Why This Conversation Matters

We often call the nineteenth century the age of steam. Railroads crossed continents, steamships joined ports, and factories filled the sky with smoke. Yet the world created by these technologies remained profoundly dependent upon animals. The century that began as an Age of Steam and ended as an Age of Electricity was, throughout its decades, an Age of the Horse.

Horses and their equine relatives supplied the connective power that made industrial society function. They transported people through cities, moved freight between and within railroads and warehouses, hauled agricultural products to market, worked inside mines, and pulled fire engines toward burning buildings.

The Great Horse Flu of 1872–73 exposed that dependence. When horses became sick, the economy began to stop. The resulting crisis crossed the boundaries separating environmental, economic, political, medical, and animal history.

As you consider the conversation, ask:

• What forms of labor become invisible when a technology works reliably?

• How does a disease become a social and political event rather than merely a biological one?

• What dependencies in our own world would become visible only after they failed?

Throughlines

The conversation begins by reconstructing a world built upon horse power. In the 1870s, horses, mules, and donkeys performed many of the tasks now assigned to internal-combustion engines. They pulled streetcars and wagons, moved goods through warehouses, hauled fire engines, powered machinery, and worked underground in mines. Steam transportation actually increased the demand for horses because the proliferation of railroads and ships required even more animals to complete the shorter connections between ports, stations, businesses, and consumers.

Humans and horses inhabited the same environments. Stables and carriage houses stood behind homes. Streets and alleys were designed to accommodate horse-drawn vehicles. Hay markets, livery businesses, veterinary services, and corpse-removal contractors formed essential parts of the urban economy. The city was also shaped by the habits of horses. Horses are highly social and mobile animals. Their work and habits (communicating constantly through noise) brought them constantly into contact with one another, creating ideal conditions for a respiratory virus to spread.

The outbreak began in September 1872 in the agricultural townships north of Toronto. Andrews argues that the extraordinarily high infection rate points to a novel influenza variant. The region combined wild waterfowl, domesticated animals, intensive agriculture, imported breeds, and ambitious livestock improvement. Viral evolution remained contingent—the new variant might have appeared elsewhere—but a globalizing agricultural economy created abundant opportunities for reassortment and transmission.

Once the disease reached Toronto, it spread with remarkable speed. Horses existed to move, and their movements carried the virus through cities, farms, markets, transportation corridors, and international borders. News traveled faster still. Telegraph networks and wire services ensured that people generally read about the epizootic before it reached them. Andrews’s research draws upon thousands of digitized newspaper reports, allowing him to follow both the disease and the information surrounding it.

The epidemic created a conflict between animal welfare and economic survival. Sick horses needed rest, warmth, food, and care. But working-class carters, cab drivers, and small operators often depended upon one or two animals for their daily income. As the supply of healthy horses contracted, the price of hauling rose dramatically. Continuing to work a sick animal could mean the difference between feeding a family and losing a livelihood.

The recently organized animal-protection movement attempted to intervene. Henry Bergh and the ASPCA used publicity, public shaming, and police authority against people and corporations that continued working sick horses. Initial sympathy for the animals gradually collided with public frustration as transportation and commerce remained disrupted. The controversy revealed how concern for animal suffering could become entangled with class power when reformers judged the choices of people who possessed few alternatives.

Death created another crisis. Influenza itself was not usually fatal, but pneumonia, bronchitis, overwork, and immune complications killed large numbers of horses. With the corpses of horses piling up, cities lacked sufficient healthy animals to remove the dead ones. Offal contractors using teams of oxen hauled carcasses away, while an extensive rendering economy converted hides, bones, hair, fat, and other remains into glue, handles, strings, industrial materials, and even into products used in sugar refining.

The outbreak also struck at the unsettled economy of the Reconstruction South. Farms and plantations depended upon equines to move cotton, tobacco, and sugar into commercial networks. Warehouses, cotton presses, rail connections, river landings, and ports required horse or mule power at every stage. The Civil War had already destroyed enormous numbers of Southern animals. Now illness disrupted recovering herds and delayed the movement of crops.

Andrews argues that these interruptions helped prepare the ground for the depression that followed the Panic of 1873. The horse flu did not single-handedly cause the financial collapse. But repeated local declines in production, the Great Boston Fire, broken supply chains, and accumulating losses made an already vulnerable economy less capable of absorbing a financial shock. The ensuing depression had profound consequences for Reconstruction and the willingness of Northern voters to sustain federal intervention in the South.

The disease followed different patterns farther west. It traveled rapidly through corridors of settlement but appears to have affected Indigenous horse herds differently. Native horses were less frequently confined in crowded stables, may have been worked differently, and often possessed different breeding histories. Restrictions upon Indigenous mobility may also have slowed transmission. At the same time, Native communities faced crises so severe that horse sickness did not always receive much attention in official sources.

By the fall of 1873, the outbreak had largely petered out after reaching British Columbia, Mexico, Central America, and other regions. Yet its effects continued. Horses suffered lingering illness, later outbreaks were compared with the “epizootic,” and nineteenth-century Americans remembered the crisis for decades. Modern genetic studies suggest that the 1870s may also have marked an important moment in the evolution of influenza across several species.

The conversation concludes with the relationship between this history and COVID. Andrews began the project before 2020, but the pandemic sharpened his awareness that outbreaks do not merely cause events. They reveal structures, dependencies, inequalities, and conflicts that were already present. His GIS maps similarly show the disease moving through North America like a wave, following the infrastructures of settlement and commerce. The Great Horse Flu becomes not simply a story about sick horses, but a way of seeing an entire society.

Questions for Reflection & Discussion

1. Why did the spread of steam power increase rather than immediately reduce the demand for horses?

2. What kinds of labor did horses, mules, and donkeys perform in nineteenth-century cities and industries?

3. How did the physical and social organization of horse-powered society encourage the spread of influenza?

4. What conditions near Toronto may have enabled a novel influenza variant to evolve?

5. Why does Andrews emphasize both biological contingency and economic structure when explaining the outbreak?

6. How did telegraphs, wire services, and newspapers shape the public experience of the epizootic?

7. Why was resting sick horses economically difficult for working-class owners and drivers?

8. What does the response of the animal-protection movement reveal about the relationship between humanitarian reform and class?

9. How did cities dispose of dead horses, and what does that process reveal about the nineteenth-century industrial economy?

10. In what ways did horse sickness disrupt the agricultural and commercial systems of the Reconstruction South?

11. How persuasive is Andrews’s argument that the outbreak contributed to the depression following the Panic of 1873?

12. Why might the disease have behaved differently among Indigenous horse herds and in less integrated regions of North America?

13. What did writing during COVID allow Andrews to recognize about the relationship between epidemics and social conflict?

14. Why was the Great Horse Flu remembered for decades and then largely forgotten?

15. What essential forms of labor or infrastructure in our own society become visible only when they fail?

For Further Investigation

Books

• Thomas G. Andrews, The Great Horse Flu: A Forgotten Contagion and the Fate of Reconstruction America (University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

• —, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Harvard University Press, 2008).

• —, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies (Harvard University Press, 2015).

• Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

• Jessica Wang, Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840–1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

• William T. Taylor, Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History (University of California Press, 2024).

• Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (Hill and Wang, 2001).

Maps and Online Resources

• Adoniram B. Judson, “History and Course of the Epizootic Among Horses upon the North American Continent,” American Public Health Association Reports 1 (1873).

• “Map of the Great Epizootic, 1872–1873,” York University.

• Mary Baxter, “What a Horse Flu Reveals about Societies at the Dawn of Industrialization.”

Related Episodes

• Horse: Timothy Winegard on the animal that transformed human history.

• Mosquito: Timothy Winegard on the most lethal predator in human history.

• Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Jessica Wang on rabies, medicine, animals, and life in nineteenth-century New York

• The Great Shadow: Susan Wise Bauer on How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy

• Pox Romana: Colin Elliott on the Plague That Shook the Roman World

Tags: Thomas G. Andrews, Great Horse Flu, Equine Influenza, Horses, Reconstruction, Panic of 1873, Animal History, Environmental History, Capitalism, Urban History, Epidemics, Human-Animal Relations

Introduction

In September 1872, in the countryside north of Toronto, horses began to fall ill. Their noses ran, they coughed, and their breathing became “labored and severe.” In the worst cases, the sufferers could do nothing other than stand in their stalls “as if benumbed and paralyzed.” Eventually, an increasing number of them began to die.

Within days of the illness being identified, it was spreading throughout the new Canadian Confederation. By mid-October it had invaded New England and upstate New York; by late October it had nearly ended traffic on the Erie Canal. In early November it reached New York City and Boston. Eventually, it would spread through nearly every corner of North America and into parts of the Southern Hemisphere.

About the Guest

Thomas G. Andrews is professor of history and faculty director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research and teaching encompass environmental, animal, Indigenous, labor, and western American history.

He is the author of Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the George Perkins Marsh Prize, and Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies. His latest book reconstructs the extraordinary equine influenza outbreak of 1872–73 and uses it to reconsider capitalism, urbanization, animal labor, Reconstruction, and the Panic of 1873.

For Further Investigation

• Thomas G. Andrews, The Great Horse Flu: A Forgotten Contagion and the Fate of Reconstruction America (University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

• —, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Harvard University Press, 2008).

• —, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies (Harvard University Press, 2015).

• Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

• Jessica Wang, Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840–1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

• William T. Taylor, Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History (University of California Press, 2024).

• Mary Baxter, “What a Horse Flu Reveals about Societies at the Dawn of Industrialization,” an interview with Thomas G. Andrews for NiCHE.

Related Episodes

• Horse: Timothy Winegard on the animal that transformed human history.

• Mosquito: Timothy Winegard on the most lethal predator in human history.

• Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Jessica Wang on rabies, medicine, animals, and life in nineteenth-century New York

Tags: Thomas G. Andrews, Great Horse Flu, Equine Influenza, Horses, Reconstruction, Panic of 1873, Animal History, Environmental History, Capitalism, Urban History, History of Medicine, American West

Why This Conversation Matters

Modern war is usually described through weapons, production, transportation, and manpower. But armies are composed of people, and people require more than ammunition and food. They need information, diversion, consolation, and some means of remaining connected to the lives they left behind.

During the Second World War, the United States Army decided that books could help meet those needs. Under Ray Trautman, its Library Section constructed a global system that delivered books and magazines to millions of service members. Its most remarkable products were the Armed Services Editions: complete books printed cheaply in pocket-sized formats and distributed wherever American forces went.

Throughlines

The conversation begins with the improbable formation of Ray Trautman. He grew up in a tiny Ohio farming community without a library and with few books. His family could not afford to send him easily to college, and his education was repeatedly interrupted by financial difficulty. Yet the scarcity of books seems to have intensified his desire for them. Reading allowed him to visit places and encounter lives otherwise unavailable to him.

His early career brought together experiences that would later make him unusually suited to become the Army’s chief librarian. He studied geology, received a commission through the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, managed bookstores, and won a coveted place as an Army flying cadet. Poor eyesight ended his flying career, but he eventually joined the Civilian Conservation Corps. After recovering from a serious illness—and briefly working at the Library of Congress—he became an educational adviser in the CCC. There he built camp libraries, taught men to read, and used books to help them imagine lives beyond the Depression. His work in the CCC became a small-scale version of what he would later attempt throughout the Army.

After earning a library science degree at Columbia, and being hired as director of the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, Trautman possessed an unusual combination of military, bookselling, educational, and library experience. In 1940 the Army needed precisely that combination. The American Library Association had supplied troops during the First World War, but Army library services had languished during the interwar years. With the return of conscription and the rapid expansion of the armed forces, the Army appointed Trautman to revive the system.

Books initially appeared to be a practical answer to a severe morale problem. New draftees arrived at unfinished camps that lacked proper uniforms, weapons, recreational facilities, and sometimes adequate housing. Movies and live entertainment required equipment and infrastructure. Books were comparatively inexpensive, portable, and available every evening. And of course books provided information. Soldiers needed to understand the countries to which they were being sent, the societies they would encounter, and the reasons the United States was fighting. Reading could simultaneously educate, entertain, and preserve a connection with civilian life.

A world tour Trautman made in 1942 clarified the problems he faced. In the Southwest Pacific, ordinary soldiers told Trautman that they desperately wanted books and magazines. But Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Southwest Pacific Theater, had a different view. He regarded reading as a distraction and independent thought as potentially incompatible with military discipline. Moreover, books shipped into the theater took the space of bacon and bullets, the food and ammunition required to fight a war. When Trautman pressed the case, MacArthur threatened him with charges of insubordination and refused to provide cargo space for books.

MacArthur’s resistance, and the problems of shipping hardcovers, made portability essential. Trautman first experimented with miniature editions of popular magazines. He realized that a publication could be cut down to roughly three and a half by five inches—small enough for a uniform pocket—while still containing a complete book printed in two columns. If books could travel with individual soldiers, they would no longer depend upon permanent libraries or specially allocated cargo space.

The next challenge was persuading publishers to participate. Major firms made their profits from hardcovers and saw little reason to produce inexpensive paperbacks. Trautman argued that millions of service members constituted an enormous potential audience. Publishers could contribute to the war while cultivating readers who might continue buying books after it. Malcolm Johnson of Doubleday and W. Warder Norton helped carry the proposal to the Council on Books in Wartime. Eventually more than seventy publishers participated. Between 1943 and 1947, the program distributed approximately 123 million copies of more than 1,300 titles.

The soldiers answered the question of whether reluctant readers would read: they did so voraciously. Books, magazines, and comics ranked behind only movies as preferred entertainment—and movies were far less consistently available. Unsurprisingly books with any kind of sexual content were pouplar, but so were books that had some connection to family life and memories of home. Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn acquired a particularly devoted readership. Copies intended to survive only a few readers passed through dozens of hands, while Smith received thousands of letters from service members explaining what the novel meant to them.

The program eventually became entangled in the politics of the 1944 election. A provision of the Soldier Voting Act attempted to prevent the government from sending troops material that might influence their votes. Because almost any discussion of public affairs could be considered political, the provision threatened to ban a vast range of books. Trautman quietly supplied publishers with information about the restrictions, allowing them to alert the public. Americans objected to denying soldiers fighting for democracy the freedom to read, and Congress amended the law.

The conversation ends by considering Trautman’s larger legacy. After the war he continued working to extend books and literacy to rural communities, prisoners, adults with limited reading skills, and people with visual impairments. His papers survived with his family and eventually reached Molly Manning after the publication of When Books Went to War. They revealed not merely a sequel to that book, but the life of a man convinced that reading should be available to everyone.

For Manning, the story offers grounds for optimism. Technologies will change, but the imaginative experience of reading remains. Books allow people to leave their immediate circumstances without physically going anywhere—an ability that was especially precious to homesick and frightened soldiers. The problem may not be that people have ceased to be potential readers. It may be that they have not yet encountered the right book.

Questions for Reflection & Discussion

1. How did the scarcity of books during Trautman’s childhood shape his later understanding of their value?

2. Which elements of Trautman’s unusually varied education and early career prepared him to become the Army’s chief librarian?

3. How did Trautman’s work in the Civilian Conservation Corps anticipate his wartime library program?

4. Why did the Army regard books as a solution to both its morale problem and its need to educate millions of civilian soldiers?

5. Why did the Victory Book Campaign fail to supply the kinds of books troops wanted and needed?

6. What did Trautman learn from his 1942 journey around the world?

7. What does his confrontation with Douglas MacArthur reveal about competing ideas of military discipline and morale?

8. Why was the physical design of the Armed Services Editions so important?

9. How did Trautman persuade publishers that supplying inexpensive books to soldiers served both patriotic and commercial purposes?

10. What do the popularity of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and the soldiers’ letters to Betty Smith reveal about reading under wartime conditions?

11. Why did the Soldier Voting Act threaten the freedom of service members to read, and how was that restriction overcome?

12. Did the Armed Services Editions help create the postwar American reading public, or did they merely reveal an appetite that already existed?

13. Is “escapist reading” a useful category, or does all reading involve temporarily escaping one’s immediate circumstances?

14. What might Trautman’s belief in finding the right book for each person contribute to contemporary debates about literacy and the future of reading?

For Further Investigation

Books

• Molly Guptill Manning, A Librarian’s War: The Man Who Fought World War II with Books and Brought the Joy of Reading to Millions (Oxford University Press, 2026).

• Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

• Molly Guptill Manning and Brian Anderson, The Best-Read Army in the World (Grolier Club, 2020).

• Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Harper & Brothers, 1943).

• Ernest Hemingway, ed., Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time (Crown, 1942).

Exhibitions and Archives

• The Grolier Club, “The Best-Read Army in the World.”

• The Library of Congress, Armed Services Editions Collection.

• John Y. Cole, “Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions,” Library of Congress.

Related Episodes

• 1942—When World War II Engulfed the Globe: Peter Fritzsche on the decisive year of a global conflict.

• Book Makers: Adam Smyth on the lives behind printed pages

• The Intellectual Life in Difficult Circumstances: Jonathan Rose on the education of the British working classes

• The Devils Will Get No Rest: James B. Conroy on Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Casablanca Conference.

Tags: Molly Guptill Manning, Ray Trautman, Armed Services Editions, World War II, Libraries, Reading, Books, Publishing History, Military History, Censorship, Literacy, Intellectual History

Introduction

On December 16, 1944, as American troops retreated or fled before advancing German soldiers on the first day of what is now known as the Battle of the Bulge, Lieutenant Colonel Ray Love Trautman found himself leading an ad hoc formation of stragglers and stranded soldiers. This might not seem strange—that’s a lieutenant colonel’s job, isn’t it? But while Ray Trautman had the rank of a lieutenant colonel, his training was that of a librarian. He was, to be sure, the Army’s chief librarian, but that was hardly preparation for combat.

This is just one of the many amazing revelations in Molly Guptill Manning’s new book, A Librarian’s War: The Man Who Fought World War II with Books and Brought the Joy of Reading to Millions. She tells the story of how Trautman, having earned a degree in library science at Columbia, joined the Army, created the largest library system in the world, and championed the Armed Services Editions of books and magazines.

This is not simply a biography of Trautman. It is also a history of the Second World War as a war of ideas, of intellectual life under some of the most difficult imaginable circumstances, and—maybe—of the future of reading.

About the Guest

Molly Guptill Manning is a historian, curator, and professor of law at New York Law School. Her scholarship examines legal history and the intersection of law and culture, with particular interests in freedom of expression, censorship, voting rights, and access to books.

She is the author of the New York Times bestseller When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II and the curator of “The Best-Read Army in the World,” an exhibition devoted to the books, magazines, newspapers, and other reading material distributed to American service members during the Second World War.

For Further Investigation

• Molly Guptill Manning, A Librarian’s War: The Man Who Fought World War II with Books and Brought the Joy of Reading to Millions (Oxford University Press, 2026).

• Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

• The Website of Molly Manning

• Molly Guptill Manning and Brian Anderson, The Best-Read Army in the World (Grolier Club, 2020).

• The Grolier Club’s online exhibition, “The Best-Read Army in the World.”

• The Library of Congress, “Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions.”

• The Library of Congress, Armed Services Editions Collection.

• Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Harper & Brothers, 1943)—one of the books most cherished by American troops.

• Ernest Hemingway, ed., Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time (Crown, 1942)—whose corrected proofs accompanied Trautman around the world.

Related Episodes

• 1942—When World War II Engulfed the Globe: Peter Fritzsche on the decisive year of a global conflict.

• Book Makers: Adam Smyth on the lives behind printed pages

• The Intellectual Life in Difficult Circumstances: Jonathan Rose on the education of the British working classes

• The Devils Will Get No Rest: James B. Conroy on Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Casablanca Conference.

Tags: Molly Guptill Manning, Ray Trautman, Armed Services Editions, World War II, Libraries, Reading, Books, Publishing History, Intellectual History

Why This Conversation Matters

Robert Gould Shaw is literally an iconic historical figure. He rides at the head of the 54th Massachusetts in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s great memorial—or, for most, he is personified by Matthew Broderick in Glory. Since icons are unchanging, his death at Fort Wagner appears to complete a story whose meaning was present from the beginning. In death an abolitionist martyr, it stands to reason that in his short life he was always preparing to be an abolitionist martyr.

Kevin Levin asks us to look again at the icon. The Shaw who emerges from his new biography was not the committed abolitionist later memory required—or assumed—him to be. He was a privileged and often aimless young man, seemingly failing to launch, who found direction in the army. He became a courageous and capable officer, but remained ambivalent about emancipation. He initially refused command of the 54th. His eventual acceptance brought together duty, ambition, family pressure, military opportunity, and perhaps a developing sense of purpose.

That does not make Shaw’s story less significant, but makes it more historically and biographically interesting. His life raises questions about the relationship between motives and actions, between individual development and historical circumstance, and between the people who lived through events and the symbols later generations made of them.

Throughlines

The conversation begins with the distance between Robert Gould Shaw and his historical image. To understand Shaw, the discussion first turns away from Fort Wagner and toward his remarkable family.

The Shaws were an old Boston family whose wealth had been built through Atlantic commerce. Robert’s parents, Frank and Sarah Shaw, used that wealth to support the reform movements of the 1840s. They were sincere abolitionists who also supported experiments such as Brook Farm, though they never surrendered the comforts of their class. Nor did their fervent opposition to slavery did not necessarily produce social intimacy with Black Bostonians. The conversation therefore distinguishes moral opposition to slavery from a belief in racial equality—and reminds us that nineteenth-century antislavery contained many different positions.

Robert did not initially share his parents’ intensity of social commitment. He spent important years of his adolescence in Europe, removed from the political crises that were radicalizing many young Americans. At Harvard he showed little interest in study, reform, or the growing sectional conflict. He rowed, joined clubs, socialized, and left without graduating. Work in the family business made him miserable. Farming, military service, and even a voyage to China appeared briefly among the futures he imagined, but nothing awoke his passion or attention.

The war did. Shaw as part of New York’s 7th Regiment traveled to Washington during the chaotic weeks after Fort Sumter, where he slept in the Capitol and met President Lincoln. He then accepted a commission in the 2nd Massachusetts, a regiment filled with men from his own social and educational world. Military life uncovered qualities not previously visible. Shaw became a disciplinarian, and proved capable of leading men under fire. He survived the Shenandoah Valley campaign, Cedar Mountain, and the Cornfield at Antietam while friends and fellow officers fell around him. Whatever else might be said about him, his physical courage was beyond dispute.

His political development was less straightforward. Shaw was a Unionist, but Levin describes him primarily as a pragmatist and sometimes an opportunist. Even after Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Shaw remained lukewarm toward emancipation and asked his mother to stop pressing the subject in her letters to him. By late 1862 he was exhausted, disillusioned, and increasingly concerned with whether his military career could progress to higher levels of rank. The conversation resists the assumption that service in the Union Army—or birth into an abolitionist family—necessarily led along a straight road toward racial egalitarianism.

When Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts, a committed antislavery politician, received permission to organize a Black regiment after the Emancipation Proclamation he offered its command to Shaw, apparently assuming that the son of Frank and Sarah Shaw shared their convictions. While Shaw initially refused, within roughly twenty-four hours he changed his mind. The evidence does not permit a simple explanation of either the denial or the reversal. Command meant promotion from captain to colonel and an opportunity to lead his own regiment, but command of a regiment of black soldiers also involved risk—to his reputation, his career, and his place among fellow officers. And his family’s expectations mattered as well.

Once committed to command, Shaw proved an effective organizer. He took pride in the regiment he was helping to create, although the conversation complicates the image presented in Glory of Shaw personally training the men from the beginning. Much of his work involved administration apart from the regiment: fundraising, meetings with Governor Andrew, and the innumerable tasks required to build a regiment. Meanwhile, as it organized, the 54th drew Black volunteers from across the North and beyond. Its march through Boston in May 1863, on its way to embarkation for the southern theater, was a public declaration that Black men would fight to destroy slavery and preserve the United States.

In South Carolina, Shaw encountered James Montgomery, perhaps the episode’s most startling character. Montgomery was both a militant abolitionist and an outspoken racist, a veteran of the struggle in Kansas who practiced a ruthless form of warfare along the Southern coast. Yet he also admired Montgomery’s energy, determination, and commitment. But Shaw was horrified when Montgomery ordered the burning of Darien, Georgia, an undefended town, for he worried that the raid would dishonor the 54th. His men, Shaw believed, were intended for more honorable service.

That opportunity came at Fort Wagner. The regiment reached Morris Island exhausted, hungry, and depleted after fighting on James Island. Nevertheless, Shaw volunteered the 54th to lead the assault, a decision Levin suggests may have been irresponsible. The attack ended with approximately forty percent of the regiment killed, wounded, or captured, including Shaw. The discussion leaves open whether his decision represented confidence in his men, concern for his own honor, military ambition, obedience to the demands of the moment, or some combination of them all.

The final movement of the conversation returns to Boston Common. Sarah Shaw helped shape the memory of her son as the committed emancipationist she had always wanted him to become. Saint-Gaudens’s memorial fixed that interpretation in bronze at a moment when national reconciliation and Confederate commemoration were pushing slavery and Black military service out of public memory. Glory presented that memory to a new generation, combining it with the story of the soldiers he commanded.

Yet Levin does not conclude by simply dismantling Shaw’s reputation. When challenged, he insists that he respects Shaw more than he did before his years of research. Shaw’s importance lies not in ideological purity, but in his place within the broad and unlikely coalition that brought slavery to an end. Biography restores the imperfect person without denying the significance of what he helped accomplish.

Questions for Reflection & Discussion

1. How did the wealth and reform commitments of the Shaw family shape Robert Gould Shaw’s early life?

2. What does the social distance between white abolitionists and Black Bostonians reveal about the varieties of nineteenth-century antislavery?

3. Why did Shaw remain comparatively detached from the sectional controversies unfolding during his youth? Does he sound more or less like other teenagers you might have known?

4. In what ways did military service give Shaw an identity and purpose that he had previously lacked?

5. How did Shaw’s conduct in the 2nd Massachusetts complicate the image of him as an aimless and self-absorbed young man?

6. Why does Levin describe Shaw as a pragmatist or opportunist rather than as a committed abolitionist?

7. What considerations may have led Shaw first to refuse and then to accept command of the 54th Massachusetts?

8. Why did Shaw object so strongly to the burning of Darien, and what did his reaction reveal about his understanding of military honor?

9. Was volunteering the exhausted 54th to lead the assault on Fort Wagner an act of courage, irresponsibility, or both?

10. How did Sarah Shaw and the Saint-Gaudens memorial shape the public memory of Robert Gould Shaw?

11. Does recovering Shaw’s mixed motives diminish his achievements, or make them more historically intelligible?

12. What does Shaw’s life suggest about the role of imperfect people and unlikely coalitions in producing major historical change?

For Further Investigation

• Kevin M. Levin, A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

• —, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

• Robert Gould Shaw, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, edited by Russell Duncan (University of Georgia Press, 1992).

• Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863–1865 (1891)

• Ray Anthony Shepard, Now or Never!: 54th Massachusetts Infantry’s War to End Slavery (Calkins Creek, 2017).

Related Episodes

• Now or Never!: Ray Anthony Shepard on the battles, sacrifices, and legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment in its fight for freedom

• Worse Than Hell: W. Fitzhugh Brundage on Civil War prisoners and prison camps

• Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on interracial life in the slaveholding South.

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

• Black Suffrage: Paul D. Escott on Lincoln’s last goal and the politics of Reconstruction

• Abolitionist Civil War: Frank Cirillo on how the abolitionist movement transformed during the Civil War, eventually destroying itself.

• Searching for Black Confederates: Kevin Levin on who fought for the South

Tags: Kevin M. Levin, Robert Gould Shaw, 54th Massachusetts, Fort Wagner, American Civil War, Emancipation, Black Soldiers, Abolitionism, Military History, Biography, Historical Memory, Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Introduction

On July 18, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts—one of the first Black regiments in the Union Army, and the first raised in the North—led an assault on Fort Wagner, one of the fortifications defending Charleston, South Carolina.

Their attack was preceded by an eight-hour bombardment that did little damage to the fort’s walls or defenders. Moving through heavy Confederate small-arms fire, with their commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, at their head, the 54th made their way up the walls and into hand-to-hand combat, but were bloodily repulsed. By the end of the action, Shaw and some 250 men had been killed, wounded, or captured.

With his death, Robert Gould Shaw became a hero of the abolitionist movement, eventually memorialized in bronze at the head of his regiment on Boston Common. But as my guest Kevin Levin argues in his new book, A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, he was a much more complicated and ambiguous person than even his contemporaries claimed him to be.

About the Guest

Kevin M. Levin is an award-winning historian and educator based in Boston. His work explores the history and memory of the Civil War, particularly the ways Americans have remembered slavery, emancipation, Black military service, and the Confederacy. His books include Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder, and now A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. He has written about Civil War history and memory online since founding Civil War Memory in 2005 and is an honorary fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

For Further Investigation

• Kevin M. Levin, A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

• —, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

• —, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (University Press of Kentucky, 2017)

• Robert Gould Shaw, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, edited by Russell Duncan (University of Georgia Press, 1992).

• Ray Anthony Shepard, Now or Never!: 54th Massachusetts Infantry’s War to End Slavery (Calkins Creek, 2017).

• The National Park Service, “The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial.”

• The National Park Service, “Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment.”

• The National Park Service, “Faces of the 54th.”

Related Episodes

• Now or Never!: Ray Anthony Shepard on the battles, sacrifices, and legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment in its fight for freedom

• Worse Than Hell: W. Fitzhugh Brundage on Civil War prisoners and prison camps

• Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on interracial life in the slaveholding South.

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

• Black Suffrage: Paul D. Escott on Lincoln’s last goal and the politics of Reconstruction

Tags: Kevin M. Levin, Robert Gould Shaw, 54th Massachusetts, Fort Wagner, Civil War, Emancipation, Black Soldiers, Abolitionism, Civil War Memory, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Glory, Historical Memory

Content Note: This Friday Reflection discusses rape, sexual assault, and physical violence.

Why This Conversation Matters

It is easy to judge a system of justice by asking whether it recognized a wrong. But is harder to ask whether it possessed the authority, institutions, and practical means to do anything about that wrong once it had been recognized. In the early 21st century United States, we often assume both things; but we should not.

This distinction lies at the center of Sara McDougall’s reconstruction of the case of a woman named Jehanne’s. The officials of fifteenth-century Dijon did not simply dismiss the allegations of this pregnant immigrant from Champagne to their city. An investigator met her, recorded her testimony, questioned her neighbors, and pursued the men she accused. Jehanne herself appeared before those men and identified them. The machinery of justice ground forward. Yet whether it could deliver justice was another question entirely.

This is what makes Jehanne’s story more than an account of crime in the Middle Ages. It is a conversation about what happens in the uncertain space between testimony and judgment. It reminds us that the rule of law is not merely a collection of good principles. It is an achievement of institutions, authority, habits, and capacities whose absence is felt most sharply by those with the fewest alternatives.

Throughlines

The conversation begins with the difficulty of Jehanne’s story. It involves sexual assault, extreme violence, and cruelty that can seem safely confined to “the Middle Ages.” Yet neither Sara McDougall nor I wanted to place it at a comfortable historical distance. There are people suffering comparable violence in our own communities whose lives remain invisible to many of us. While some of this story is distinctly medieval, some of it is about humanity.

From there we turn to Jaques Borestal, the substitute prosecutor whose papers preserve Jehanne’s testimony. Borestal combined some of the work of an investigator and a prosecutor, spending decades examining allegations of theft, assault, abduction, murder, and rape. We encounter Jehanne because he wrote down her words. McDougall therefore structures her book as a police procedural, following his investigation while reminding us that the archive was created by officials rather than by the people we most wish to hear.

Borestel, it is true, worked within a legal order. Dijon had laws, courts, officials, and a jail. But their authority was sharply limited. Arrest could depend upon whether officials believed they could safely seize the accused. Suspects escaped from jail or were released when it became overcrowded. Punishment usually meant fines, whipping, humiliation, or banishment, while mercy and pardon could be extended even after appalling crimes. The system sought to restore social order, and offer the possibility of repentance and rehabilitation, but its efforts often seem frighteningly inadequate and haphazard.

Borestel began with little more than a report that a pregnant woman had been abducted and assaulted. He searched until he found Jehanne in a widow’s home. Everything that followed depended upon what he observed, what Jehanne told him, and what her neighbors remembered. McDougall preserves the uncertainties in these accounts. Details about Jehanne’s origins, marriage, appearance, and circumstances emerge gradually, and they do not always fit neatly together.

Eventually the conversation reaches the decision at the center of the book. Others questioned about sexual assaults might be willing to testify at first, but then unwilling to make formal complaints. Jehanne chose differently. After giving birth she summoned Borestel again to correct and supplement her testimony. Then, most incredibly of all, she faced the accused men in prison and identified them. She demanded punishment, but not their execution; she did not want their deaths on her conscience. She insisted upon justice while limiting the vengeance sought in her name.

Finally, McDougall challenges the familiar claim that medieval victims of rape were invariably blamed or disbelieved. The records reveal something more complicated. Officials and neighbors could believe that an assault had occurred. The harder question was what an unreliable judicial system could do afterward. Similar weaknesses plagued prosecutions for murder, theft, and other forms of violence. What can appear to be a failure peculiar to sexual crimes was also part of a broader failure of institutional capacity.

Jehanne’s story therefore gives us neither a simple tale of medieval barbarity nor a comforting account of justice achieved. It gives us a survivor who spoke, an investigator who listened, neighbors who helped, and institutions whose power remained uncertain. Between belief and justice lay a distance that neither Jehanne’s courage nor Borestel’s persistence could entirely overcome.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. What is the difference between a society recognizing an injustice and possessing the institutional capacity to remedy it?

2. How does Jehanne’s status as an immigrant, a pregnant woman, and a person without powerful local family connections simultaneously increase her vulnerability and affect her willingness to testify?

3. What are the advantages and dangers of encountering Jehanne primarily through records created by Jaques Borestel?

4. How should historians write about people whose testimony survives only through the words and categories of officials?

5. What does Borestel’s long career suggest about the possibilities and limitations of public authority in medieval Dijon?

6. Why might victims or witnesses decline to pursue a complaint even when authorities appear willing to listen?

7. How should we understand Jehanne’s demand for punishment alongside her refusal to seek the death penalty?

8. What does the accused man’s offer to become godfather to Jehanne’s child suggest about violence, remorse, restitution, and the human capacity for moral contradiction? Or does it simply suggest something about the human capacity for cruelty?

9. When should a historian offer a plausible interpretation, and when is it more responsible to leave a mystery unresolved?

10. How does placing rape alongside murder, theft, assault, and abduction change our understanding of the failures of medieval justice?

11. Why are historical myths about the treatment of sexual violence so persistent, even when the surviving evidence complicates them?

12. What does Jehanne’s case reveal about the relationship between individual courage and institutional power?

For Further Investigation

• Sara McDougall, Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor (Princeton University Press, 2026)

• —, Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230 (Oxford University Press, 2016)

• —, Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late-Medieval Champagne (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)

• Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, and Adultery, 1100–1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

• Ruth Mazo Karras and Katherine E. Pierpont, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, 4th ed. (Routledge, 2023)

• Trevor Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, 1200–1550 (Longman, 2001)

Related Episodes

• The Saint, the Count, and Sourcing: Leah Shopkow on recovering the past by reading difficult sources like a historian

• House of Lilies: Justine Firnhaber-Baker on the Capetian dynasty and the making of medieval France

• Mass Expulsion: Rowan Dorin on law, religious authority, and the spread of expulsion in medieval Europe

• A Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on using court records to recover lives shaped by violence and unequal power

Content Warning: This episode contains frank discussions of rape, sexual assault, and physical violence and is not suitable for children.

Introduction

On a winter morning in 1472, a prosecutor arrived at a poor widow’s home in the St. Nicholas district of the city of Dijon. He was there to interview a pregnant woman named Jehanne, an immigrant from the county of Lorraine. She had reportedly been abducted and sexually assaulted by several men, and Jacques Borestal–technically the substitute prosecutor of Dijon–began his investigation by taking Jehanne’s testimony.

This was far from the first such case that Borestal had investigated. For about thirty years he had investigated dozens of allegations of rape, as well as dozens more of theft, violence, assault and abduction. Many times his investigations of rape ended when, asking the victim if she wished make a criminal complaint, she declined to do so. But Jehanne said that she did.

This decision is at the heart of Sara McDougall’s new book Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of Medieval Survivor. It is a window into a world of cruelty and repentance, of heart-stoppingly casual violence in which “safety and security remained impossible dreams”, and in which nearly everyone in society had extraordinarily limited options for justice and restitution.

About the Guest

Sara McDougall is Professor of History at John Jay College of the City University of New York, and a member of the faculty in Biography and Memoir, French, History, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She studies gender and justice in the Middle Ages, with particular attention to women’s encounters with legal and religious institutions in medieval France. Her previous books are Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230 and Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late-Medieval Champagne.

For Further Investigation

• Sara McDougall, Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor (Princeton University Press, 2026)

• —, Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230 (Oxford University Press, 2016)

• —, Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late-Medieval Champagne (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)

• Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, and Adultery, 1100–1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

• Ruth Mazo Karras and Katherine E. Pierpont, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, 4th ed. (Routledge, 2023)

• Trevor Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, 1200–1550 (Longman, 2001)

Related Episodes

• The Saint, the Count, and Sourcing: Leah Shopkow on recovering the past by reading difficult sources like a historian

• House of Lilies: Justine Firnhaber-Baker on the Capetian dynasty and the making of medieval France

• Mass Expulsion: Rowan Dorin on law, religious authority, and the spread of expulsion in medieval Europe

• A Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on using court records to recover lives shaped by violence and unequal power

Tags

Sara McDougall, Justice for Jehanne, Medieval History, Medieval France, Dijon, Women’s History, Legal History, History of Crime, Sexual Violence, Gender History, Rule of Law, Historical Method

Why This Conversation Matters

Modern democracies have an uneasy (at best) relationship with exceptional leaders. We celebrate them while worrying about them. We praise political talent while distrusting anyone who seems too successful at acquiring influence. While we tell ourselves that institutions or the people matter more than individuals, yet we continue to search for men and women capable of changing history.

The Athenians wrestled with precisely the same tension; certainly they were the first to do so in a consciously democratic system, one much more democratic than our own. No figure embodies it more completely than Pericles. He spent decades shaping the destiny of democratic Athens, yet he never became a king, a tyrant, or even the holder of a permanent office, because he couldn’t be. He remained, in theory and often in practice, one citizen among thousands. How can one person lead a democracy without ceasing to be its servant? And did Pericles do that?

Throughlines

One of the pleasures of talking with Paul Cartledge is that he has spent a lifetime resisting the temptation to make the ancient world resemble our own. He is perfectly willing to explain Greek democracy, but he has no interest in pretending that it looked anything like Westminster or Washington. As we talked about Pericles, I found myself repeatedly struck by how strange Athens really was, and by how difficult it is to fit Pericles into any familiar political category.

Take the word “demagogue.” Today it is almost entirely an insult. To call someone a demagogue is to accuse him of manipulating popular opinion, flattering crowds, or appealing to prejudice rather than reason. Yet Cartledge reminds us that the Greek dēmagōgos originally meant nothing more sinister than “leader of the people.” Whether such leadership was admirable or dangerous depended less on the word itself than on what the leader did with the confidence he had earned. Somewhere along the way the office became a slur.

That small linguistic shift says something larger about democracy itself. Democracies need leaders. They cannot function without individuals capable of persuading, organizing, negotiating, and occasionally inspiring. Yet they are also suspicious of those same individuals, for the successful democratic politician always seems in danger of becoming too influential. The line between leadership and manipulation is rarely obvious while events are unfolding, and it’s clear from even the limited extant sources Pericles lived on precisely that line. He may even have enjoyed living there.

Athens was a direct democracy. There were no political parties, no permanent ministries, no elected parliament sitting throughout the year. Thousands of citizens assembled in person to debate and vote. A politician succeeded not because he commanded a bureaucracy as an executive but because, time after time, he persuaded his fellow citizens to follow his advice.

That makes Pericles all the more remarkable, because his influence rested almost entirely on reputation. Every proposal had to survive debate. Every military command required election. Every policy remained vulnerable to reversal. Even the most respected citizen governed—or remained resident in the city— only so long as other citizens wished him to do so

It is tempting, therefore, to describe Pericles as the architect of Athens. Certainly later generations often have. The Parthenon, the Long Walls, the empire, the flowering of drama and philosophy—all have become “Periclean.” Yet Cartledge repeatedly urges caution. Athenians built the Parthenon. Athenians voted the funds for building projects. Athenians maintained the empire. Pericles influenced these decisions, but influence is not quite the same thing as authorship.

One of the most revealing moments in our conversation came when we considered the counterfactual: what if Pericles had never existed? There might indeed be a Periclean-shaped hole in Athenian history, but Cartledge argues that Athens itself would still remain recognizable. That is perhaps the highest compliment one can pay both to Pericles and to Athenian democracy, although perhaps a backhanded one.

Another paradox emerged in Pericles’ private life. Publicly he championed a citizenship law restricting political membership to those born of two Athenian parents. Privately he formed a lifelong partnership with Aspasia of Miletus, a foreign woman who could never become his legal wife under the very legislation which he championed. Cartledge suggested something more interesting than simple hypocrisy. Pericles appears repeatedly as a man willing to violate social convention while defending political principle. Whether that makes him admirable or merely eccentric remains open to debate.

Perhaps the greatest surprise, however, is how little we finally know about him. The buildings survive. Thucydides preserves speeches. Plutarch collects anecdotes centuries later. Comic playwrights mock the shape of his head. But the man himself continually retreats behind the evidence. Toward the end of our conversation I asked whether this is not the fate of every biographer and every biographical subject. Cartledge agreed in part, but insisted that ancient historians face an even greater difficulty. We possess no private correspondence, no journals, no intimate reflections. We know Pericles almost entirely through the public traces he left behind.

That helps explain the haunting remark with which Cartledge concludes his biography. According to tradition, Pericles said on his deathbed that “no citizen ever put on mourning because of me.” It is an extraordinary statement, especially after a life spent directing wars, navigating political struggles, embroiling Athens in the “final conflict” with Sparta, and in a city devastated by the plague that was killing him. What did he mean? Was he claiming moderation? Defending his conscience? Reflecting on justice? We cannot know. The sentence survives, but the mind behind it remains elusive.

Perhaps that is why Pericles continues to fascinate. Not because he solves the riddle of democratic leadership, but because he embodies it. Democracies depend upon institutions, laws, assemblies, and constitutions. Yet every so often they also depend upon the judgment of particular men and women whose gifts cannot be legislated into existence. Pericles reminds us that democratic government has always required both strong institutions and exceptional citizens—and that the relationship between the two is never entirely comfortable.

Questions for Reflection

1. Why has the word demagogue acquired such a negative meaning when its original sense was simply “leader of the people”?

2. What qualities made Pericles successful within a direct democracy rather than despite it?

3. How does Athenian democracy differ from representative democracy in ways that affect political leadership?

4. Can a democracy benefit from extraordinary leaders without becoming dependent upon them?

5. Why are counterfactual questions—what if Pericles had never existed?—sometimes useful to historians?

6. What does Pericles’ relationship with Aspasia suggest about the tension between public principle and private life?

7. Why do some historical figures remain strangely unknowable despite extensive study?

8. What kinds of evidence would change our understanding of Pericles if they suddenly appeared?

9. Why do later generations repeatedly remake Pericles in their own image?

10. Does democracy ultimately depend more upon institutions or upon the character of its citizens?

For Further Investigation

• Paul Cartledge, Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric (Reaktion, 2026)

• —, Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2020)

• Jennifer T. Roberts, The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece (OUP, 2019)

• —, Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2011)

• Herodotus, Histories, translated by Walter Blanco, edited by Walter Blanco and Jennifer T. Roberts (W.W. Norton, 2013)

• The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, translated by Robert Crawley, edited by Robert B. Strassler (Simon and Schuster, 1998)

• Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War (Penguin, 2004)

• Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton University Press, 2016)

• Brook Manville and Josiah Ober, The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives (Princeton, 2023)

• Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Democratic Disconnect,” Journal of Democracy (July 2016)

Related Episodes

• The Forgotten City: Paul Cartledge on the city of Thebes, its myths, wars, and place in the “fateful triangle” of ancient Greece

• Forever War: Jennifer T. Roberts on the war between the Greeks, and its long shadow

• Athens and Sparta: Adrian Goldsworthy on how the two rival Greek city-states shaped the world around them

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

• Athens: Bruce Clark on the city of wisdom

Tags

Ancient Greece • Athens • Pericles • Democracy • Peloponnesian War • Persian Wars • Classical Greece • Political History • Paul Cartledge

Introduction

Pericles of Athens was a complicated man, a man of twists and turns. Born into a lineage of Athenian aristocrats, he became a champion of democracy and indeed a masterful demagogue. A teenager by the end of the Persian Wars, he was one of the architects of an Athenian empire designed to ensure that Persia never again advanced westward. Possibly his earliest public act as an Athenian citizen was to sponsor four plays by Aeschylus, beginning a lifelong association with the artistic life of the city. And while he married as an Athenian aristocrat was expected to marry, his later domestic life proved, by Athenian standards, strikingly unconventional.

These are only some of the many facets of Pericles that Paul Cartledge examines in his new book Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric. Along the way he also traces the afterlife of Pericles himself—from the hostile portrayals of his contemporaries to Victorian admiration and even the appropriations of twentieth-century dictators.

About the Guest

Paul Cartledge is A. G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge. One of the world’s leading historians of ancient Greece, he has written extensively on Sparta, Athens, Alexander the Great, and Greek political thought. His many books include Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece, discussed on Historically Thinking in Episode 177, and his newest work, Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric.

For Further Investigation

• Paul Cartledge, Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric (Reaktion, 2026)

• —, Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2020)

• Jennifer T. Roberts, The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece (OUP, 2019)

• —, Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2011)

• Herodotus, Histories, translated by Walter Blanco, edited by Walter Blanco and Jennifer T. Roberts (W.W. Norton, 2013)

• The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, translated by Robert Crawley, edited by Robert B. Strassler (Simon and Schuster, 1998)

• Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War (Penguin, 2004)

• Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton University Press, 2016)

• Brook Manville and Josiah Ober, The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives (Princeton, 2023)

• Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Democratic Disconnect,” Journal of Democracy (July 2016)

Related Episodes

• The Forgotten City: Paul Cartledge on the city of Thebes, its myths, wars, and place in the “fateful triangle” of ancient Greece

• Forever War: Jennifer T. Roberts on the war between the Greeks, and its long shadow

• Athens and Sparta: Adrian Goldsworthy on how the two rival Greek city-states shaped the world around them

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

• Athens: Bruce Clark on the city of wisdom

Tags

Ancient Greece • Athens • Pericles • Democracy • Peloponnesian War • Persian Wars • Classical Greece • Political History • Paul Cartledge

Why This Conversation Matters

We tend to treat political maps as if they were geological formations. France is France. India is India. Singapore is Singapore. The world appears divided naturally into sovereign states, each with its flag, borders, passport, and seat at the United Nations. We even imagine that every linguistic community needs its own nation-state, as if that is its right. It is often difficult to imagine that things could have been otherwise.

Jon Wilson’s Out of Chaos invites us to do exactly that. His argument is not merely that the nation-state has a history, it is that the triumph of the nation-state was astonishingly late, remarkably contingent, and in many respects accidental. For much of the twentieth century, intelligent observers expected the future to belong to empires, federations, multinational unions, or even institutions of world government. Instead, within only a few years after the Second World War, the political imagination narrowed until the sovereign nation-state became almost the only acceptable answer.

Throughlines

At the beginning of the conversation, I trotted out my new favorite dictum that “the curious task of the historian is to make the present seem weird.” Jon Wilson laughed, but his entire book is an extended demonstration of exactly that proposition.

It is remarkably easy to assume that today’s political world emerged naturally. We inherit atlases in elementary school, we memorize national capitals (well, probably not, but we did), we cheer for countries at the Olympics. The nation-state feels almost biological, as though political communities naturally grow into bounded territories with governments, passports, and flags.

Wilson asks us to forget everything we know, and to do that he essentially recommends that we imagine ourselves viewing a globe in 1900. That globe is dominated by empires. The British Empire reaches around the world. The Russian Empire spans Eurasia. Austria-Hungary dominates most of Eastern Europe, and the Ottoman Empire controls what is left. The French and American republics have recently extended their republican empires to Southeast Asia. And the Chinese Empire in 1900, however beleaguered, still governed multiple peoples under a single political roof.

So in 1900, empires were not generally regarded as a relics. Quite the opposite: for many contemporaries it appeared to be the most practical response to an increasingly interconnected world.

That observation alone changes the conversation. We often tell ourselves that empire was already dying before the First World War. Yet the people living through those years did not generally think so. They debated how empires should be organized, how much autonomy different peoples should enjoy, and whether federations might replace older imperial structures. Few imagined that almost every corner of the globe would eventually consist of sovereign nation-states.

One of the pleasures of this conversation was discovering how crowded the marketplace of political ideas once was. There was no single obvious future.

The Soviet Union imagined itself as a federation of peoples rather than a conventional empire. British imperial thinkers increasingly discussed commonwealths and federations. The United Nations began life amid genuine hopes that it might coordinate the world’s resources and institutions on a scale previously unimaginable. Even world government, which today sounds utopian, attracted serious advocates after 1945.

Then everything changed.

Wilson repeatedly returned to the atmosphere of 1945 through 1947. The war ended, but peace did not arrive. Populations were moving across continents. Famines threatened. Civil wars simmered. Empires were exhausted. Governments struggled simply to maintain order.

In those circumstances, the nation-state ceased to be merely one possible political form. It became the only one capable of attracting support across ideological divides. which is a point struck me more than any other. Communists could support nation-states; Liberals could support nation-states; Progressives could support nation-states; Conservatives could support nation-states; Anti-colonial movements could support nation-states; Former imperial administrators could support nation-states. The remarkable thing was not that everyone agreed about politics, because they certainly didn’t. It was that people with profoundly different visions of politics increasingly agreed about the container in which politics should occur.

Perhaps nowhere does this become clearer than in the partition of India. Wilson resists treating partition as a uniquely South Asian tragedy. Instead, he places it alongside the broader political improvisations occurring across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia after the war. Borders were not simply expressions of ancient national identities. They were often emergency solutions to immediate crises. States emerged not because they represented timeless peoples but because governments desperately needed workable units to which authority could be transferred.

That perspective also explains why so many decisions made during those years continue to shape international politics. They were not the culmination of centuries of careful planning, but were often responses to immediate fears, improvisations of necessity.

One of the ironies Wilson emphasizes is that the nation-state ultimately survived not because it answered every political question, but because it answered so few. It established borders. Beyond that, it proved remarkably adaptable. A nation-state could define itself through ethnicity, citizenship, language, religion, or constitutional principles. It could become democratic, authoritarian, socialist, capitalist, or something in between. Precisely because the form was flexible, it outlived many of the ideologies that first inhabited it.

That flexibility may also explain why today’s political map has proven more stable than many of us appreciate. We speak constantly of globalization, supranational institutions, and multinational corporations. Yet almost every political movement still seeks recognition through the language of statehood, sovereignty, and self-determination. Even those who challenge existing borders usually do so by demanding new nation-states rather than abandoning the concept altogether.

History rarely ends by arriving at its inevitable destination. More often, it settles—for a time—on arrangements that nobody quite expected. And that makes the present weird.

Questions for Reflection

1. Why does today’s political map seem so inevitable to us? What does that say about us?

2. What alternatives to the nation-state appeared plausible in 1900?

3. Why did so many different ideologies converge on the nation-state after 1945?

4. Does viewing partition as an improvised political solution alter our understanding of decolonization?

5. Why are political institutions often products of crisis rather than long-term planning?

6. What advantages does the nation-state possess precisely because it is ideologically flexible?

7. How might the history of empire look different if we stop assuming its collapse was inevitable?

8. Which political institutions today might future historians regard as surprisingly contingent?

9. Why does Wilson believe the nation-state is here to stay? Do you agree? Why or why not?

10. What other present-day assumptions deserve to be made “strange” by historians?

For Further Investigation

• Jon Wilson, Out of Chaos: How the Nation-State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II (Basic Books, 2026)

• —, The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India (PublicAffairs, 2016)

• Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (Penguin, 2013)

• Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017)

• Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2009)

• Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999)

Related Episodes

• Louisiana Purchase: Alexander Mikaberidze on the acquisition that (eventually) transformed the United States into a continental empire.

• Inventing a New World Order: Glenda Sluga on the Congress of Vienna and the birth of international politics

• War and Power: Phillips Payson O’Brien on Who Wins Wars and Why

• 1942—When World War II Engulfed the Globe: Peter Fritzsche on the decisive year of a global conflict

Introduction

At the beginning of the twentieth century many thinkers, activists, and politicians would have been astonished if you told them that at the end of that century the nation-state would be the prevalent form of government throughout the world. After all, the previous fifty years had seen a revival of empires, and by 1900 everyone was living in a world of empires. The nation-state was not an obvious next step.

But following 1945, argues my guest Jon Wilson in his new book Out of Chaos: How the Nation-State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II, the nation-state was the only kind of political organization that could gain universal support and become a vehicle for national liberation. The nation-state transcended postwar ideology: communists, capitalists, and nationalists of every stripe could agree to a world of sovereign states. “One can’t understand the political crises and tendencies from the late 1960s to the early 1980s,” writes Wilson, “without understanding the history of the nation-state and the very particular way it emerged.”

About the Guest

Jon Wilson is Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. A historian of empire, decolonization, and South Asia, he is the author of The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India. His latest book, Out of Chaos: How the Nation-State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II, offers a sweeping reinterpretation of the emergence of the modern nation-state after the Second World War.

For Further Investigation

• Jon Wilson, Out of Chaos: How the Nation-State Emerged from the Ruins of World War II (Basic Books, 2026)

• —, The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India (PublicAffairs, 2016)

• Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (Penguin, 2013)

• Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017)

• Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2009)

• Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999)

Related Episodes

• Louisiana Purchase: Alexander Mikaberidze on the acquisition that (eventually) transformed the United States into a continental empire.

• Inventing a New World Order: Glenda Sluga on the Congress of Vienna and the birth of international politics

• War and Power: Phillips Payson O’Brien on Who Wins Wars and Why

• 1942—When World War II Engulfed the Globe: Peter Fritzsche on the decisive year of a global conflict

Tags

Nation-State • Empire • Decolonization • World War II • Cold War • India • Partition • International History • Political History • Jon Wilson

Why This Conversation Matters

Every institution depends on rules, on the guardrails that constrain and direct behavior of the variety of humans within it. Yet from time to time every institution also requires, for its survival and the survival of those who depend upon it, on people who seem very nearly incapable of living within guardrails; people who as children probably ignored every admonition to color within the lines.

Peter J. Ortiz was one of those people. The more one learns about him, the less he resembles a conventional military hero. He was too cosmopolitan to fit comfortably into any one nation, too independent to become a successful bureaucrat, too restless to thrive in peacetime. Yet when the circumstances were exactly right—when occupied France needed a man who could disappear into another culture, improvise under impossible conditions, and inspire confidence simply by appearing—there may have been no one better suited to the task.

Studying institutional history in the 21st century seems at best old-fashioned, because in an age of hyper individualism institutions seem old-fashioned. (But we will miss them when they are gone.) Part of institutional history should be a reminder that they succeed because they find a place for remarkable eccentrics.

Throughlines

One of the most striking observations Nicholas Reynolds makes during our conversation is that Peter J. Ortiz was what today might be called a “third-culture” individual. He belonged completely to no single country. Born into a family divided between Europe and America, educated in France, forged in the French Foreign Legion, yet deeply committed to being an American, Ortiz possessed exactly the sort of divided identity that usually makes bureaucracies nervous. But when the Second World War came it also made him indispensable.

Modern states like clear categories. Soldier or civilian. American or Frenchman. Intelligence officer or commando. Ortiz was all of these at once. He could move through occupied France not simply because he spoke flawless French, but because he understood France instinctively. He knew its manners, its rhythms, its assumptions. He did not merely imitate another culture, he inhabited it, a skill that cannot be taught.

It is tempting to think that history is shaped primarily by institutions: armies, governments, intelligence services, political parties. Certainly they matter. But institutions regularly encounter problems for which their standard procedures are inadequate. At such moments they depend upon individuals who do not quite fit their own organizational logic.

Ortiz had spent years acquiring precisely the experiences no planner would ever have designed. He had run away to the French Foreign Legion, fought brutal colonial wars in North Africa, driven armored cars across deserts, learned to parachute, escaped German captivity, wandered across occupied Europe, and somehow found his way back to America where he rode horses on a dude ranch, drove race cars, tamed lions, and parachuted at air shows. None of these experiences followed a sensible career path. Collectively, however, they created the perfect operative for a very peculiar war.

The conversation also raises a question about organizations themselves. The Marine Corps recognized Ortiz’s extraordinary abilities almost immediately. The Office of Strategic Services understood even better how to employ them. Both organizations, at their wartime peak, proved remarkably flexible. Rather than forcing Ortiz into a conventional mold, they built missions around what he uniquely could accomplish. That willingness to accommodate unusual talent may itself be one of the hidden strengths of successful institutions. Great organizations are not merely disciplined, but are capable of recognizing exceptions.

The irony is that the very qualities which make someone invaluable in wartime often become liabilities in peace. Ortiz himself understood this. After the war he declined a regular Marine commission, observing that he simply was not made for peacetime soldiering. Morning formations, inspections, routine administration—these were not failures of discipline. They were essential parts of maintaining a professional military, but they were not what Ortiz had been built to do.

His postwar life carries a quiet sadness. Like many men whose gifts emerge most clearly under extraordinary circumstances, he struggled to discover an equivalent purpose once those circumstances disappeared. His body, already battered by wounds and imprisonment, no longer allowed him to seek fresh adventures. Hollywood found occasional use for him, but bit parts and consulting gigs could hardly provide the sense of necessity that had defined his wartime service.

Toward the end of our conversation, we found ourselves talking less about Peter Ortiz than about a broader human problem. Every profession contains people who seem oddly placed during ordinary times but become indispensable during moments of crisis. They are rarely the easiest colleagues, they seldom flourish inside normal bureaucratic structures, and they can even seem like dangerous misfits.

Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that civilizations ignore such people at their peril. Perhaps that is another reason—not just the incredible adventures—that stories like Ortiz’s continue to fascinate. They remind us that excellence is not always orderly. Some individuals spend their lives searching for the challenge that finally matches the peculiar shape of their abilities. Peter Ortiz had the great good fortune to find his. The tragedy is that human history so often provides those opportunities amidst terrible violence.

Questions for Reflection

1. Why do some of history’s most effective leaders seem uncomfortable within ordinary institutions?

2. How can qualities that appear eccentric in peacetime become indispensable during war or crisis?

3. How much of Ortiz’s effectiveness came from his learned skills, and how much from his unusual upbringing—or just the way that he was?

4. Are organizations better served by enforcing uniformity or by making room for exceptional individuals? How can they do both?

5. Why do military institutions often produce figures whose greatest difficulties begin after peace returns?

6. What distinguishes courage from recklessness, and where did Ortiz stand on that spectrum?

7. How important is cultural fluency—not merely language—in intelligence and diplomacy?

8. Why do societies remember some wartime heroes while allowing others to fade almost completely from public memory?

9. What kinds of talents does modern society fail to recognize because they do not fit conventional career paths?

10. Is history made more often by institutions—or by the rare people who operate just beyond their boundaries?

For Further Investigation

• Nicholas Reynolds and Katie Sanders, Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France (Harper Horizon, 2026)

• Nicholas Reynolds, Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence – How Churchill Built the CIA and Modern Spy Operations from Nothing (Mariner Books, 2022)

• Ben Jones, Eisenhower’s Guerrillas: The Jedburghs, the Maquis, and the Liberation of France (Oxford University Press, 2016)

• Douglas Waller, Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage (Free Press, 2012)

• Douglas Porch, The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force (Skyhorse, 2010)

• —, The Conquest of Morocco: A History (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005)

• —, Defeat and Division: France at War, 1939-1942 (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Related Episodes

• Trojan War: Odysseus and Peter J. Ortiz might have had a lot to talk about

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

• Eisenhower’s Guerillas: Ben Jones on the Jedburgh teams and the liberation of France

Introduction

Peter J. Ortiz was one of the most decorated United States Marines of the Second World War—and he served in the European Theater. In fact, his service was almost entirely within occupied France, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services as the manager of a resistance network and later as the leader of a (sort of) Jedburgh Team.

The stories of his exploits are legendary, though admittedly legendary among a much smaller circle of people than they deserve to be. One that can be verified is the time that, in a French bar, Ortiz ordered a round of drinks for a group of German officers, opened his raincoat to reveal his Marine uniform, drew two pistols, and ordered the Germans to drink toasts to President Roosevelt and the United States Marine Corps.

That and many other tales of his winding career are to be found in Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France, a new book by Nicholas Reynolds and Katie Sanders.

About the Guest

Nicholas Reynolds is a historian, former United States Marine Corps infantry officer, and former CIA operations officer, where he subsequently served as historian for the CIA Museum. He earned his DPhil in history from the University of Oxford and has written extensively on intelligence, military history, and special operations.

Katie Sanders, who could not join us for the conversation, is an award-winning journalist who has written for National Geographic, The New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, New York, TIME, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, Insider, Glamour, and Marie Claire. She is also the granddaughter of American pilot Murray Simon, whose escape through occupied France was made possible by Peter J. Ortiz.

For Further Investigation

• Nicholas Reynolds and Katie Sanders, Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France (Harper Horizon, 2026)

• Nicholas Reynolds, Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence – How Churchill Built the CIA and Modern Spy Operations from Nothing (Mariner Books, 2022)

• Ben Jones, Eisenhower’s Guerrillas: The Jedburghs, the Maquis, and the Liberation of France (Oxford University Press, 2016)

• Douglas Waller, Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage (Free Press, 2012)

• Douglas Porch, The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force (Skyhorse, 2010)

• —, The Conquest of Morocco: A History (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005)

• —, Defeat and Division: France at War, 1939-1942 (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Related Episodes

• Trojan War: Odysseus and Peter J. Ortiz might have had a lot to talk about

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

• Eisenhower’s Guerillas: Ben Jones on the Jedburgh teams and the liberation of France

Tags

Second World War • OSS • Peter J. Ortiz • Marines • Special Operations • France • Resistance • Intelligence History • Military History • Biography • Nicholas Reynolds

Why This Conversation Matters

The Trojan War has occupied an unusual place in Western civilization for nearly three thousand years. It is simultaneously history and literature, archaeology and myth, memory and imagination. Every generation seems compelled to ask the same question: Did it really happen?

Barry Strauss suggests that this is the wrong question—or at least an incomplete one. The more interesting question is how a historical conflict became one of humanity’s greatest stories, and why that story continues to illuminate the realities of war long after the kingdoms that fought it disappeared. Homer was not writing history in the modern sense. Yet he preserved something historians care deeply about: the mentality of another world. Through him we glimpse how Bronze Age people understood honor, friendship, kingship, revenge, and fate. We also see how some parts of warfare remain the same, even when the technology of killing other humans is very different.

Throughlines

Medieval, early-modern, and modern readers have often approached the Iliad with two instincts that pull in opposite directions. One is to treat it as history disguised as poetry. The other is to dismiss it as poetry that tells us nothing about history. Barry Strauss argues for something a little more subtle than that.

He believes that Homeric poems are neither newspaper reports nor complete fairy tales. They are some kind of historical memory—memory transmitted across centuries by oral poets, reshaped by successive generations, embroidered with gods and miracles, yet still preserving remarkably authentic glimpses of an earlier civilization.That distinction matters because history is never simply the accumulation of facts, but also the preservation of ways of seeing the world.

Again and again during the conversation, the Bronze Age reveals itself not through dates or battles but through mentality. Guest friendship is not merely etiquette; it is the social glue that makes life possible in a violent world. Honor is not vanity but political currency. To insult a king publicly is to threaten the fragile hierarchy upon which an army depends. Even wars themselves are explained differently. Modern historians instinctively search for structural causes—trade routes, climate change, economic competition, strategic geography. Bronze Age peoples looked instead to persons: stolen wives, family honor, broken oaths, divine favor.

Neither perspective is entirely wrong. Indeed, one of the conversation’s most striking insights is that these explanations often coexist. Troy occupied one of the most strategic locations in the eastern Mediterranean, controlling access between the Aegean and the Black Sea. Countless later powers would fight over the same ground. Yet people rarely march to war under banners proclaiming grain routes and commercial advantage. They march for honor, loyalty, revenge, family, nation, or faith. Structural forces create the conditions for conflict; human beings experience them personally.

The conversation also reminds us how remarkably constant war itself has remained. Epidemics sweeping through camps. Raiding expeditions. Night patrols. Arguments between commanders. Mutiny among exhausted soldiers. Occupation. The sack of cities. Combat trauma carried home by survivors. Remove the bronze armor, and much of the human experience would be recognizable to soldiers in Napoleon’s armies, on the Western Front, or in Iraq.

Homer understood something historians sometimes forget: war is not merely a sequence of campaigns. It is a moral environment that reshapes everyone who enters it.

Perhaps that explains why the stories after Troy prove just as compelling as the war itself. Odysseus cannot simply return home. Agamemnon brings victory back with him only to discover that triumph has solved nothing. Greece itself seems unable to recover from the violence it has unleashed. The homecomings become stories not of celebration but of damaged people trying to re-enter ordinary life.

Barry Strauss makes an intriguing observation near the end of the conversation. Modern historians explain the collapse of the Bronze Age through impersonal forces: migrations, epidemics, environmental change, systemic breakdown. Homer explains the same catastrophe differently. The men who returned from Troy were broken, and broken men broke the world around them.

Questions for Reflection

1. What kinds of historical truth can survive within myth?

2. Why do societies preserve stories long after they have forgotten the events that inspired them?

3. How do personal explanations for war differ from structural explanations?

4. What does guest friendship reveal about life in violent societies?

5. Why are homecoming stories often more psychologically revealing than battle stories?

6. How much continuity exists between ancient warfare and modern warfare?

7. Why do archaeological discoveries sometimes strengthen rather than weaken legendary traditions?

8. What does Homer’s treatment of honor tell us about Bronze Age political life?

9. Can literature preserve historical mentalities more effectively than chronicles?

10. What myths from our own age might future historians discover contain unexpected historical truths?

For Further Investigation

• Barry Strauss, The Trojan War: A New History (Simon and Schuster, 2006)

• —, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

• Homer, The Iliad

  • translated by George Chapman (1611; republished by Princeton University Press, 1998)

  • translated by Alexander Pope (Oxford University Press World’s Classics, 1998)

  • translated by Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, 1951)

  • translated by Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1990)

  • translated by Stanley Lombardo (Hackett Publishing Company, 1997)

  • translated by Emily Wilson (W. W. Norton & Company, 2023)

• Homer, The Odyssey

  • translated by Richard Lattimore (Harper Perennial, 2007)

  • translated by Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1999)

  • translated by Emily Wilson (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017)

  • translated by Peter Green (University of California Press, 2018)

• Eric H. Cline, The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction.

• —, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

• Gregory Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours (Belknap Press, 2020)

• Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (Simon and Schuster, 1995)

• —, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (Scribner, 2003)

• W. G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy

Related Episodes

• Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: Amanda Podany on 3,000 years of the Ancient Near East

• Babylon: Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones on the history and importance of the Mother of All Cities

• Jews vs Rome: Barry Strauss on the revolts that remade peoples, religions, and ancient geopolitics

• The End of the World As They Knew It: Eric Cline on the Bronze Age collapse

• The First Dark Ages?: Eric H. Cline on survival, collapse, and whether there really are “dark ages”

• Love, War, and Diplomacy: Eric H. Cline on the Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed

Introduction

Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the house of death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion feasts
for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

Those were of course the opening lines of the Illiad, written by someone who we might as well call Homer. And since in this summer of 2027 it seems that very few people are without an opinion of Homer, or the Odyssey, or how Christopher Nolan may have violated his copyrights, I thought it a good time to talk with Barry Strauss, for among his many books is The Trojan War: A New History.

About the Guest

Barry Strauss is Corliss Page Dean Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He is the author most recently of Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, which he and I discussed in Episode 421. This is his sixth appearance on Historically Thinking.

For Further Investigation

• Barry Strauss, The Trojan War: A New History (Simon and Schuster, 2006)

• —, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Related Episodes: A Concert of Strauss

• The Death of Caesar: Barry Strauss guides us through the foreign country of the late Roman Republic

• The View from Thucydides’ Tower: Barry Strauss on History’s second father

• The War That Made the Roman Empire: Barry Strauss on Actium, Augustus, and the remaking of Rome

• Jews vs Rome: Barry Strauss on the revolts that remade peoples, religions, and ancient geopolitics

Why This Conversation Matters

Most of us think about punctuation only when it goes wrong. We notice the missing comma, the questionable apostrophe, or the email written entirely in capital letters. Otherwise, punctuation disappears into the background, doing its work so quietly that we forget it exists.

Florence Hazrat asks us to see punctuation differently—not as a collection of rules imposed by schoolteachers, but as one of civilization’s hidden technologies. The period, the paragraph, the space between words, the question mark: none of these was inevitable. Each had to be invented, and each changed not simply how people wrote, but how they read, thought, argued, remembered, and ultimately understood the world.

People who think about the importance of technology, or just about its coolness, focus on conspicuous inventions: the wheel, the printing press, the steam engine, railroads, the internet. But sometimes history advances by means of much smaller innovations. A tiny dot at the end of a sentence can alter the way an entire civilization encounters knowledge.

Throughlines

One of the most illuminating themes running through this conversation is that punctuation is not only part of writing, but part of thinking itself. A period tells us where an idea ends. A paragraph groups thoughts into meaningful units. Spaces between words make silent reading possible. The page itself becomes a map that guides both eye and mind. Seen this way, punctuation belongs alongside those other great cultural technologies that quietly expanded human possibilities.

The history which Florence Hazrat recounts is striking because it repeatedly overturns assumptions that seem obvious only because we have inherited them. There was a time when texts flowed continuously, without spaces between words. Reading required extraordinary training. The reader’s task was to disentangle language from an uninterrupted stream of letters. The introduction of spaces did not merely make reading easier; it changed what reading was. Silent reading became faster, more accessible, and more widely available. The written page became something a reader could navigate rather than decode.

Cicero assumed an educated audience capable of supplying rhythm and pauses without visual assistance. But medieval monks copying Scripture wanted precisely the opposite. Their punctuation invited readers into the text. Charlemagne’s reforms standardized writing across an empire because governments, like churches, depend upon shared systems of communication. Renaissance printers refined the page still further, recognizing that typography and punctuation were not afterthoughts but essential tools for making knowledge portable and comprehensible.

Throughout these changes, punctuation performs a quiet act of hospitality. It anticipates the reader’s needs. We often imagine punctuation as restrictive—a collection of rules limiting expression. Hazrat suggests almost the reverse. Punctuation emerged because writers cared about readers. Every period, every paragraph, every parenthesis represents an attempt to reduce ambiguity just enough for communication to succeed while leaving enough freedom for interpretation to remain alive.

The conversation ends by bringing this history into the present. The recent fascination with em dashes and artificial intelligence is amusing, but it also reveals something important. We instinctively treat punctuation as evidence of personality, and recognize voices through their habits of punctuation just as we recognize them through vocabulary or tone. The smallest marks on the page continue to carry social meaning far beyond grammar.

Perhaps that is why punctuation has remained remarkably stable for four centuries. While we have not stopped inventing technologies, in punctuation we inherited a system of marks so flexible that it continues to adapt to new media, from printed books to text messages to large language models.

The tiny dot at the end of a sentence turns out to be far more than a dot. It is one of the innumerable ways human beings have learned to make thought visible.

Questions for Reflection

1. Why do we tend to overlook the historical importance of everyday technologies such as punctuation?

2. How did spaces between words change the experience of reading?

3. In what ways does punctuation reflect assumptions about the relationship between writer and reader?

4. Why might punctuation be understood as a technology rather than merely a set of grammatical conventions?

5. How have religious traditions influenced the development of writing and punctuation?

6. What responsibilities do writers owe their readers when deciding how clearly—or ambiguously—to write?

7. How does the physical form of a text shape the way we understand it?

8. Why do seemingly small innovations often have such large historical consequences?

9. What does the current fascination with AI and punctuation suggest about how we recognize human writing?

10. What ordinary feature of modern life might future historians discover has quietly transformed the way we think?

For Further Investigation

• Florence Hazrat, On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs (Basic Books, 2026)

• —, An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark! (Godine, 2023)

• Malcolm B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Routledge, 1992)

• Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Routledge, 2013)

• Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Avery, 2006)

• John Harris, Punctuation Personified (1824), from The Public Domain Review

Related Episodes

• Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: Amanda Podany on 3,000 years of the Ancient Near East (where all this punctuation business started)

• Offa the King: Rory Naismith on a forgotten King, with some discussion of manuscripts, literacy, and early medieval England.

• Book Makers: Adam Smyth on the Lives Behind the Printed Page

• The History of Technology, from Leonardo to the Internet: Thomas J. Misa on how technologies reshape societies and cultures–and how culture shapes technology

Introduction

Even that overlooked yet essential little pinprick at the end of this sentence has a history. For once upon a time, there were no stops or periods. And therefore there were no sentences, at least as we conceive them now. “Changes in punctuation,” writes my guest Florence Hazrat, “like changes in language, are normal, but they’re also important reflections of our values.”

They are also, perhaps, indications of how we reframe the realities that we create with words. In her new book On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Changed the World, Hazrat ranges from cuneiform and Cicero to uncial and Shakespeare, and beyond, attending to how we have chosen to shape our sentences, and why. “From neuroscience to law, colonialism to love, punctuation exerts an enormous hidden power over our internal and external lives.”

About the Guest

Florence Hazrat is a writer, researcher, and educator fascinated by anything that has to do with language, writing, culture, and society—and by dogs. She is the author of An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark! as well as On the Mark. Her research examines how seemingly small features of written language reveal larger changes in society, politics, and human thought.

For Further Investigation

• Florence Hazrat, On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs (Basic Books, 2026)

• —, An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark! (Godine, 2023)

• Malcolm B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Routledge, 1992)

• Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Routledge, 2013)

• Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Avery, 2006)

• John Harris, Punctuation Personified (1824), from The Public Domain Review

Related Episodes

• Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: Amanda Podany on 3,000 years of the Ancient Near East (where all this punctuation business started)

• Offa the King: Rory Naismith on a forgotten King, with some discussion of manuscripts, literacy, and early medieval England.

• Book Makers: Adam Smyth on the Lives Behind the Printed Page

• The History of Technology, from Leonardo to the Internet: Thomas J. Misa on how technologies reshape societies and cultures–and how culture shapes technology

Apology: this should be a “Friday Reflection”, but for technical difficulties of little interest to anyone other than myself and that barely, I could only publish it today.

Why This Conversation Matters

The election of 1860 occupies a unique place in American history. It was probably the most consequential election this nation has ever held. Yet because we know what followed—secession, civil war, emancipation, the destruction of the slave-system, the death of tens of thousands, the ruin of the American South—we are tempted to see the outcome as inevitable. Abraham Lincoln wins, the South leaves the Union, and history proceeds on its majestic and inevitable course.

Jonathan Earle pounds home to us how misleading that perspective is. The election was anything but inevitable. It emerged from political improvisation, fractured parties, technological change, regional fears, blithe hoopes, and a series of contingent events that could easily have unfolded differently. To recover that uncertainty is not only the way to better understand 1860, but to recover the experience of history when the future remains unwritten.

More broadly, this conversation asks us to think about democracy as a historical achievement rather than a permanent condition. Elections do not resolve political disagreements simply because votes are counted. They work only so long as participants continue to believe that constitutional politics remains preferable to every alternative. That assumption was tested severely in 1860.

Throughlines

One of the historian’s first responsibilities is to restore uncertainty. The people who lived through the election of 1860 did not know they were approaching the Civil War. They knew only that the political order seemed increasingly unstable, that familiar institutions were failing to resolve deep disagreements, and that every month seemed to produce another surprise.

Jonathan Earle’s account begins before a single vote was cast. John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859 transformed the political climate. Brown’s execution made him both martyr and menace, forcing Republicans to navigate an uncomfortable distinction between opposing slavery and rejecting violent abolitionism. The raid intensified sectional distrust while simultaneously revealing how differently Americans interpreted the same event.

The nation’s political institutions reflected that growing instability. Even the election of a Speaker of the House became a months-long constitutional struggle, with arguments over Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South preventing Congress from organizing itself. It is a reminder that constitutional systems often reveal their greatest strains during ordinary procedures that suddenly cease to function.

The conversation also highlights how rapidly politics itself was changing. The telegraph accelerated the circulation of news. National party conventions became possible because expanding railroads and increasingly large hotels allowed hundreds of delegates to gather in one place. Cheap printing made campaign biographies and pamphlets available to ordinary voters in unprecedented numbers. Organizations such as the Wide Awakes introduced disciplined mass political demonstrations that inspired supporters while alarming opponents. Every generation believes its political technologies are revolutionary; 1860 reminds us that earlier generations experienced similar upheavals.

Yet perhaps the most important lesson concerns contingency. Lincoln was hardly the inevitable Republican nominee. William H. Seward entered the convention as the favorite. The Democratic Party might have remained united. Constitutional Union candidates hoped to postpone sectional conflict altogether. Even after Lincoln’s victory, compromise remained imaginable to many Americans. History retained multiple possible futures until political choices gradually narrowed them.

That narrowing occurred because increasing numbers of political leaders ceased to regard ordinary electoral defeat as acceptable. Southern Fire-Eaters did not merely oppose Lincoln. Many had already concluded that the simple chance of Republican victory itself demonstrated the failure of the constitutional order. Once enough people no longer accepted the legitimacy of electoral outcomes, the institutions designed to contain political conflict could no longer perform their essential function. Democracy depends not only upon persuasion but upon restraint.

Walt Whitman called 1860 the “Year of Meteors,” a year illuminated by sudden, dazzling events. Historians must also attend to what lies between those flashes of light, the accumulated decisions, fears, ambitions, compromises, and miscalculations that slowly reshape political life. By recovering that uncertainty, Jonathan Earle restores the election of 1860 to what it truly was—not the beginning of an inevitable story, but the last great democratic contest before Americans abandoned politics for war.

Questions for Reflection

1. Why do later generations so often mistake historical outcomes for historical inevitabilities?

2. How does recovering contingency change our understanding of the election of 1860?

3. What role did new communications technologies play in reshaping nineteenth-century politics?

4. Why can routine constitutional procedures become flashpoints during periods of political crisis?

5. How should political leaders respond when they believe an election threatens fundamental principles?

6. What distinguishes passionate political disagreement from a crisis of constitutional legitimacy?

7. Why is accepting electoral defeat essential to representative government?

8. How did the election of 1860 expose both the strengths and weaknesses of the American party system?

9. What can historians learn by studying elections as lived experiences rather than predetermined outcomes?

10. In what ways does Whitman’s image of the “Year of Meteors” capture the experience of living through a period of rapid historical change?

For Further Investigation

• Jonathan Earle, He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860

• Orville Vernon Burton, The Age of Lincoln

• Richard Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

• Michael F. Holt, The Election of 1860: A Campaign Fraught with Consequences

• Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860–1861

• Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1871 edition), “Year of Meteors (1859–60)”

Related Episodes

• True Blue: Clayton Butler on white Unionists in the Deep South

• Civil War Politics: Paul Escott on political traditions, personalities, and the limits of pragmatism

• The Abolitionist Civil War: Frank Cirillo on how the abolitionist movement transformed during the Civil War, eventually destroying itself

• Horace Greeley, American Editor: James Lundberg on the Method in His Madness

• The Democracy We Must Keep: David O. Stewart on the founding documents.

• The Long Revolution: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal on remembering the American Revolution.

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