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.

Why This Conversation Matters

In this week’s conversation with Helen Zoe Veit, we began with a startling reversal: in the nineteenth century, Americans worried that children were not picky enough. They ate oysters, organ meats, sauerkraut, highly seasoned dishes, and whatever else appeared on the family table. They were assumed to be omnivorous.

Today, we assume the opposite. Children are widely believed to be “food rejectors by nature.” Parents navigate an exhausting landscape of nutritional science, psychological advice, processed food marketing, and guilt. Somewhere between those two moments—overeager omnivores and refusers by virtue of evolutionary biology—something obviously changed. But what? And how? And why?

As you think about the conversation, ask yourself which and how ideas about childhood, technology, psychology, commerce, and pleasure reshaped the act of eating itself.

Throughlines

One of the most striking claims in the conversation is also the simplest: for most of history, children ate what adults ate. In nineteenth-century America, that meant a cuisine far more varied—organ meats, fermented foods, smoked meats, richly seasoned dishes—than many families serve today. Children were not given separate menus. They were expected to eat the family meal.

This arrangement was not necessarily the result of scarcity or severity. The United States was, by the mid-nineteenth century, a land of agricultural abundance. Contemporary observers described children as eager and curious eaters. The prevailing assumption was not that children were biologically predisposed to reject unfamiliar foods, but that they were capable of eating almost anything.

The shift began not with marketing, but with reform. Nineteenth-century doctors and food reformers, concerned about digestion and high child mortality rates, argued that rich or heavily seasoned foods were unsuitable for young bodies. They advocated plain fare and regulated diets. By the early twentieth century, nutrition science amplified this impulse. Experts urged parents to monitor intake carefully and to differentiate children’s diets from adult fare. For the first time, “children’s food” became distinct in theory—even if everyday practice lagged behind.

Material changes then made differentiation easy. Refrigeration, processed food production, pasteurization, and the supermarket transformed the conditions of eating. The grocery cart placed children face-to-face with packaged foods designed to attract their attention. Industrial food processing made it possible to prepare separate meals with minimal additional labor. What had once been logistically difficult—customized eating within the same household—became ordinary.

Psychology intensified the transformation. Mid-twentieth-century experts warned parents not to pressure children about food, arguing that coercion could create emotional harm. At the same time, nutrition advice stressed the importance of proper intake for growth and development. Parents were left in a contradictory position: food mattered immensely, but direct influence was risky. The result, as emerged in the conversation, was a culture of anxiety and guilt, layered atop expanding consumer choice.

Running quietly through the discussion was the question of pleasure. Earlier accounts of childhood eating often emphasized delight and participation—children helping prepare food, sharing meals, and encountering strong flavors without fear. Modern discourse, by contrast, tends to center avoidance and management: avoiding rejection, avoiding conflict, avoiding unhealthy options. The narrowing of taste was not inevitable. It was the outcome of a complex interaction among reform, technology, commerce, and advice.

If something has a history, it is not fixed. Nor does it have the long time horizon of geology or evolution. That idea—articulated repeatedly in different forms—was perhaps the most hopeful insight to emerge from the conversation. If mass childhood pickiness is overwhelmingly cultural, then it can change. The history of children’s food suggests that young eaters are more adaptable than we assume, and that the structure of meals matters as much as the contents of the plate.

Questions for Reflection & Discussion

1. Why did nineteenth-century Americans see children’s omnivorousness as a problem rather than a virtue?

2. How did early nutrition science alter the moral stakes of feeding children?

3. In what ways did refrigeration and processed food enable the fragmentation of family meals?

4. How did the supermarket reshape the balance of power between parent and child?

5. What unintended consequences followed from psychological advice about not pressuring children to eat?

6. How does guilt function as a mechanism of cultural change in parenting practices?

7. To what extent is “picky eating” a product of abundance rather than scarcity?

8. How does the history of children’s food challenge pop evolutionary explanations of taste?

9. What role does pleasure play in shaping both historical and modern eating habits?

10. If culture produced modern pickiness, what specific practices would need to change in order to reverse it?

For Further Investigation

• Helen Zoe Veit, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)

Food History & Culture

• Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (University of California Press, 2023)

• Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Illinois Press, 1998)

• Warren Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry (Cornell, 2006)

Childhood & Psychology

• Benjamin Spock, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care: A Handbook for Parents of the Developing Child from Birth through Adolescence (Dutton, 1998)

• Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children (Knopf, 2004)

• Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Harvard, 2006)

Technology & Consumption

• Ruth Schwarz Cowan, More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave (Basic Books, 1985)

• Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (Vintage, 2003)

• Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (Smithsonian, 2004)

• Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century (UNC Press, 2012)

Manifestos

• Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Penguin, 2009)

Related Episodes

• Cuisine and Empire: Rachel Laudan on the world history of food

• The History of Keeping Things Cold: Jonathan Rees on ice, refrigeration, and the rise of the modern cold chain

• Breakfast Cereal: A global history of grains, health, and culture with Kathryn Cornell Dolan

• Street Food: Charlie Taverner on street vendors, London, and the history of urban eating

Apology: Helen Veit’s audio has a lot of “ducking”, in which a word or multiple words were clipped. This happened during the recording, and cannot be fixed in the audio edit. We'll work hard to make sure this never happens again.

Introduction

In nineteenth-century America, cookbook authors, concerned doctors, and food reformers believed that children had a problem with food. The problem was not that they rejected vegetables or demanded sweets. It was that they were too eager and undiscriminating about what they ate. Children, reformers worried, would “eat anything and everything.” If they were to grow into healthy adults, they needed a special diet—“children’s food”—which meant that for the first time in human history children would have to eat differently from everyone else.

That moment was one step along a path that my guest Helen Zoe Veit traces in her new book Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History. Beginning in a mid-nineteenth century world in which children routinely ate oysters, organ meats, sauerkraut, and richly spiced dishes alongside adults, she carries the story forward to our own moment—an era of childhood obesity, nutritional anxiety, supermarket abundance, and the widespread assumption that children are “food rejectors by nature.” But as Veit argues, mass childhood pickiness is not deeply biological. It is overwhelmingly cultural. And culture, unlike biology, can change.

About the Guest

Helen Zoe Veit is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. She specializes in American food history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is the author and editor of numerous works on food, morality, and culture. Picky is her latest book.

Reflection Questions

1. Why did nineteenth-century Americans worry that children were not picky enough—and what does that reveal about changing ideas of health and biology?

2. How did technologies such as refrigeration, processed food, and the supermarket alter not just what families ate, but how children learned to eat? What were changes in cultural practice that were perhaps just as important

3. If mass childhood pickiness is cultural rather than biological, what would have to change in order to reshape that culture?

For Further Investigation

• Helen Zoe Veit, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)

• Benjamin Spock, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care: A Handbook for Parents of the Developing Child from Birth through Adolescence (Dutton, 1998)

• Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (University of California Press, 2023)

• Ruth Schwarz Cowan, More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave (Basic Books, 1985)

• Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Penguin, 2009)

Related Episodes

• Cuisine and Empire: Rachel Laudan on the world history of food

• The History of Keeping Things Cold: Jonathan Rees on ice, refrigeration, and the rise of the modern cold chain

• Breakfast Cereal: A global history of grains, health, and culture with Kathryn Cornell Dolan

• Street Food: Charlie Taverner on street vendors, London, and the history of urban eating

Tags

Food History, History of Childhood, History of Parenting, Family History, Nutrition,

Why This Conversation Matters

During the American Civil War, roughly 194,000 Union soldiers and 214,000 Confederate soldiers became prisoners of war. No prior or subsequent American conflict saw numbers like these. In the Second World War, about 124,000 Americans were captured—but the likelihood of capture was roughly one in one hundred. In the Civil War, it was closer to one in five.

Yet prison camps remain strangely peripheral in our public memory of the war.

In our conversation, W. Fitzhugh Brundage argued that Civil War captivity was not merely a tragic byproduct of industrial warfare. It was a formative experience for hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their families. And it represented a structural shift: the normalization of large-scale, bureaucratically managed imprisonment in modern war.

As you read or listen, consider:

• When does suffering become policy rather than accident?

• How does retaliation reshape moral judgment in wartime?

• And why have prison camps been so marginal in Civil War memory compared to battlefields?

Throughlines

The conversation begins with numbers—and with probability. Capture was common in the Civil War in a way it has rarely been in American conflicts. That fact alone demands attention. Brundage stresses that imprisonment was not exceptional; it was a widespread experience that shaped the war’s human landscape.

Early in the conflict, both sides relied on an exchange system formalized in the Dix–Hill Cartel of 1862. Prisoners were paroled and swapped with surprising efficiency. The system assumed a shared commitment to mutual recognition and to certain inherited norms of warfare. But the cartel unraveled in 1863, largely over the Confederacy’s refusal to treat Black Union soldiers as legitimate combatants. Once exchanges collapsed, the scale of imprisonment exploded.

Brundage is careful to resist simple narratives of deliberate extermination. The Confederate government faced staggering shortages—food, medicine, manpower—and struggled to supply its own armies. But scarcity alone does not explain the catastrophe of places like Andersonville. Policy choices mattered. The Confederate leadership prioritized soldiers in the field over captives. Prisoners were viewed as expendable liabilities rather than as men to be sustained for future exchange.

Retaliation hardened positions on both sides. As mortality rose in Southern camps, Northern authorities debated reprisals. Elmira and other Union prisons acquired grim reputations of their own. Brundage underscores that suffering became politicized. Newspapers, families, and officials used prison conditions as evidence of enemy barbarity. The camps became rhetorical weapons as well as physical spaces.

One of the most striking elements of the discussion is Brundage’s insistence that imprisonment must be understood as a relational system. The fate of Union prisoners depended on Confederate calculations about exchange; Confederate prisoners suffered when Northern officials curtailed swaps in response to Southern policies. Decisions reverberated across lines.

The conversation also confronts memory. Andersonville became synonymous with cruelty, symbolized by the postwar trial and execution of Henry Wirz. But Brundage cautions against reducing the story to villainy. The camps reflected the bureaucratic capacities—and failures—of modern states under extreme stress. They exposed how easily institutional logic could eclipse humanitarian obligation.

The discussion closes on the long shadow of Civil War captivity. The war normalized the idea that mass warfare entailed mass imprisonment. Future American conflicts would build successor institutions. Yet the Civil War’s prison camps remain overshadowed by battles and emancipation—despite the fact that for hundreds of thousands of soldiers, captivity was the defining ordeal of the war.

Questions for Reflection & Discussion

1. Was the emergence of the modern prisoner of war camp inevitable? If so, what about modern warfare made large prison camps inevitable?

2. How was prisoner exchange regulated at the beginning of the war?

3. Why did the exchange system collapse in 1863, and what role did the status of Black soldiers play?

4. To what extent were prison conditions the result of scarcity or deliberate prioritization decisions?

5. How did retaliation shape policies on both sides of the conflict?

6. What does Brundage mean by describing imprisonment as a “relational system”?

7. Why did prisoners become politically useful symbols in wartime rhetoric?

8. What kind of life and community did prisoners fashion within the camps?

9. Prisoners were acutely aware that they lived on the knife’s edge; any illness in the camps might be fatal. How did the presence of death shape the lives of prisoners?

10. Why do battlefields occupy such a dominant place in Civil War memory compared to the experience of prison camps?

For Further Investigation

• W. Fitzhugh Brundage, A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War

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

• James M. Gillispie, Andersonvilles of the North: The Myths and Realities of Northern Treatment of Civil War Confederate Prisoners (2008)

• Roger Pickenpaugh, Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union (2009)

• —, Captives in Blue: The Civil War Prisons of the Confederacy (2013)

• Evan A. Kutzler, Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons (2019)

• Angela M. Zombek, Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War (2018)

• Robert Scott Davis, Ghosts and Shadows of Andersonville: Essays on the Secret Social Histories of America’s Deadliest Prison (2006)

• Dale Fetzer and Bruce Mowday, Unlikely Allies: Fort Delaware’s Prison Community in the Civil War (2000)

• William Marvel, Andersonville: The Last Depot (1994)

• Richard H. Triebe, Point Lookout Prison Camp and Hospital: The North’s Largest Civil War Prison (2016)

Related Episodes

• True Blue — Loyalty and Unionism in the Civil War

• American South — rethinking Southern history

• Armies of Deliverance—Elizabeth Varon’s interpretation of the Civil War

Primary Sources & Archives

• The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion

• The Henry Wirz trial transcripts

• Report of the Joint Select Committee Appointed to Investigate the Condition and Treatment of Prisoners of War

Introduction

During the American Civil War an estimated 194,000 Union soldiers and 214,000 Confederate soldiers became prisoners of war. No prior or subsequent American conflict has seen such numbers. During the Second World War, approximately 124,000 Americans were held captive, but the chance of being captured in that conflict was roughly one in one hundred; during the Civil War it was closer to one in five. Captivity was not a marginal experience. It was central to the war.

Indeed, the gigantic scale of prisoner-of-war camps was one of the conflict’s most consequential innovations. Every modern war since has produced successors to Andersonville, Point Lookout, Rock Island, and Florence. Yet prisoner-of-war camps remain oddly peripheral in our narratives of the Civil War, overlooked both as institutional innovations and as formative experiences for soldiers and their families. My guest, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, argues in A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War that captivity reshaped military policy, political rhetoric, racial attitudes, and postwar memory. Prison camps were not aberrations; they were integral to the modernizing logic of total war.

About the Guest

W. Fitzhugh Brundage is the William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An eminent historian of the American South, he has written extensively on lynching, racial violence, and debates over torture in American history. He previously appeared on Historically Thinking in Episode 327 to discuss A New History of the American South, which he edited.

🎧 Listen here on Substack, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you download your podcasts.

Reflection Questions

1. Why have prisoner-of-war camps remained marginal in Civil War narratives despite their scale and significance?

2. In what ways did captivity reshape not only military policy but also public memory and political rhetoric?

3. What does the experience of mass captivity during the Civil War reveal about the emergence of modern warfare?

For Further Investigation

• W. Fitzhugh Brundage, A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War

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

• “British and French Prisoners of War, 1793-1815”, Royal Museums of Greenwich

• “Norman Cross Prison”, Peterborough Archaeology

• Andersonville National Historic Site

• Point Lookout State Park, Maryland

Related Episodes

• De rebus civilibus Americanis

• De memoria et bello

• De humanitate in bello

Share

If you know someone interested in the Civil War, in the history of warfare, or in how institutions transform suffering into policy and memory, consider sharing this conversation.

Tags

Civil War · Military History · Prisoners of War · Memory · W. Fitzhugh Brundage · American History

Why This Conversation Matters

American religious history often gravitates toward the dramatic. We talk about revivals. We talk about prophets and entrepreneurs. We talk about religious radical abolitionists and preachers advocating racial chattel slavery. We know the loudest voices.

But what about those groups, communities, and denominations typically ignored? What about the religious communities that were neither revivalist innovators nor southern apologists—but something more complicated?

Timothy D. Grundmeier argues that nineteenth-century Lutheranism was not marginal but central to American religious culture. Lutherans were the nation’s fourth largest denomination by 1900. He argues that the institutions they built i and debates that shaped them in the late nineteenth grew from the crisis of the Civil War Era. This crisis revealed tensions between theology, ethnicity, American constitutionalism, and political loyalty, and that complicates our familiar narrative of the Civil War, and of American religious history.

A few questions to consider:

• What happens when a denomination prides itself on moderation during a period of moral crisis?

• How do theological disputes become inflamed—or transformed—by political conflict? And not always in the ways you might think?

• And how can a church grow enormously while simultaneously becoming more culturally isolated?

Throughlines

The conversation begins with definition. What is Lutheranism? Grundmeier wisely resists a simple doctrinal checklist. Lutherans are, at the most basic level, those who trace themselves to the Lutheran branch of the Reformation and confess foundational texts like the Augsburg Confession and Luther’s Small Catechism. But by 1850, American Lutheranism had splintered into distinct varieties.

The first were the “New” or “American” Lutherans, represented by Samuel Simon Schmucker—religious entrepreneur, seminary founder, and tireless institution builder. Schmucker sought to align Lutheranism with the Anglo-American evangelical mainstream. He embraced revivalism, temperance activism, and Protestant benevolent societies. He was uneasy with Lutheran sacramental theology, and the Lutheran confessions of the sixteenth century, fearing that both appeared too “Romanish.” He believed Lutherans should shed parochial German identity in order to become fully American.

Moderate Lutherans, centered in the Pennsylvania Ministerium, were less ambitious. They were content within Pennsylvania German culture and less eager to revise Lutheran doctrine or identity. They were neither separatist nor aggressively assimilationist.

Then came the Old Lutherans—many recent immigrants from post-Napoleonic Germany—who would coalesce in the Missouri Synod under C.F.W. Walther. Initially a small, self-conscious separatist minority, they insisted on strict adherence to the Lutheran confessions and rejected theological compromise.

Here is where the Civil War reshapes the story. Unlike Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, Lutherans did not fracture along sectional lines in the 1830s and 1840s. In fact, Lutheran unity was growing right to the eve of the war. When division finally came, it did so in two ways: a familiar North–South split, and a distinctly Lutheran theological schism among Northern synods over how strictly the Augsburg Confession should be enforced.

The war intensified doctrinal debates. “Unionism” became both a political and theological metaphor. Just as Americans fought to preserve the Constitution, some Lutherans argued that the church must stand uncompromisingly on its confessional foundations.

The most startling episode came when Walther and leaders of the Norwegian Synod publicly defended the permissibility of slavery in 1864—not from enthusiasm for the institution, but from a conviction that abolitionism threatened biblical authority and divinely ordered society. The Civil War, for them, dramatized the dangers of revolutionary ideology as much as the evils of slavery.

Yet after Reconstruction, Lutheranism took a sharp turn. Engagement gave way to quietism. Denominations built vast networks of schools, orphanages, hospitals, and publishing houses, even as they withdrew from mainstream Protestant cooperation. By 1900, Lutheranism was large, organized, confident—and culturally isolated.

The irony is profound: in seeking to become more distinctively American, Lutherans ended the century both deeply American and widely regarded as outsiders.

Questions for Reflection & Discussion

1. Why has Lutheranism often been overlooked in narratives of American religious history?

2. How did the three varieties of American Lutheranism differ in their understanding of doctrine and American identity? How were they similar in institution building?

3. Why did Lutherans avoid sectional schism before 1861 when other denominations did not?

4. How did the Civil War transform debates over the Augsburg Confession?

5. What does the concept of “unionism” reveal about parallels between theology and politics?

6. Why did Walther and others defend the permissibility of slavery so late in the conflict?

7. How did Lutheran moderation shape its response to slavery and the war?

8. Why did Lutheranism shift toward quietism during Reconstruction? Were the two things related? If so, how?

9. How can a denomination grow rapidly while becoming more culturally isolated?

10. What does this story suggest about the relationship between religious identity and national identity?

For Further Investigation

• Timothy D. Grundmeier, Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith (LSU Press, 2026)

• Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)

• Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1998)

• George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015)

• Molly Oshatz, Slavery and Sin: The Fight against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (OUP, 2011)

• Timothy Wesley, The Politics of Faith in the Civil War Era (LSU, 2023)

• James Byrd, A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War OUP, 2021)

• Richard Carwardine, Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union (Knopf, 2025)

• Alison Efford, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era (Cambridge, 2013)

• Kristen Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America (LSU, 2016)

• Bo Rasmussen, Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870 (Cambridge, 2022)

• L. DeAne Lagerquist, The Lutherans (Praeger, 1999)

• Mark Granquist, The Lutherans in America: A New History (Fortress, 2015)

Related Episodes

• Ruin Nation: Megan Kate Nelson on the Destruction of the Civil War

• Armies of Deliverance: Elizabeth Varon and a New Interpretation of the American Civil War

• President Garfield: C.W. Goodyear on the man who was a radical, a unifier, and very briefly president

Introduction

Lutherans are a strange denomination in American religious history and culture. For Catholics they are certainly Protestants. For Protestants they are sometimes suspected of being crypto-Catholics. They have been present in North America since the Swedes established their short-lived colony on the Delaware River—and yet in the American imagination they have typically received about as much attention as that short-lived Swedish colony itself.

But my guest Timothy D. Grundmeier argues that this neglect obscures something essential about nineteenth-century America. In Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith, he contends that Lutheranism was not marginal but central to American religious life in the era of the Civil War. By 1900 it was the nation’s fourth-largest denomination. It occupied a distinctive place between revivalist Protestantism and sacramental Catholicism. And in Union states outside the Northeast, Lutheran churches often reflected what he calls the “moderate majority.” Like every other major American institution, Lutheranism was reshaped by the Civil War and Reconstruction—and in turn helped shape the political, ethnic, and religious culture of the nation.

About the Guest

Timothy D. Grundmeier is Professor of History at Martin Luther College in New Ulm, Minnesota. Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith is his first book.

For Further Investigation

• Timothy D. Grundmeier, Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith (LSU Press, 2026)

• Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)

• Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1998)

• George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015)

Related Episodes

• Ruin Nation: Megan Kate Nelson on the Destruction of the Civil War

• Armies of Deliverance: Elizabeth Varon and a New Interpretation of the American Civil War

• President Garfield: C.W. Goodyear on the man who was a radical, a unifier, and very briefly president

Reflection Questions

1. What does Grundmeier mean by the “moderate majority”?

2. How did ethnicity, immigration, and theology intersect within nineteenth-century Lutheran communities?

3. In what ways did the Civil War reshape American denominational structures?

Tags

Civil War · American Religion · Lutheranism · Nineteenth Century · Timothy D. Grundmeier · American Culture

Why This Conversation Matters

There are eras that feel foundational because they are familiar. Classical Athens. Republican Rome. The age of Alexander. We know their names; we can (maybe, just barely) summon their chronology. But between the death of Confucius in 479 BC and the rise of the First Emperor of China in 221 BC, another revolution unfolded—one that shaped nearly a quarter of humanity for over two millennia. And that is quite possibly an underestimate of how many were influenced by it.

Yet this period remains almost invisible in the English-speaking world.

If we want to understand why East Asia developed the political, educational, and cultural forms it did—and why those forms still matter—we must return to this hinge moment in human history.

A few questions to consider as you read or listen:

• Is centralization the inevitable answer to prolonged instability, or merely one possible solution?

• When does intellectual innovation become politically transformative?

Throughlines

The conversation begins with scale. Covering the period from Confucius’s death to the First Emperor’s unification is the equivalent, Zambone notes, of writing a single history stretching from Marathon to the Second Punic War. The Warring States period occupies the final centuries of the Zhou dynasty, a time when regional powers increasingly acted independently of a king who retained ritual prestige but little material authority.

China did not lack a past before 481 BC; it possessed a written tradition stretching back to the Shang oracle bones. But during the Warring States era, political fragmentation and consolidation occurred simultaneously. More than a hundred early polities were gradually absorbed until seven powerful states dominated the landscape. Disunity and centralization advanced together.

Socially, the period was dominated by a robust hereditary aristocracy. Power correlated with lineage; elite clans traced descent from gods or divine ancestors. Warrior and priestly functions were intertwined through ancestral cults that mediated access to the divine. Yet this order was under strain. The wealth generated by intensive agriculture and expanding administrative capacity transformed the scale of warfare. Standing armies, crossbows, careful record-keeping, and what Meyer calls “social technologies” required literate administrators and systematic governance.

From here, the discussion pivots to four great questions the period forced into the open. First: Is the state the patrimony of a ruling clan, or a bureaucratic machine designed to achieve material ends? Texts like the Art of War were not neutral manuals but radical challenges to aristocratic honor culture. Victory without battle offended warrior sensibilities—but made perfect sense in a security-oriented state.

Second: Should political order rest on multipolar autonomy or centralized unity? The partition of the powerful state of Jin into three rival powers demonstrated both the dangers of overconsolidation and the possibilities of cooperative balance. Yet in the end, the western state of Qin rejected compromise, conquering and abolishing its rivals outright.

Third: What is the relationship between education and government? Confucius’s imagined humiliation on the road dramatizes how fragile the role of the intellectual once was. By the end of the period, however, masters and their disciples formed a recognized and institutionalized class—consulted, empowered, and eventually indispensable.

Finally: What becomes of hereditary aristocracy? Over three centuries, divine lineage ceased to be the sole determinant of status. The rise of men of talent—culminating in the peasant-born founder of the Han dynasty—signaled a social revolution as profound as the political one.

The Qin unification in 221 BC appears triumphant but paradoxical. The dynasty collapsed after fifteen years. Yet the empire it forged endured. The revolution was incomplete under Qin; under Han, it was made durable.

Questions for Reflection & Discussion

1. Why does the Warring States period remain comparatively unknown in the English-speaking world, and what does that reveal about our historical priorities?

2. How did political fragmentation and consolidation occur simultaneously during this period?

3. In what ways did hereditary aristocracy shape early Warring States society?

4. Why was the idea of “winning without fighting” so radical in an aristocratic honor culture?

5. How did administrative and military innovations reinforce one another?

6. Was Qin’s decision to eliminate all rival states an act of necessity or of ideological conviction?

7. How did the role of the intellectual change between Confucius’s lifetime and the First Emperor’s reign?

8. What social and political pressures made merit-based advancement possible?

9. Why did the Qin dynasty collapse so quickly despite its overwhelming military success?

10. Which of the four “great questions” discussed in the episode feels most urgent in our own political moment?

For Further Investigation

• Andrew Seth Meyer, To Rule All under Heaven: A History of Classical China, from Confucius to the First Emperor (Oxford University Press, 2026)

• Liu An, The Dao of the Military: Liu An’s Art of War, translated by Andrew Meyer

• Liu An, The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Imperial China, translated by John S. Major, Sarah Queen, Andrew Meyer, Harold D. Roth

• Erica Fox Brindley, Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BCE-50 BCE (Cambridge, 2015)

• Constance A. Cook, Ancestors, Kings and the Dao (Harvard, 2017)

• J.I. Crump, Legends of the Warring States: Persuasions, Romances and Stories from Chan Kuo Ts’e (University of Michigan, 2022)

• Paul Goldin, The Art of Chinese Philosophy: Eight Classical Texts and How to Read Them (Princeton, 2020)

• Mark Edward Lewis, Violence and the Rise of Centralized States in East Asia (Cambridge, 2022)

• Li Feng, Early China: A Social and Cultural History (Cambridge, 2013)

Related Episodes

• Great State: China and the World since 1250

• The Gunpowder Revolution

Introduction

In the roughly 280 years between the death of the philosopher Confucius and the reign of the first emperor of China, one of the most profound revolutions in human history took place. It ended with the creation of an imperial system that endured, in one form or another, for more than two millennia. It also produced new traditions of thought and practice, along with enduring achievements in art, literature, and philosophy that continue to shape social life well beyond East Asia. This era—marked by sustained conflict, experimentation, and reform—was critical not only for China, but for humanity writ large.

Yet this period remains surprisingly unfamiliar in the English-speaking world. As my guest Andrew Seth Meyer notes, shelves overflow with books on classical Greece, the conquests of Alexander, or the early Roman Republic—but there has been no equivalent, synthetic account of this foundational moment in early Chinese history. To Rule All Under Heaven was written to fill that gap. In this conversation, Meyer explains how centuries of warfare forced societies to confront fundamental questions about power, administration, education, social status, and the nature of the state itself—and how the answers forged during this period reshaped not only China, but much of East Asia.

About the Guest

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

For Further Investigation

• Andrew Seth Meyer, To Rule All under Heaven: A History of Classical China, from Confucius to the First Emperor (Oxford University Press, 2026)

• Liu An, The Dao of the Military: Liu An’s Art of War, translated by Andrew Meyer

• Liu An, The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Imperial China, translated by John S. Major, Sarah Queen, Andrew Meyer, Harold D. Roth

Related Episodes

• Great State: China and the World since 1250

• The Gunpowder Revolution

Reflection Questions

1. Why might prolonged conflict have accelerated political and social innovation?

2. What problems does a bureaucratic state solve that a patrimonial one cannot?

3. How did education become politically consequential during this period?

Tags

Early China · Empire · State Formation · Bureaucracy · Intellectual History · World History

Why This Conversation Matters

The approaching 250th anniversary of the United States is not merely a challenge of commemoration. It is a test—of historians, of public institutions, and of historical thinking itself.

As the participants make clear, historians face a paradox. They are trained to complicate stories, to resist flattening the past into moral parables. Yet civic life often requires shared narratives, common reference points, and some degree of affirmation. Add to this a profound trust gap—between scholars and the public, institutions and communities, red states and blue cities—and the work becomes harder still.

This roundtable does not offer slogans or programs. Instead, it models something rarer: historians thinking out loud about limits, tradeoffs, and responsibilities. What follows is less a roadmap than a set of bearings.

Before turning to the conversation itself, think through these questions:

1. When does historical honesty build trust—and when does it undermine it?

2. Is the task of public history to persuade with argument, to inform with facts, or to deliver judgments?

What would it mean to treat the 250th anniversary not as a verdict on the past, but as an invitation to think?

Throughlines

1. Trust Is the Central Problem

Across institutions and states, participants return again and again to trust—not partisan alignment, not even disagreement over facts. Communities disengage when they feel talked at, caricatured, or managed by distant experts. Trust grows most reliably when historians show their work, acknowledge uncertainty, and resist the temptation to begin with moral judgment rather than shared inquiry.

2. Does Complexity Have a Cost?

Complexity is not free. While historians rightly resist simplification, several speakers acknowledge that complexity introduced without time, narrative structure, or pedagogical care can feel evasive or condescending. Public history requires difficult decisions about what complexity can be responsibly introduced now—and what must be postponed rather than gestured at superficially.

3. Primary Sources Do Not Speak for Themselves

Appeals to “letting the sources speak” mask the unavoidable fact of interpretation. Selection, framing, and juxtaposition are themselves arguments, whether acknowledged or not. The ethical task of the historian is therefore not neutrality, but transparency: making clear how conclusions are reached, what alternatives exist, and where reasonable disagreement remains.

4. Order Matters in Difficult Conversations

A recurring insight from community conversations is that sequence matters as much as substance. Beginning with shared values, local stories, or familiar experiences can create space for harder truths later. Leading with condemnation or abstraction often closes doors before they open, even when the underlying critique is historically sound.

5. Alienation Is Not Always an Accident

Several participants note that alienation can be cultivated—and even rewarded. Political polarization, institutional branding, and fundraising models can all incentivize grievance and moral sorting. The 250th offers an opportunity to resist this dynamic, but only if historians consciously refuse to build engagement strategies around outrage or exclusion.

6. Distortion vs. Judgment

The discussion of de Gaulle and the history he created of France’s resistance during the Second World War raises hard questions. Is omission always distortion? Can there be such a thing as a noble lie? Political actors may simplify for strategic reasons, but historians cannot evade responsibility for the consequences of simplification. What ultimately distinguishes judgment from distortion is whether simplification is oriented toward understanding—or toward control and mobilization.

7. The Local Is Where History Becomes Real

Again and again, the most promising 250th projects are local, participatory, and modest in scale. Mapping Revolutionary graves, reading foundational texts aloud, or hosting community conversations roots history in place rather than ideology. These efforts do not tell people what to think; they give them something tangible to do with the past.

Questions for Reflection & Discussion

1. Is it possible to tell a unifying national story without smoothing over injustice?

2. When does complexity illuminate—and when does it paralyze understanding?

3. Should public historians aim to make arguments, or to host arguments?

4. How much simplification is ethically permissible in museum spaces?

5. What role should shared civic texts (like the Declaration) still play today?

6. Can trust be rebuilt once an institution is perceived as partisan?

7. Is alienation something historians should challenge—or simply acknowledge?

8. Are there circumstances where “leaving things out” serves the public good?

9. What distinguishes historical interpretation from political messaging?

10. What would success look like for the 250th—not institutionally, but civically?

    Know someone who cares about history, civic life, or how we talk about the past in public? Share this conversation with them. Historically Thinking grows best the old-fashioned way: by thoughtful recommendation.

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For Further Investigation

On Trust, Expertise, and Public Life

• Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise – A provocative account of why expert authority has eroded, and what that means for democratic culture.

• Naomi Oreskes, Why Trust Science? – the social character of scientific knowledge.

On Historical Thinking and Civic Education

• Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts – The foundational text for understanding why historical thinking is difficult—and why it matters. It is the reason why this podcast exists.

• Digital Inquiry Group – Practical tools and research on sourcing, context, and evidence for history education.

On Public Memory and Commemoration

• Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History – A classic study of how societies remember and rearrange the past.

• American Association for State and Local History: 250th Anniversary Resources – Case studies and toolkits especially relevant to local 250th projects.

Introduction

Welcome to the first-ever Historically Thinking Roundtable. Given that it is now 2026, it seemed appropriate to devote this conversation to the 250th anniversary of the United States—and to the question of how historians can be involved in its commemoration.

Difficulties in doing so arise from at least two sources. One is political and cultural. Historians, like most academics, represent a relatively small slice of the American political pie. In an intensely partisan moment, academics are also among the least trusted people in public life—ranking alongside members of Congress in recent polling. It is easy, and perhaps natural, for professionals in universities and cultural institutions to respond defensively to this distrust. But beginning from a posture of attack and defense rarely produces good results.

The second difficulty is intellectual. Historians are trained to tell the whole story of the past, however complicated and messy. Anything less can feel like distortion. Yet civic life arguably requires an element of gratitude as well as critique, and those instincts do not always sit easily together. These tensions are felt most acutely by historians working in public-facing roles—especially in state historical societies, museums, and archives—who must navigate complexity, trust, and public responsibility at the same time.

With me to discuss these challenges, and how they might be addressed, are five historians working at the intersection of scholarship, public life, and civic memory.

About the Guests

• Bill Peterson, Director of the State Historical Society of North Dakota

• Trait Thompson, Executive Director of the Oklahoma Historical Society; podcast host

• Ben Jones, South Dakota State Historian and Director of the South Dakota Historical Society

• Ryan Cole, historian and speechwriter for the U.S. Senate; author of The Last Adieu: Lafayette’s Triumphant Return

• Jill Weiss Simins, Historian and Director of Special Projects, Indiana State Archives

Together, they bring perspectives from across the Midwest and Plains states on what America 250 might become—and what it should avoid.

For Further Investigation

• American Association for State and Local History (AASLH): America 250 resources

Related Episodes

• Civic Bargain—Brook Manville and Josiah Ober on democracy, self-rule, and civic renewal

• Can There Ever Be History for the Common Good?—Jonathan Zimmerman and Eliot Cohen discuss the role of patriotism and civic education in the teaching of history

• Public Historian—Amanda Roper on preserving places, and stories that matter

Reflection Questions

1. Why does distrust of historians matter for public commemoration?

2. Can civic gratitude and historical complexity coexist without distortion?

3. What responsibilities do public historians have that differ from academic historians?

4. How might America 250 succeed—or fail—at the local level?

Tags

America 250 · Public History · Civic Memory · Historical Trust · Museums · State Historical Societies · Historical Thinking

Introduction

He was, at various points in his life, known as Gaius Octavius Thurinus, Gaius Julius Caesar, and Caesar Augustus. He called himself princeps, the first man in Rome; the Roman Senate would eventually call him pater patriae, the father of his country. Heir to his great-uncle Julius Caesar, this nineteen-year-old was dropped into the tumult of Roman political violence and emerged from it, decades later, the sole and undisputed victor after a generation of civil war.

He murdered hundreds—probably thousands—and then became the founder of a new Roman system that brought peace, stability, and prosperity to Rome’s citizens and subjects. He was tyrannical and generous, cruel and clever, manipulative and restrained. Few political figures have combined such sustained violence with such enduring institutional success. Fewer still created a political system that lasted centuries beyond their own lifetime.

Understanding Augustus, as Adrian Goldsworthy makes clear, requires abandoning simple moral verdicts. It means resisting the temptation to read his career backward—from peaceful old age to feral youth—or to reduce him to a single interpretive frame, whether heroic founder or revolutionary dictator. It also means taking seriously the ways Romans understood names, titles, and appearances, and how Augustus himself manipulated all three.

About the Guest

Adrian Goldsworthy is a historian of the ancient world and the author of numerous works of ancient history and historical fiction. His book Augustus: First Emperor of Rome has just been reissued in a second edition. This conversation marks his sixth appearance on the Historically Thinking podcast.

For Further Investigation

• Adrian Goldsworthy, Augustus: First Emperor of Rome (2nd ed.)

• Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2002)

• Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, translated by Tom Holland (Penguin, 2025)

• Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles (Penguin, 2008)

Related Episodes

• Julius Caesar, Historian— Adrian Goldsworthy on the conqueror as historian

• The War That Made the Roman Empire— Barry Strauss on the struggle between Augustus and Mark Anthony for control of the Roman Empire

• Mortal Republic— Ed Watts on how the Roman Republic fell apart

Reflection Questions

1. Why does Goldsworthy resist calling Augustus simply a “revolutionary” or a “tyrant”?

2. How do names—Octavius, Caesar, Augustus—shape both ancient and modern interpretations of his power?

3. Why did Augustus’s willingness to perform the tedious work of governance matter so much?

4. What role did exhaustion and longing for stability play in the acceptance of his regime?

Tags

Augustus · Roman Empire · Roman Republic · Ancient History · Political Power · Biography · Adrian Goldsworthy

Listen First

If you haven’t yet listened to Wednesday’s episode, this reflection will make more sense after hearing the conversation with Susan Wise Bauer on her new book The Great Shadow

Subscribe now

Throughlines

Sickness, Susan Wise Bauer insists, is not a marginal experience in human history. but a constant one which is also perennially mysterious. Injuries are intelligible: a fall, a blow, a wound. Sickness is not. From the earliest civilizations to the present, people have awakened ill without warning, watched others recover inexplicably while they declined, and struggled to understand why bodies fail when no visible violence has been done. This persistent mystery, Bauer argues, has shaped how humans explain causation, responsibility, guilt, authority, and even moral worth.

Doctors, treatments, and theories matter, but they are not the center of gravity of Bauer’s history. Instead, she focuses on what sickness felt like to those who endured it and how that experience reshaped their fears, hopes, and expectations. Histories that retroactively diagnose or dismiss past explanations miss the point. What mattered to sufferers was not whether an explanation was “correct,” but whether it accounted for their pain and offered meaning in the face of uncertainty.

This emphasis reframes familiar debates about human progress. While early humans did get sick, Bauer explains, they were largely spared epidemic disease. Density, settlement, grain consumption, domesticated animals, and stored food—all hallmarks of civilization—create the conditions that allow sickness to persist and spread. The transition to settled life, not merely the rise of cities, made illness endemic.

From there, the conversation turned to guilt. Across cultures and centuries, sickness has rarely been morally neutral. Ancient ontological views treated disease as an external assault—by gods, demons, or curses—while later humoral theories located illness inside the body as imbalance. Yet in both frameworks, responsibility remained. Whether sickness came from without or within, someone had done something wrong. Bauer traces how this logic persists into modern life, shaping how societies blame the sick, moralize recovery, and reassure themselves that proper behavior guarantees safety.

In this moral landscape, doctors assumed priestly roles from the beginning of the profession. Their authority, language, training, and rituals echo older religious structures of mediation and explanation. From classical philosophy to medieval theology to modern popular culture, the physician becomes the interpreter of suffering, the bearer of specialized knowledge, and the figure whose authority is difficult to question without social cost.

The long dominance of humoral theory illustrates how explanatory systems endure even when empirically weak. For nearly two millennia, illness was understood as imbalance among blood, phlegm, and bile, influenced by environment, diet, and temperament. Even today, traces remain in everyday language and habits. Humoral thinking did not eliminate guilt; it relocated it. If you were sick, you were still at fault—eating wrongly, living improperly, failing to regulate yourself.

Pandemics exposed the fragility of these frameworks. The Black Death shattered confidence without replacing explanation with certainty. Competing theories—astral influence, poisonous vapors, deliberate poisoning—circulated simultaneously. Fear flourished, and scapegoating followed, especially of Jewish communities. Bauer emphasizes that when causes are unknowable, fear searches for targets.

The conversation then traces the rise of drugs, vaccines, and modern medicine—not as a smooth ascent toward enlightenment, but as a series of responses driven by pain, fear, and hope. Early drugs promised relief rather than cure; opiates thrived because they eased suffering, even at great cost. Vaccines marked a turning point because they required trust: they worked in ways patients could not feel or immediately verify. Resistance, Bauer notes, was not irrational but rooted in lived experience and uncertainty.

The twentieth century briefly seemed to break history’s pattern. Antibiotics and vaccines produced what historians call the Pax Antibiotica, a short-lived era when sickness appeared conquerable. For those born into it, illness became an inconvenience rather than an existential threat. But that confidence proved fragile. Antibiotic resistance, emerging viruses, and COVID shattered the illusion. The “great shadow” of sickness returned—not as a novelty, but as a memory resurfacing.

In the final moments of the conversation, Bauer reflects on continuity. Technology alters the scale and speed of disease, but human responses remain strikingly consistent. Fear, blame, moralization, and the desire for control recur again and again. Sickness, she suggests, is not merely a biological fact. It is a mirror in which societies repeatedly see themselves.

Reflection Questions

1. Why does Bauer argue that sickness, rather than injury, has been more influential in shaping human thought and culture?

2. How does focusing on the experience of sufferers change the way we read historical accounts of disease?

3. In what ways did settled life make humans more vulnerable to illness than did nomadic existence?

4. Why does guilt persist across very different explanatory systems for sickness?

5. How do modern attitudes toward illness still reflect ancient ontological or humoral assumptions?

6. What parallels does Bauer draw between medical authority and religious authority, and why do they matter?

7. Why did the Black Death produce violence without understanding?

8. How did early drugs and pain relief reshape expectations about illness and responsibility?

9. Why were vaccines uniquely difficult for patients to trust, historically and today?

10. What does the idea of the Pax Antibiotica help us understand about contemporary reactions to COVID and emerging diseases?

Resources for Further Investigation

• Susan Wise Bauer, The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)

• —The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

• —The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

• —The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

• —The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory

• — The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home (4th ed., 2024)

• —The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had