What it’s about: The story of Elżbieta Zawacka—codename “Zo”—Polish patriot, soldier in the Polish Army, the only woman to parachute back into Poland to rejoin the fight against Nazi rule.
Listen for: How Zo survived not just the Nazis, but torture and imprisonment in Communist Poland; and how her act of resistance against the communists was to collect materials about the Polish Resistance during the Second World War
Originally published: December 16, 2024

The Forgers

Guest: Roger Moorhouse
What it’s about: Beginning in 1940, a group of Polish diplomats based in Bern, Switzerland, orchestrated a daring program of forging passports and identity documents from Latin American countries. These papers were then smuggled into Nazi-occupied Europe, where they became lifelines for Jews targeted for deportation and extermination.
Listen for: When fairly ordinary people decide to do what little they can rather than do nothing at all
Originally published: November 6, 2023

The Devils Will Get No Rest

Guest: James Conroy
What it’s about: In January 1943, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill convened in Casablanca for what Churchill later called the most important Allied conference of the war. The conference yielded not only military plans but also public declarations of Allied unity and the principle of “unconditional surrender.”
Listen for: Roosevelt’s journey to Casablanca; the meeting between Roosevelt and De Gaulle, which can only be called an Epic Fail
Originally published: June 15, 2023

Eisenhower’s Guerillas

Guest: Ben Jones
What it’s about: The Jedburgh Teams were three man teams parachuted into France after D-Day to support the Resistance in tandem with the Allied invasion. Historian Ben Jones joins me to explore how these teams operated, why they mattered, their connection to the great politics of the war, and why their story continues to resonate.
Listen for: The unique characters that ended up as Jedburghs; why some teams succeeded, and why some failed
Originally published: March 13, 2023

Okinawa, the Crucible of Hell

Guest: Saul David
What it’s about: It was the most brutal battle of the war in the Pacific, matching in its hellishness anything on the Eastern Front. Saul David tells the story of how it was fought, and the cost inflicted on both Japanese and Americans.
Listen for: The straight line that Saul David draws from Okinawa to Hiroshima
Originally published: May 23, 2020

C. How We Have Remembered It

Speaking Yiddish to Chickens

Guest: Seth Stern
What it’s about: Thousands of survivors of the Holocaust emigrate to southern New Jersey and become chicken farmers. Some families fail quickly, defeated by the difficulty of farming, something they’ve never done before. Others, even those who later left farming, remembered them as their happiest years in America.
Listen for: The deep network of rural Jewish life in South Jersey that by 1945 was more than fifty years old. How Jewish immigrants of earlier periods didn’t always take stories of the Holocaust seriously.
Originally published: May 30, 2023

The Age of Hitler, and How We Will Survive It

Guest: Alec Ryrie
What it’s about: The Second World War is the biggest event in our cultural imagination; and Adolf Hitler the biggest and most evil character, against which all else must be measured. If you’re wondering what’s wrong with that, you should give the conversation a listen.
Listen for: What happens when the memory of Adolf Hitler and his unique evil no longer defines our common moral language? And what might replace it?
Originally published: October 8, 2025

War and Power

Guest: Phillips Payson O’Brien
What it’s about: Not really about the Second World War, but O’Brien is a historian of the Second World War, and the author of a ground-breaking reinterpretation of the conflict; so its history permeates this conversation
Listen for: A reflection on alliances in the Second World War; on how armed forces have to reinvent themselves and regenerate themselves in the midst of a war
Originally published: November 5, 2025

III. Epilogue

Putting all these conversations together makes one thing clear to me: the Second World War resists simplification because it contains too many human scales at once.

At one level, it is the story of conferences in Casablanca; of declarations like “unconditional surrender”; of industrial systems and amphibious invasions and atomic bombs. It is a story of strategy, alliance, and statecraft. It happens on a grand canvas. And it occurs at amazing speed.

But at another level, it is a small and intimate story. It is a collection of small and intimate stories. One is the story of villages that continue to quarrel, or of submarine crews who think of themselves as professionals first and Nazis second (or perhaps the reverse), of diplomats in Bern forging passports at night, three-man teams dropped into France hoping that London will receive their radio calls. It is the story of Freud, unable to imagine that the Nazis would do him harm. And it is the story of Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe finding themselves trying to raise chickens in a part of New Jersey that no one realizes exists, certain not people from North Jersey.

The war was global, but it was lived locally.

These episodes also reveal how much of the war’s meaning is constructed afterward, so that it seems inevitable, when it was always contingent. “Unconditional surrender” sounds inevitable in hindsight; in January 1943 it was a gamble. The line from Okinawa to Hiroshima looks straight only because we know where it ends. And the moral vocabulary of “Hitler” remains so powerful that we struggle to imagine politics without invoking him.

Let me suggest that what emerges from this Field Guide is not a single argument but a habit of historical thinking: resist inevitability. Resist the idea that events moved along a single track toward a foregone conclusion. Notice improvisation. Notice hesitation. Notice the stubborn persistence of ordinary life under extraordinary pressure.

And finally, notice memory itself, and how it differs from history. Did the war really end in 1945? Well, sort of. But it continues to shape how we argue, how we compare, how we condemn, how we justify. The Second World War is not simply an event but a lens; or, really, many lenses in a very large telescope.

IV. Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. When did the Second World War begin? When did it end? Was it part of one long conflict, including the First World War and the Cold War?

2. How did speed and improvisation contribute to the consolidation of Nazi power?

3. In Third Reich Village and Speaking Yiddish to Chickens, how does local life persist during and after catastrophe? What changes—and what does not?

4. Freud could not believe he was in danger. Why do intelligent people underestimate ideological threats? Is denial a personal flaw, or a social phenomenon?

5. In 1942 and at Casablanca, when did Allied leaders know they were fighting a global war rather than parallel conflicts? How does declaring “unconditional surrender” reshape a war’s trajectory?

6. Can professional identity coexist with extremist ideology, as in the U-Boat serivce, or does one inevitably reshape the other?

7. Compare the Jedburgh teams, Agent Zo, and the Bern forgers. What makes resistance effective? What makes it morally meaningful? Are those the same thing?

8. In Okinawa, how does the brutality of the battlefield alter strategic calculation? Does Saul David’s line from Okinawa to Hiroshima feel persuasive—or too neat?

9. What role do exile governments and diplomatic improvisation play in shaping wartime outcomes? How fragile is legitimacy when it exists without territory?

10. How does the Second World War function in our political imagination today? What are the dangers of treating it as our primary moral analogy?

11. When you move between global strategy, institutional culture, and individual lives, which level of analysis feels most explanatory? Which feels most honest?

12. What are some lessons of the Second World War that we haven’t learned? Ones that we overemphasize?

V. For Teachers

This expanded Field Guide lends itself to thematic teaching rather than chronological coverage. Instructors might assign one cluster—regime-building, global war, or memory—and ask students to trace how scale shapes interpretation. Where does contingency appear? At what moments did events feel open rather than predetermined?

A comparative approach works particularly well. Pair different episodes together, and ask students how power operates differently at the levels of conference table, submarine, village, and farm. What does “agency” mean in each context?

Finally, invite students to reflect on their own moral vocabulary. Do they instinctively frame contemporary politics through the lens of the Second World War? What is gained by that analogy—and what is lost?

The aim is not simply to understand the war, but to cultivate habits of attention: sensitivity to scale, resistance to inevitability, awareness of memory’s distortions, and the discipline to see human beings inside vast events.