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.

We consi…

Read more

Introduction

YEAR of meteors! brooding year!
I would bind in words retrospective some of your deeds
and signs;
I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;.
I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair,
mounted the scaffold in Virginia;
(I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I
watch'd;
I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indiffer-
ent, but trembling with age and your unheal'd
wounds, you mounted the scaffold;)

That was Walt Whitman, from the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass; and the 19th Presidentiad to which he refers is the election of 1860. No election in the history of the United States can come close to being more confusing, tumultuous and consequential than the election of 1860.

Now Jonathan Earle seeks to disclose its mysteries. And in fact in his new book He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860, he reveals that the 1860 contest was even stranger than we might have imagined it to be.

About the Guest

Jonathan Earle is Associate Professor of History at Louisiana State University, where he also serves as the Roger Hadfield Ogden Dean of the LSU Honors College. A specialist in nineteenth-century political and intellectual history, he is the author of several books on the coming of the Civil War and the political culture of the antebellum United States, of which He Has the People is the latest.

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

Tags

Abraham Lincoln • Election of 1860 • Civil War • American Politics • Republican Party • Jonathan Earle • Nineteenth-Century America • Political Culture • Political History • United States History

Why This Conversation Matters

Most of us think of high-fructose corn syrup as an ingredient—or perhaps as a cultural symbol. Depending on one’s perspective, it represents industrialized food, modern industrialized agriculture, or America’s dangerously sweet tooth. But Brian Leech’s conversation invites us to see something quite different. Corn syrup is not merely a product. It is the endpoint of dozens of historical processes that converged in the seemingly unlikely town of Clinton, Iowa.

But isn’t that one of history’s recurring lessons? The objects we encounter every day can conceal remarkably complicated pasts. A bottle of pop (as they say in Clinton) or a package of cookies turns out to embody international scientific collaboration, agricultural policy, corporate strategy, labor conflict, environmental change, and technological innovation. Looking closely at something as ordinary as corn syrup reminds us that history’s greatest rewards often come from asking deceptively simple questions: Where did this come from? Why here? Why then? Why? Why? Why?

Throughlines

One of the oldest temptations in history is to divide the past into neat categories. Food history belongs over here. Labor history belongs over there. Environmental history occupies another shelf, while the history of technology sits somewhere else entirely. Brian Leech’s story of high-fructose corn syrup quietly dismantles that habit of mind, because nothing in this story stands alone or unrelated.

Begin with geography. Clinton, Iowa, appears at first glance to be an unremarkable Midwestern river town. Yet its location on the Mississippi River made it a natural site for processing one of America’s great agricultural commodities. Corn did not simply grow nearby; it arrived continuously along the river and rail network that connected the Corn Belt into a single economic organism. The Mississippi was not merely scenery. It was infrastructure. The factory belonged there because the landscape made it possible.

Then comes technology. Wet milling sounds like an obscure industrial process, but Leech describes it almost as a kind of industrial digestion essential to making the components of modern life. The wet mill separates the corn kernel into its constituent parts, each becoming something different: animal feed, corn oil, starches, adhesives, alcohol, ethanol, sweeteners, and dozens of other products. A single kernel became, as the conversation memorably suggests, almost an entire grocery store. Technology did not replace agriculture, but multiplied its possibilities.

Yet technological innovation alone explains very little. The breakthrough that made high-fructose corn syrup commercially viable depended upon Japanese biochemical research, corporate relationships that crossed the Pacific, and a pair of enzyme samples quietly carried through customs in 1965. Even then, the scientific discovery had to be transformed into an industrial process before it became economically useful. Innovation, historians are reminded once again, rarely consists of a single moment of genius. It is usually an accumulation of experiments, adaptations, and collaborations spread across institutions and continents.

Labor enters the story not as a separate chapter but as another consequence of success. The very profits generated by high-fructose corn syrup reshaped expectations inside the Clinton Corn Processing Company. Workers believed that unprecedented profits should produce safer conditions and higher wages. Executives faced growing uncertainty in commodity markets and sought flexibility instead. The resulting strike became far more than a local labor dispute. It exposed how technological change, corporate consolidation, automation, and global competition were already transforming the industrial Midwest. The bitterness that lingered for decades after the strike reminds us that economic transitions are experienced not as abstractions but as ruptures within families, neighborhoods, and communities.

Perhaps the conversation’s most provocative insight concerns the Midwest itself. Americans often imagine two different regions: the agricultural Corn Belt and the industrial Rust Belt. Leech argues that this distinction has always been misleading. The factories existed because of the farms. The farms increasingly depended upon industrial technology. Manufacturing and agriculture developed together and declined—or transformed—together. Standing at the edge of a Midwestern town, where cornfields abruptly meet elevators, factories, and rail lines, the supposed boundary disappears.

Finally, there is the moral of scale. High-fructose corn syrup eventually became a worldwide commodity, but its history begins in interviews conducted with retirees in one Iowa town. Historical understanding often grows in precisely this way. By examining one place carefully, we begin to see the larger systems in which it participated. Local history is not history written on a smaller canvas. Done well, it becomes one of the best ways of understanding the world itself.

Questions for Reflection

1. Why do ordinary objects often have extraordinarily complicated histories?

2. How does following the history of a single product change the way we think about historical causation?

3. What does the story of corn syrup suggest about the relationship between scientific discovery and technological innovation?

4. Can we meaningfully separate agricultural history from industrial history in the American Midwest?

5. How did geography shape the development of Clinton more than individual decision-making?

6. Why do technological advances often create new labor conflicts rather than simply eliminating old problems?

7. What does this conversation suggest about the strengths of local history as a way of understanding global history?

8. How should historians balance structural explanations—such as geography, markets, and technology—with the choices made by individuals?

9. Why do communities often remember labor conflicts long after the economic issues have changed?

10. What other everyday products deserve the same kind of historical investigation?

For Further Investigation

• Brian James Leech, “Sweet Solution, Sticky Situation: Mill Technology, Organized Labor, and the Midwestern Origins of High Fructose Corn Syrup,” Middle West Review, Volume 10, Number 1, Fall 2023

• —, The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit (University of Nevada Press, 2019)

• Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (Yale University Press, 2010)

• Jon Lauck, The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History (University of Iowa, 2013)

• John C. Hudson, Making the Corn Belt: A Geographical History of Middle-Western Agriculture (Indiana University Press, 1994)

• Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Penguin, 1986)

Related Episodes

• Environmental History: Brian Leach explains the basics

• Picky: Helen Zoe Veit on How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History

• The Lost Region: Jon Lauck on why the Midwest matters

Introduction

In early 1965, three executives boarded a plane in Japan, bound for the United States. “Unbeknownst to the U.S. Customs, they were carrying corporate secrets. Each man had carefully placed two vials of an isomerase enzyme into their pockets before the flight.” With it, they would change the world. For after two arduous years of nearly aerobic chemical engineering, their corporation produced what it called Isomerose 30. We know it, or its technically improved successors, as corn syrup.

That’s how my guest Brian Leech begins his intricate, multi-valenced history of what went on in Clinton, Iowa, from the 1960s through the 1980s. It’s food history, it’s labor history, it’s technological history, it’s environmental history, it’s regional history—“and not any single one of them, which is to say,” to quote the great Edmund Morgan, “that it is good history.”

About the Guest

Brian James Leech is Professor of History at Augustana College. His work ranges across labor, environmental, and urban history, often focusing on the American Midwest. He is the author of The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit and has long explored how industry, communities, and landscapes shape one another. This is his third appearance on Historically Thinking.

For Further Investigation

• Brian James Leech, “Sweet Solution, Sticky Situation: Mill Technology, Organized Labor, and the Midwestern Origins of High Fructose Corn Syrup,” Middle West Review, Volume 10, Number 1, Fall 2023

• —, The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit (University of Nevada Press, 2019)

• Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (Yale University Press, 2010)

• Jon Lauck, The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History (University of Iowa, 2013)

• John C. Hudson, Making the Corn Belt: A Geographical History of Middle-Western Agriculture (Indiana University Press, 1994)

• Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Penguin, 1986)

Related Episodes

• Environmental History: Brian Leach explains the basics

• Picky: Helen Zoe Veit on How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History

• The Lost Region: Jon Lauck on why the Midwest matters

Tags

Food History • Labor History • Environmental History • Technology • Midwest • Iowa • Corn • Corn Syrup • Industrial History • Agricultural History • Brian Leech

This a Historically Thinking Field Guide, a guide to a set of episodes on a topic, a historical problem, or a habit of historical thinking. In time we plan for these to be classroom companions for high school and college teachers.This is not only the third Field Guide, but by far the largest thus far, jam-packed with links and references and goodness.

I. Introduction

Years ago I heard David Hackett Fischer give a talk about symbols of the American Revolution, and of American liberty and freedom. He admitted that he was perplexed about the symbolism of the image you see above, which comes from a French textile. I assured him after the talk that it was pretty clear to me what was going on, and I’m not sure that he was much interested in what my opinion was after that introduction. But here’s what I might have told him, or should have.

In the center of this particular set of images from the textile (another features, not surprisingly, Benjamin Franklin) we have of course George Washington. The textile artist has lifted Washington’s image from an engraving by Charles Willson Peale that had sold well in France (and England), but no doubt horrified by Washington’s going outside without a hat in Peale’s engraving, he (or she) has been provided the General with one.

After that it gets a little more complicated. Washington is driving a chariot in which sits (I would guess) a personification of either America or of Liberty—probably America, since she wears a Francofied vision of an Indian headdress. More confusingly, for a contemporary audience, Washington is whipping along a pair of muzzled leopards. But this is not confusing if you were French in the late eighteenth century. Since at least the Hundred Years War you and your ancestors had been calling the English leopards, because what the English took as lions in their royal heraldry the French identified as leopards. (Lions can only be rampant, you see; any other kind of heraldric cat, when unrampant, is a leopard. Simple, n’est ce pas?)

Note also that in the apparent throes of a mescaline-addled dream scrambling together classical and American tropes, the artist shows the chariot preceded by two putti who seem to be amalgrams of both Blacks and Native Americans. They’re blowing horns of triumph, and there are flags attached to the horns. One is the “rebellious stripes”, the thirteen stripes sans blue field with stars. The other is one of the wide variety of rattlesnake flags flown by rebels from New England to the Carolinas—though it’s unclear to me if it’s based on any particular model. Tucked just to the left you see a “Liberty Tree”, this one with the trophies of victory over the leopards strewn before it. And off in the background, its realism somewhat jarring with all the classicized symbolism, is a very nice rendition of an American cavalry troop complete with its own flag-bearers.

Now I’ve gone into all this because, you know, when will I ever have the chance to do it again. And for another reason because this view of the American Revolution from France says something about the American Revolution that resonates with a great many of the conversations below. For a variety of reasons we need not get into, a wide variety of Americans have seen the American Revolution as a strictly provincial affair, in all the meanings of the word. But that is what it never was. From before it began in earnest it was of intense interest to people around the Atlantic seaboard. When it did begun, it soon turned into what is arguably the Second World War, a war that dragged into conflict peoples around the world who lived thousands of miles away from Lexington Green.

In the following conversations you’ll hear about some of those peoples. You’ll also hear about Americans that you might never have heard of before, and some that you’ve heard a lot about but never in this way. But you’ll also hear about some of the "King’s Friends,” both British American, British-British, and German. You can listen to a variety of conversations about the war itself, and how it changed things. And you can trace its consequences, and the memories it left behind.

All in all, there are 28 hours of conversation waiting for you. That’s like a fourteen week semester, with two hour long conversations a week. And it doesn’t cost you a thing.

II. Episodes

Prologue

• The Man at the Center of Two Revolutions: Martin Clagett on William Small, Thomas Jefferson’s teacher and James Watt’s collaborator

• Republic and Empire: Andrew O’Shaughnessy on the global causes and consequences of the American Revolution

Rebels

• Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution: Lorri Glover on how one woman’s life reveals the opportunities and limits of female independence in the 18th century

• The First Martyr of the American Revolution: Christian DiSpigna on Dr. Joseph Warren, his life and times, his death at Bunker Hill, and his legacy

• Founders as Fathers: Lorri Glover on family, fatherhood, and the American Revolution

• Quaker Founder: Jane E. Calvert on John Dickinson, Quaker Constitutionalism, and America’s “Penman of the Revolution”

• George Washington, Politician: David Stewart explains why Washington’s greatest talent was not war, but politics

The King’s Servants

• Noble Volunteers: Don N. Hagist on the myths and realities of British soldiers who fought in America.

• The Hessians are Coming!: Friederike Baer on the German soldiers who fought for the British Army in the American Revolution

• Tory’s Wife: Cynthia Kierner on Jane Welborn Spurgin’s American Revolution

• The Family That Lost America: Julie Flavell on the Howe dynasty and Britain’s wars in and for America

Declaration

• National Treasure: Michael Auslin on the Declaration of Independence's Two Simultaneous Lives

• When the Declaration of Independence was News: Emily Sneff on how people first encountered independence–in newspapers, sermons, rumors, and public readings

The War

• If This Be Treason, Make the Most of It: Carlton W. Larson on treason, juries, and citizenship in the American Revolution

• War Without Mercy: Mark Lender on the American Revolution as an Existential War

• Down the Road to the Cedars: Mark R. Anderson on Native politics, diplomacy, and the American Revolution in Canada

• The American Revolution in the South: John Buchanan on Nathanael Greene, the Southern Campaign of the American Revolution, and the Road to Charleston

• The Crisis of Peace: David Head on the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the Revolution

• World Crisis: Richard Bell on how the American Revolution became a global event that reshaped nearly every corner of the world

Influences and Aftershocks

• Revolutionary Age: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal on the Atlantic World in Upheaval

• The American Revolution in Hapsburg Lands: Jonathan Singerton onthe American Revolution’s influence on the Austrian Empire

• The Great Atlantic Freedom Conspiracy: Micah Alpaugh on correspondence, revolution, and social movement

• Suitable: Chloe Chapin on the Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men

• Men on Horseback: David A. Bell on charisma, revolutions, and the paradox of democratic leadership

Remembering

• Glorious Lessons: Richard Brookhiser on John Trumbull, Revolutionary Art, and Civic Virtue

• Longing for Connection: Andrew Burstein on memory, emotion, and early America

• Long Revolution: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal on a century of talking about the Revolution

• The Democracy We Must Keep: David Stewart on seven founders, nine documents, and the ideas that shaped them

III. Epilogue

If you’ve gone through a section of these conversations, or (wow!) all of them, I hope that you’ve encountered some of these underlying themes:

• contingency rather than inevitability

• citizenship rather than mere independence,

• the Revolution as a process rather than a moment

• historical memory as an active, ongoing practice

In the introduction I asked you to think about the American Revolution as larger than they imagined. Now I would end by asking them to think about your own place within that Revolution’s continuing history.

After all, this is not meant to be just an anthology of podcast episodes. It’s really a very long argument about what it means to think historically about the American Revolution. If all you have after you’ve finished is a more exhaustive list of facts, then it’s been a failure. Hopefully you have some facts, but also a much more expansive set of questions—and if so, that is exactly what Historically Thinking is for.

IV. Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Many of these conversations challenge familiar ideas of who “made” the American Revolution. How does the story change when we shift our attention from the canonical founders to figures such as Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Joseph Warren, John Dickinson, or Abigail Adams? What does this suggest about the way revolutions create—and forget—their heroes?

2. These episodes blur the boundaries between public and private life. How did family, friendship, patronage, reputation, and local community shape political leadership during the Revolution? Can we really separate the “private” lives of the founders from their public actions?

3. Several conversations ask us to reconsider familiar reputations. Joseph Warren became a forgotten martyr; John Dickinson a remembered “coward”; George Washington a soldier rather than a politician. Why do historical reputations change? What responsibilities do historians have in recovering neglected lives—or revising celebrated ones?

4. Many of these conversations complicate the familiar division between “Americans” and “the British.” How useful are those categories for understanding the Revolution? What do we miss when we forget that Loyalists, Hessians, and British soldiers all had their own motives, loyalties, and aspirations? What factors—family, profession, patronage, principle, geography, or opportunity—seem to have mattered most in determining where people’s loyalties lay?

5. What can historians learn by following people who did not support independence—or who simply found themselves on the wrong side of history? Does writing history from the perspective of the defeated change the story we tell?

6. How does recovering the Declaration’s original context—its uncertainty, circulation, and immediate political consequences—change the way we read it today?

7. The Declaration has lived both as a text and as a physical object. Why have Americans attached such importance not only to its ideas but also to the parchment itself? What does the history of the Declaration suggest about the relationship between ideas, artifacts, and national memory?

8. Many of these conversations challenge the familiar image of the Revolutionary War as a straightforward struggle between Britain and the thirteen colonies. How do Native nations, civil conflict, legal prosecutions, and the Southern Campaign reveal the Revolution to have been a far more complex—and often more local—war than popular memory suggests?

9. Several episodes remind us that the outcome of the Revolution remained uncertain until the very end. Which moments seem most contingent? How did military decisions, political leadership, and even chance shape the survival of the revolutionary cause?

10. War changes societies as well as governments. Many of these conversations explore the Revolution’s effects on law, political authority, and the conduct of violence. In what ways did the experience of war transform Americans’ ideas about citizenship, loyalty, justice, and the legitimate use of power?

11. Many of these conversations suggest that the American Revolution was never an isolated event. How does placing it within an Atlantic world of ideas, revolutions, diplomacy, and exchange change our understanding of what happened in North America?

12. Political revolutions are rarely only political—they therefore often leave unexpected legacies. Beyond constitutions and governments, how did the Revolution reshape everyday life, including clothing, consumption, public opinion, political organization, and ideas about leadership? Which of these changes seem most enduring?

13. How do these conversations encourage us to think about the American Revolution as a process rather than a moment? Where do you see its influence extending across borders, generations, or aspects of life that are easy to overlook?

14. Every generation inherits the American Revolution, but no generation remembers it in exactly the same way. How have public speeches, founding documents, works of art, and historical writing shaped what later Americans believe the Revolution meant? What do these acts of remembrance reveal about the needs and concerns of their own time?

15. These conversations remind us that the Revolution has always been interpreted as well as commemorated. How have Americans used the Revolution’s documents, stories, images, and heroes to teach civic virtue, define citizenship, or debate the nation’s future? When does remembrance deepen historical understanding—and when can it oversimplify the past?

16. Again and again, these conversations suggest that Americans have regarded the Revolution not as a completed achievement but as an unfinished experiment. Why have its documents, ideals, and symbols remained objects of debate for nearly 250 years? What does that continuing conversation suggest about the relationship between history, memory, and democratic self-government?

V. Bibliography

• Micah Alpaugh, Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

• David A. Bell, Men on Horseback: Charisma and Power in the Age of Revolutions (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)

• John Buchanan, The Road to Charleston: Nathanael Greene and the American Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2019)

• —, The Road to Guilford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the Carolinas (1999)

• Trevor Burnard & Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Republic and Empire: Crisis, Revolution, and America’s Early Independence (Yale, 2025)

• Chloe Chapin, Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men (Oxford University Press, 2026)

• Don N. Hagist, Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought for the American Revolution

• —, British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution

• Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (Yale University Press, 2014)

• Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions–And the Generations Who Made It (Basic Books, 2024)

• —, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Harvard, 2015)

• Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (North Carolina, 2007)

• Jonathan Singerton, The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy (University of Virginia Press, 2022)

VI. Suggestions for Teachers

These conversations are intended to supplement classroom instruction. They work best when students encounter them alongside primary sources, textbooks, and discussion. In effect they are substitutes for a more conventional lecture.

Here are a few possibilities for what you might then do:

Use one episode to complicate a familiar story.

Many students arrive with a simplified understanding of the American Revolution. Rather than assigning several episodes, try pairing one conversation with the corresponding classroom topic.

For example:

• Joseph Warren alongside Lexington and Concord

• Hessians during the New York campaign

• John Dickinson during debates over independence

• Chloe Chapin when discussing republicanism and the Early Republic

• Emily Sneff before reading the Declaration itself

One carefully chosen episode can widen students’ understanding without overwhelming them.

Compare interpretations

Many episodes challenge stories students think they already know.

Ask students:

• What assumptions did this conversation challenge?

• Which evidence surprised you?

• Did the guest persuade you? Why or why not?

• What further evidence would help answer the question?

Historical thinking begins with questioning familiar narratives.

Connect military, political, and social history

The Revolution was simultaneously

• a military conflict,

• a constitutional crisis,

• a civil war,

• a social revolution,

• an Atlantic event.

Invite students to trace one event through several perspectives.

For example, the Declaration appears differently in conversations with Emily Sneff, David Stewart, Michael Auslin, and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal.

Introduce historiography naturally.

These episodes expose students to historians disagreeing—not through abstract debate but through evidence.

Encourage students to notice:

• What question is this historian trying to answer?

• What kinds of evidence are being used?

• How does this interpretation differ from older accounts?

Why This Conversation Matters

The Louisiana Purchase is one of those historical events that Americans think they already understand. We remember the headline: fifteen million dollars, 530 million acres, and a nation that doubled in size almost overnight. It seems so obvious in retrospect that it is tempting to imagine it as inevitable—as though the continent had merely been waiting for the United States to claim it.

Alexander Mikaberidze’s conversation reminds us how misleading that confidence can be. The Purchase was not simply an American triumph or a fortunate real-estate transaction. It emerged from decades of imperial failure, global war, colonial administration, revolution, and political improvisation. To understand why Thomas Jefferson acquired Louisiana, we first have to understand why France repeatedly failed there, why Spain unexpectedly succeeded, why Haiti transformed Napoleon’s ambitions, and why events unfolding simultaneously in Paris, New Orleans, London, Madrid, and Kentucky all converged in the spring of 1803.

Throughlines

One of the most valuable habits historians cultivate is resisting stories that seem too tidy. The Louisiana Purchase has long been presented as one of the cleanest success stories in American history: Jefferson recognized an opportunity, Napoleon needed money, and the United States became a continental power. Everything else is treated as background scenery.

This conversation reverses that perspective. The Purchase only becomes intelligible once the scenery moves to center stage. Suddenly things become a lot more interesting than the high school history that American students were supposed to learn.

The first lesson concerns the long durée—the deep structures of history. Napoleon’s decision to sell Louisiana cannot be understood by looking only at the frantic diplomatic negotiations of 1803. Mikaberidze argues that its roots reach back more than a century, into the persistent inability of France to populate and develop Louisiana as a successful colony. Despite possessing one of Europe’s largest populations, France never generated enough emigrants willing to cross the Atlantic, and the colony never became economically self-sustaining. Napoleon inherited those structural weaknesses rather than creating them. His dramatic decision in 1803 was, in part, the culmination of problems that Louis XIV and Louis XV had failed to solve.

The conversation also challenges another deeply rooted assumption: that Louisiana’s “French” character was primarily the product of French rule. In reality, much of what visitors today associate with New Orleans—the architecture of the French Quarter, the colony’s relative stability, and many of its legal and commercial institutions—owes far more to four decades of Spanish administration than to the preceding eighty years of French control. Spain approached Louisiana not as a profit center but as a strategic buffer protecting its richer possessions in New Spain and the Caribbean. Ironically, the colony flourished most under rulers whose presence is often forgotten.

Seen from this wider perspective, the Purchase becomes inseparable from the Caribbean. Napoleon never envisioned Louisiana as an end in itself. It was to be the supplier of timber, food, and raw materials for a restored French plantation empire centered on Saint-Domingue. The Haitian Revolution therefore was not merely a parallel event; it was central to the story. As the rebellion destroyed French hopes of reclaiming Haiti, and as renewed war with Britain threatened French communications across the Atlantic, Louisiana suddenly ceased to make strategic sense. Napoleon did not simply decide to sell land. He abandoned an entire imperial design.

The American side of the story proves equally complicated. Thomas Jefferson often appears as the philosopher-president, carefully guided by constitutional principle. Yet the crisis of 1802 exposed the limits of ideological consistency. Spain’s temporary closure of the Mississippi River threatened the economic survival of the western settlements and, perhaps more dangerously, the political unity of the young republic itself. Jefferson feared not merely commercial disruption but secession. Western farmers might seek their future through New Orleans rather than Washington. Federalists demanded military action. Westerners demanded access to the river. France loomed over both. Faced with these realities, Jefferson became remarkably pragmatic, even entertaining an alliance with Britain and ultimately embracing constitutional powers he had long questioned. Statesmanship, the conversation suggests, sometimes requires abandoning cherished theories in order to preserve larger political realities.

Perhaps the most striking insight of the episode is how few participants understood the magnitude of what they were doing. Jefferson initially wanted New Orleans and secure navigation of the Mississippi, not an empire. Robert Livingston scarcely imagined that the United States would permanently govern such an immense territory. Napoleon hoped to strengthen America largely to weaken Britain. No one foresaw precisely the continental nation that would emerge. The Purchase therefore reminds us that historical actors almost never possess the hindsight we routinely grant them.

That may be the conversation’s most enduring lesson. Great historical turning points often look inevitable only after they have succeeded. At the moment they occur, they are usually improvisations shaped by incomplete information, competing priorities, structural constraints, and more than a little luck. The Louisiana Purchase was indeed a grand bargain—but not simply because of the price. It was grand because it emerged from one of history’s most remarkable convergences of contingency and opportunity.

Questions for Reflection

1. Why are events like the Louisiana Purchase so often remembered as inevitable rather than contingent?

2. How does viewing the Purchase from Paris, Madrid, and Saint-Domingue change our understanding of American history?

3. Can an empire fail for structural reasons long before its leaders recognize the failure?

4. Did Jefferson act consistently with his political principles, or did circumstances require him to abandon them?

5. When should statesmen compromise deeply held constitutional or ideological commitments?

6. Why does geography exert such powerful influence over political decisions, particularly in the Mississippi Valley?

7. How important was the Haitian Revolution to the making of the United States?

8. What does this episode suggest about the relationship between global events and local political crises?

9. Which mattered more in 1803: individual leadership or long-term structural forces?

10. What other “inevitable” moments in history deserve to be reconsidered as products of contingency?

For Further Investigation

Books

• Alexander Mikaberidze, The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America (Oxford University Press, 2026)

• John Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (Knopf Doubleday, 2004)

• Peter Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (Yale, 2008)

• François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation (Penguin, 2014)

• Tyson Reeder, Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison’s America (Oxford University Press, 2024)

• David Head and Timothy Hemmis, eds., Republic of Scoundrels: The Schemers, Intriguers, and Adventurers Who Created a New American Nation (Pegasus Books, 2023)

• Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Belknap Press, 2005)

• Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 (W.W. Norton, 2016)

Primary Sources

• Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, 25 April 1802

• Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, 30 April 1802

• Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 27 April 1809

• The Treaty of Cession (1803)

Related Episodes

• The Greatest Russian General, in War and Peace: Alexander Mikaberidze on Kutuzov’s life, legend, and legacy

• The Third World War: Alexander Mikaberidze on why the Napoleonic Wars were the most consequential series of events between the Reformation and the First World War

• Doing the Research: Alexander Mikaberidze on evidence, sources, and the historian’s craft

• Serpent in Eden: Tyson Reeder on Foreign Meddling, James Madison, and the Early Republic

• Founding Scoundrels: David Head and Timothy J. Hemmis on some of the swindlers and con-artists among the Founding Fathers

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

Introduction

Most Americans remember the Louisiana Purchase as a remarkably good bargain: fifteen million dollars for an enormous tract of land that doubled the size of the United States. But that familiar cliché hides a large story. It covers over a lot of things, and suggests a few more that just aren’t so.

In this episode, historian Alexander Mikaberidze places the Purchase within a global struggle involving France, Spain, Britain, Haiti, and the Caribbean. The transaction that reshaped the United States was not inevitable. It emerged from failed colonial projects, imperial rivalry, slave revolution, diplomatic improvisation, crafty financing, Thomas Jefferson’s geopolitical cunning, and his willingness to set aside some of his deepest political convictions.

“In retrospect,” Alex writes, “ the Louisiana Purchase could be seen as providing the conceptual blueprint for American expansion: a fusion of opportunism, strategic foresight, legal elasticity, and belief in the republic’s manifest destiny. Without it, our history and culture would have unfolded along a very different path… it was the acquisition of Louisiana that turned the United States into a continental power, unleashing forces both constructive and destructive, the consequences of which still resonate around the globe.”

About the Guest

Alexander Mikaberidze is Professor of European History at Louisiana State University at Shreveport, where he also serves as Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair for the Curatorship of the James Smith Noel Collection. He is the author of numerous books on Napoleonic and early modern history, including The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America. This marks his seventh appearance on Historically Thinking.

For Further Investigation

• Alexander Mikaberidze, The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America (Oxford University Press, 2026)

• John Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (Knopf Doubleday, 2004)

• Peter Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (Yale, 2008)

• François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation (Penguin, 2014)

• Tyson Reeder, Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison’s America (Oxford University Press, 2024)

• David Head and Timothy Hemmis, eds., Republic of Scoundrels: The Schemers, Intriguers, and Adventurers Who Created a New American Nation (Pegasus Books, 2023)

Related Episodes

• The Greatest Russian General, in War and Peace: Alexander Mikaberidze on Kutuzov’s life, legend, and legacy

• The Third World War: Alexander Mikaberidze on why the Napoleonic Wars were the most consequential series of events between the Reformation and the First World War

• Doing the Research: Alexander Mikaberidze on evidence, sources, and the historian’s craft

• Serpent in Eden: Tyson Reeder on Foreign Meddling, James Madison, and the Early Republic

• Founding Scoundrels: David Head and Timothy J. Hemmis on some of the swindlers and con-artists among the Founding Fathers

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

Tags

Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, Louisiana Purchase, Early American Republic, French Empire, Spanish Empire, Diplomatic History, Western Expansion, Alexander Mikaberidze

Read more

Why This Conversation Matters

Some historical figures survive through mountains of evidence. We have their letters, speeches, memoirs, portraits, and the testimony of those who knew them. But others of more distant pasts survive only by the shape they left in the world.

Offa, king of Mercia from 757 to 796, belongs emphatically to the second category. He ruled for nearly forty years, dominated much of what is now England, corresponded with Charlemagne’s court, built one of Europe’s largest earthworks, and transformed the nature of kingship in early medieval Britain. Yet no contemporary historian thought to write his life. As Winston Churchill memorably observed, studying Offa is like finding “the hollow shape in which a creature of unusual strength and size undoubtedly resided.”

This week’s conversation is therefore about much more than one Anglo-Saxon king. It is about how historians think when the evidence is fragmentary, and how disciplined inference allows the past to emerge from silence.

Throughlines

One of the pleasures of this conversation is that it quietly overturns one of the common misconceptions about history: that historians simply read sources and report what they find. Rory Naismith demonstrates that, particularly in the early Middle Ages, historians often work with astonishingly little direct evidence. The challenge is not merely discovering sources, but learning how to reason carefully from what survives. For classical and medieval historians, inference is the only way to proceed through a dark and thorny wood.

Offa himself presents the perfect example. Although he ruled Mercia for thirty-nine years and became the dominant ruler in much of England, almost no contemporary narrative describes him. The great chronicles were written generations later, often by people writing from the perspective of kingdoms that had every reason to diminish Mercian achievement. Offa survives not through biography but through consequences. His coins, charters, diplomatic correspondence, administrative reforms, and the immense earthwork known as Offa’s Dyke become the historian’s evidence. Like the footprints of an extinct animal, they reveal the size and character of something no longer directly visible.

That image leads naturally to the conversation’s most memorable metaphor. Naismith compares writing Offa’s biography to assembling a jigsaw puzzle with only two percent of the pieces. The task is not to invent the missing ninety-eight percent, but to determine which possible pictures are actually supported by the fragments that remain. Historical inference is neither speculation nor certainty. It is disciplined imagination constrained by evidence.

The conversation also challenges another long-standing assumption: that Offa merely imitated Charlemagne. Traditionally, historians have portrayed Mercia as following continental developments at a respectful distance. Yet Naismith argues that the relationship was much more reciprocal. Both rulers watched each other closely. A remarkable coin issued in the name of Charlemagne’s queen appears to imitate coins struck for Offa’s queen Cynethryth, suggesting that influence crossed the Channel in both directions. Rather than standing on the margins of European politics, Mercia participated in a genuine dialogue among the leading powers of the eighth century.

Equally revealing is Offa’s conception of kingship. His goal was not simply conquest. He sought to transform a loose network of subordinate kingdoms into what Naismith calls a “multi-part polity,” in which rulers, bishops, and regional elites increasingly operated within a common political framework. Charters sought his endorsement. Ecclesiastical councils met alongside royal assemblies. Authority became centralized not merely through force but through participation in institutions that offered advantages to those who joined them. Power, in other words, depended as much upon legitimacy as coercion.

Offa’s Dyke embodies this principle perfectly. It was almost certainly not intended as an impenetrable military barrier. No eighth-century standing army could have garrisoned 177 miles of frontier. Instead, the Dyke announced something about the kingdom capable of constructing it. It proclaimed resources, organization, confidence, and permanence. Anyone approaching from Wales encountered not merely a bank of earth but a political statement: this was a kingdom that possessed the capacity to reshape the landscape itself.

Ironically, Offa’s greatest failure became the reason for his historical obscurity. He successfully strengthened Mercia but failed to establish a lasting dynasty. His son Ecgfrith died only months after succeeding him, and later generations—particularly under Alfred and the kings of Wessex—remembered Offa largely as an antagonist rather than as the architect of an alternative vision of England. History, as Naismith reminds us, is often written by those who inherit success rather than those who first imagined it.

By the end of the conversation, Offa himself almost recedes into the background. The larger lesson concerns historical thinking. Evidence is rarely complete. Every generation uncovers new pieces of the puzzle. The historian’s responsibility is not to eliminate uncertainty but to reason honestly within it, remaining willing to revise conclusions when new evidence appears. Naismith hopes his own book will one day become “creatively outdated.” That aspiration is not a weakness but one of the defining virtues of the historical profession.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. What responsibilities do historians have when the surviving evidence is fragmentary?

2. How should we distinguish disciplined inference from casual speculation?

3. Why do some rulers leave abundant records while others leave only traces?

4. What does Offa’s Dyke communicate beyond its possible military function?

5. In what ways can coins reveal political ideas?

6. How persuasive is the argument that Offa and Charlemagne influenced one another?

7. Why did Offa’s vision of Mercia ultimately fail to endure?

8. How much does later historical memory shape the reputation of earlier rulers?

9. Can absence itself become a form of historical evidence?

10. What other historical figures might deserve to be reconsidered because their stories have been overshadowed by those who came after them?

For Further Investigation

• Rory Naismith, Offa: King of the Mercians (Yale, 2026)

• —, Making Money in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton, 2023)

• —, Money and Power in Anglo-Saxon England: The Southern English Kingdoms, 757–865 (Cambridge, 2011)

• Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2023)

• James Campbell (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons (Penguin, 1991)

• —, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (Bloomsbury, 1986)

Primary Sources

• Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, available in translations by Bertram Colgrave and D.H. Farmer; scholarly edition by Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (OUP, 1992)

• Ralph Barlow Page, ed., The Letters of Alcuin (PhD Dissertation, Columbia, 1909)

• Michael Swanton, trans. and ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Routledge, 1998)

• The Electronic Sawyer: Online Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Charters

Related Episodes

• Venerable Bede: Rory Naismith on Britain’s First Great Historian

• “Making Medieval Money”, with Rory Naismith

• “Talking Anglo-Saxon”, with Rory Naismith

Introduction

Running for about 177 miles along the Welsh-English border is the remains of an earthwork, a fortification over a hundred miles longer than Hadrian’s Wall. Built sometime in the eighth century, it is known as Offa’s Dyke, one of the few surviving reminder of one of the most formidable kings in English history.

“As a man,” writes my guest Roy Naismith, “Offa is effectively lost.” Winston Churchill framed the issue thus: “In studying Offa we are like geologists who instead of finding a fossil find only the hollow shape in which a creature of unusual strength and size undoubtedly resided.” Or as the historian Kenneth Sisam observed, Offa “seems to have had all the attributes of a great ruler except a contemporary historian.”

But if he is effectively lost, then how can Naismith have written a new book titled Offa: King of the Mercians? Because he has, to paraphrase modern terminology, historyed it. This is a conversation about a great early medieval king; but it’s really a master class in the careful and demanding work of historical inference.

About the Guest

Rory Naismith is Professor of Early Medieval English History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. One of the leading historians of Anglo-Saxon England, his work combines political, economic, religious, and numismatic history to illuminate the early medieval world. His books include Money and Power in Anglo-Saxon England: The Southern English Kingdoms, 757–865, Making Money in the Early Middle Ages, and Offa: King of the Mercians.

For Further Investigation

• Rory Naismith, Offa: King of the Mercians (Yale, 2026)

• —, Making Money in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton, 2023)

• —, Money and Power in Anglo-Saxon England: The Southern English Kingdoms, 757–865 (Cambridge, 2011)

• Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2023)

• James Campbell (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons (Penguin, 1991)

• —, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (Bloomsbury, 1986)

• Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, available in translations by Bertram Colgrave and D.H. Farmer; scholarly edition by Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (OUP, 1992)

Related Episodes

• Venerable Bede: Rory Naismith on Britain’s First Great Historian

• “Making Medieval Money”, with Rory Naismith

• “Talking Anglo-Saxon”, with Rory Naismith

Tags

Anglo-Saxon England, Offa, Mercia, Rory Naismith, Early Medieval History, England, Kingship, Charlemagne, Coinage, Archaeology, Historical Method, History Podcast

Why This Conversation Matters

Some places have a second life. Or a shadow life, a life apart from their reality that becomes as important as their actual life. Sometimes it’s even more important.

They cease to be merely geographical locations and become symbols. Jerusalem, Rome, Paris—and Babylon. Over not just centuries but millennia, Babylon became shorthand for decadence, tyranny, wealth, corruption, exile, and divine judgment. By the modern era, the historical city had almost disappeared beneath the weight of everything people imagined it to represent.

But historical thought demands that we recover the city from the became a metaphor. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’s Babylon: Biography of a Metropolis does precisely that. He reminds us that before Babylon became a warning or a myth, it was home. Before it became an image in prophetic literature, it was one of humanity’s greatest urban experiments, inhabited by millions of ordinary people who believed they lived in the center of a blessed and orderly world.

Throughlines

The conversation begins with the observation that almost everyone recognizes the name Babylon, yet relatively few people know much about the historical city itself. For many listeners, Babylon exists primarily through the Hebrew Bible, later Christian tradition, and popular culture. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones argues that these later interpretations have almost entirely eclipsed the civilization that actually flourished on the Euphrates for more than two thousand years.

Recovering that civilization begins by seeing Babylon as its inhabitants saw it. Far from imagining themselves as decadent or corrupt, the Babylonians believed they lived in the most fortunate city in the world. Their literature presents Babylon as a place favored by the gods, protected through divine order and sustained by remarkable human achievement. That confidence shaped everything from religion and kingship to architecture and civic identity.

A recurring theme of the discussion is the extraordinary documentary record the Babylonians left behind. Unlike many ancient civilizations, Babylon speaks to us through hundreds of thousands of clay tablets. They preserve royal inscriptions and religious texts, but also business contracts, court records, marriage agreements, school exercises, inventories, personal correspondence, and everyday accounts. Through them historians can reconstruct not merely the actions of kings but the lives of merchants, families, priests, and craftsmen. Few ancient societies are documented with such richness.

Those documents also reveal a city whose achievements extended far beyond monumental architecture. Babylonian scholars developed sophisticated mathematical techniques, carefully observed the heavens over centuries, refined systems of law and administration, and produced literary works whose influence spread across the ancient Near East. The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, survived because generations of Babylonian scribes continued to copy, teach, and preserve it. Their commitment to learning became one of the city’s defining characteristics.

The conversation also explores Babylon’s remarkable continuity. Dynasties rose and fell. Conquerors arrived and departed. Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, and others ruled the city in succession. Yet Babylon remained an important religious and intellectual center throughout these political transformations. The city’s identity proved more durable than the regimes that governed it, reminding us that civilizations often outlast empires.

Religion occupies a central place in Babylonian life. Rather than existing alongside politics, religion permeated it. Kings derived legitimacy through their relationship with the city’s chief deity, Marduk, while festivals and rituals reaffirmed the bond between divine order and civic stability. The annual Akitu festival symbolically renewed both kingship and the cosmos itself, illustrating how deeply political authority and religious belief were intertwined.

One particularly striking aspect of the discussion concerns memory. Later civilizations repeatedly reinvented Babylon for their own purposes. Biblical writers transformed it into the archetype of imperial oppression. Classical authors alternated between admiration and fantasy. Modern culture continued adding new layers of symbolism. Each generation inherited a Babylon that reflected its own concerns more than those of the ancient city itself. The historical Babylon gradually disappeared beneath the accumulated weight of metaphor.

The conversation ultimately becomes an exercise in historical thinking itself. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones asks us to distinguish between inherited symbols and historical realities. Doing so does not diminish Babylon’s cultural power. Instead, it restores to view a civilization remarkable enough that it requires no embellishment. The real Babylon—its scholarship, engineering, religion, literature, and urban life—is every bit as fascinating as the mythical one.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Why do some cities become symbols while others remain places?

2. How has the biblical image of Babylon shaped modern understanding of the city?

3. What advantages do Babylon’s clay tablets give historians over many other ancient civilizations?

4. What surprised you most about everyday life in Babylon?

5. Why did Babylon remain important even as empires came and went?

6. How did religion shape Babylonian politics and civic life?

7. What can Babylon teach us about the durability of cities compared to states?

8. How does the Epic of Gilgamesh deepen our understanding of Babylonian civilization?

9. When does symbolism illuminate history, and when does it obscure it?

10. What other historical places have acquired symbolic lives that overshadow their historical realities?

For Further Investigation

Books

• Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Babylon: Biography of a Metropolis (Pegasus, 2026)

• Amanda H. Podany, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings (Oxford University Press, 2022)

• Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East (Blackwell, 2003)

• Trevor Ryce, Babylonia: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016)

• Eric H. Cline, Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed (Princeton University Press, 2025)

• —, After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Primary Sources

• The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Andrew George (Penguin, 2003)

• Code of Hammurabi

• Enuma Elish: The Babylonian Epic of Creation

• Astronomical diaries of Babylon

Related Episodes

• The Persian Version: Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones on Persia, empire, and the age of the Great Kings

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

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

Introduction

Even if you know nothing about the city, it is almost a certainty that you know its name: Babylon. It is perhaps one of the most evocative city names ever in the history of the planet—perhaps one of the most evocative names, full stop, not too far down the list from “heaven” and “hell.” From the prophet Isaiah to Lady Gaga, it has stood for decadence, corruption, indulgence, wealth, and evil.

But that is not the Babylon of history, argues my guest Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, the city that was at the center of the thriving, rich, and advanced civilization of Mesopotamia. For two thousand years, as dynasties came and went, it remained a center of religious life, art, literature, astronomy, and medicine. “The Babylonians in their own literature reckoned themselves to be the most blessed people in the world…and they thought of themselves as loved and guarded by the gods.” We still enjoy the benefits of their achievements.

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones holds the Chair of Ancient History at Cardiff University and has published widely on the ancient Near East. He was last on Historically Thinking to discuss The Persians, a conversation released on May 16, 2022. His latest book is Babylon: Biography of a Metropolis, and it is the subject of our conversation today.

About the Guest

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones is Chair of Ancient History at Cardiff University and one of Britain’s leading historians of the ancient Near East. His books include The Persians, Persians: The Age of the Great Kings, and Babylon: Biography of a Metropolis. His work explores the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Persia, and the wider ancient world through archaeology, literature, religion, and political history.

For Further Investigation

• Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Babylon: Biography of a Metropolis (Pegasus, 2026)

• Amanda H. Podany, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings (Oxford University Press, 2022)

• The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Andrew George (Penguin, 2003)

Related Episodes

• The Persian Version: Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones on Persia, empire, and the age of the Great Kings

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

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

Tags

Ancient History, Babylon, Mesopotamia, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Ancient Near East, Assyria, Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, Archaeology, Cities, Civilization, History Podcast

Hello,

It’s been a while since I’ve sent a Notanda. My apologies. This one is not a compilation of six months of random information…I wouldn’t do that to me or to you…but just some things that I’ve run across as a trawl for conversation topics on the podcast. It ranges from catchphrases to wargaming to conspiracy theories; and there’s also a subtle Chaucerian undercurrent, that might result in a conversation or two in the next few months.

There’s also an agricultural theme. Part of this is the image of farms and agriculture, such as North Carolina’s desire to stop you and me from writing “sweet potato”, for whatever reason that emerged from a fevered Tarheel imagination. But it’s also how farmers became evermore muscular in advertising and popular imagination as their job was increasingly technological. There’s also an essay arguing that the production of fertilizer is a historically persistent geopolitical question, and another on meadows in medieval England’s imagination and actual agricultural practice.

And now the links…

Curiosities & Essays

I will miss “6-7!”—but I know something else will replace it, because something always has:

But as media scholars who study children’s culture, we didn’t view the meme with bewilderment or exasperation. Instead, we thought back to our own childhoods on three different continents – and all the secret languages we spoke.

There was Pig Latin. The cool “S” doodled on countless worksheets and bathroom stalls. Forming an L-shape with our thumb and index finger to insult someone. Remixing the words of hand-clapping games from previous generations.

6-7 is only the latest example of these long-standing practices – and though the gesture might not mean much to adults, it says a lot about children’s play, their social lives and their desire for power.

Do we have to be media scholars to view 6-7 without bewilderment or exasperation? I should hope not; that would be icky. You don’t even have to be a historian, amazingly enough. Just reading a few semi-old novels reveals similar transitory verbal practices, like “23 skidoo!”, which I think remains my favorite.

The only thing better are laborious attempts to explain such memes, all of which should be regarded with at best suspicion. For a collection of examples that give you a hernia just reading them, I give you Professor Wikipedia.

Ixnay upidstay planationsexay Offesssorpay Ikipediaway.

Grapefruits, like other citrus, have disturbing sex lives

They also don’t taste like grapes, have an uncertain history, created Florida, were part of a terrible diet, and have strange drug interactions.

North Carolina Wants You to Stop Saying “Sweet Potato”

They don’t want you to say “yam”, either.

Historian Jon Peterson traces the route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement

No further comment should be required.

The Geopolitics of Fertilizer

Few questions are as strategically consequential, and as historically persistent, as those that concern the production of fertilisers. Time and again, the supply of usable nitrogen has shaped wars, driven technological breakthroughs, and influenced the map of geopolitical power. The dependencies underpinning that supply chain have never disappeared; they have simply relocated from one source to the next. As the world once again confronts questions of supply chain resilience, that pattern deserves renewed attention.

Summertime

The Meadows of Medieval Summer

…For people involved in agricultural work the mead was a place for important labour. Haymaking was a significant stage in the agricultural calendar because a good stock of hay enabled animals to be fed through the winter months. As a result there was a complex economic and social structure attached to mowing rights and obligations and the regulation of hay production.

The Making of the Muscular Farmer

Farming is one of the great success stories of automation: over time, the need for manual labor has dropped dramatically. Yet, as historian J.L. Anderson writes, over the past 80 years, the dwindling need for muscle on farms has coincided with increasing depictions of masculine strength in advertisements targeting farm markets.

If Your Summer Travel Isn’t Already Scheduled…

“33 of the World’s Most Mysterious Tombstones”

Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed (con’t)

Is There a Science of Writing?

For roughly a decade, the phrase “science of reading” has dominated literacy discourse in the United States, the United Kingdom, and most Anglophone education systems. The phrase refers to a large body of converging evidence about how the brain learns to decode print, the centrality of phonemic awareness, and the role of background knowledge and vocabulary in comprehension. It has reshaped statute, curriculum, and teacher preparation in roughly thirty US states, in England through the statutory phonics screening check and the systematic synthetic phonics requirement embedded in the national curriculum. Writing, by contrast, has been almost entirely absent from this conversation. The natural question is whether there is a comparable science of writing, and if so, why is it so unknown?

In an Age of Distraction: Historical Thinking, AI, and the Formation of College Students

AI promises efficiency, personalization, and speed. This combination is appealing to college students who are dealing with academic pressures and a fast-paced world. History teachers are now faced with the tension between student demand for quick results (which AI provides) and the slow, thoughtful process of learning to think historically. This tension is not merely about plagiarizing papers; it cuts to the heart of what it means to nurture intellectual and moral maturity at a time when universities are moving away from the humanities and neglecting the very practices that once defined liberal arts education.

And Yet It Persists

“Standardized tests are back from the dead. That’s probably a good thing.”

Essay–Episode Callbacks

• Bede: Father of English History

  • Listen to Venerable Bede: Rory Naismith on Britain’s First Great Historian

• Peter Mancall, “The US founders’ other revolutionary choice: Separating religion and government”

  • Listen to Contested Continent: Peter Mancall on the Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680

• Chloe Chapin, “Unbuttoned: an interactive history of the suit”

  • Listen to Suitable: Chloe Chapin on the Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Man

• Christine Abigail L Tan, “No one is self-made: The idea that success is deserved has great traction in the world. But Zhuangzi argues that it is a deeply flawed notion”

  • Listen to The Great Historian: Andrew Meyer on Sima Qian and the Invention of History

• “The Ghost Roads of Ireland’s Great Famine”

  • Listen to Rot: Padraic X. Scanlan on the Irish Famine and Its Imperial Legacies

(Possible) Episode Previews

How Do Academics Handle Conspiracy Theorists?

I wish I knew, tbh

Chaucer’s England

Who were Chaucer’s thirty-three pilgrims, and why were they heading to Canterbury? What do they and their tales tell us about medieval England as a place, and about the daily lives of its people?

Nicholas Orme, one of our leading historians, brings literature and history together to answer this question, using the Canterbury Tales and the other great writings of Chaucer’s day. In ten chapters, he explains what people thought: about time and space, religion and the social system. He shows their wide degree of literacy and how they spent their leisure. He takes us through the politics of the day, the crusades, and the lifestyles of the nobility, clergy, townsfolk, and country dwellers, along with the landscapes they lived in.

The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory

Truthers, birthers, flat-Earthers, the deep state, crisis actors, chemtrails, the Epstein files, Pizzagate, the Plandemic—it seems as though there’s a conspiracy theory for every situation. But what exactly is a conspiracy theory? And why is the term used to describe beliefs that are so very unlike theories (at least in the scientific sense of the word)?

Warmly,

Al Zambone

Why This Conversation Matters

The Declaration of Independence often appears in hindsight because we know the ending. We know the United States survives. We know the Revolution succeeds. We know the words become famous and take on a life of their own.

But it’s sometime hard to remember that nobody in July 1776 knew that. For contemporaries, the Declaration was not a monument. It was information. It was a provocation. It arrived amid rumors, military reports, newspaper stories, political arguments, and personal anxieties. It was something people had to react to in real time. It was something that made people pick a side.

Emily Sneff’s work invites us to recover that uncertainty.

Throughlines

The conversation opens with the deceptively simple question of how people learned about independence. Rather than beginning with Jefferson or Congress, Sneff begins with circulation. The Declaration moved through newspapers, broadsides, handwritten copies, and public readings. It entered a world already saturated with wartime information, rumor, and speculation. Americans did not encounter it in isolation; they encountered it amid a constant stream of competing news.

A central figure in the story is printer John Dunlap. His broadside became the vehicle through which the Declaration spread across the continent. Yet Sneff emphasizes that the process involved many more people than Dunlap alone. Printers, apprentices, laborers, and readers all contributed to the dissemination of the text. The Declaration’s reach depended on networks rather than on individuals.

The discussion then turns to public readings. These events were not simply practical solutions for reaching illiterate audiences but civic rituals, based upon precedents like the King’s birthday and Guy Fawkes’ Day. Communities gathered together to hear the Declaration, celebrate independence, and symbolically sever ties with Britain. Bells were rung, cannons fired, effigies were burned, and royal symbols were destroyed. Independence was communicated through performance as much as through text; but the text was the spark.

At the same time, not everyone welcomed the news. Some individuals hesitated, doubted, or resisted. Sheriffs declined to read the Declaration. Ministers struggled with the implications of abandoning prayers for the king. Anglican clergy wrestled with obligations that were not merely political but spiritual. For many people, the Declaration forced difficult choices rather than inspiring immediate enthusiasm.

Translation emerges as another major theme. German-speaking communities in Pennsylvania quickly received sophisticated translations produced by people deeply familiar with revolutionary language because they had been participants in the long argument leading to that moment. Elsewhere, translation often distorted meaning. The story highlights the importance of cultural context and demonstrates how difficult it can be to transmit political ideas across linguistic boundaries.

One particularly striking episode concerns diplomacy. The first foreign acknowledgement of American independence came not from France but from native leaders from Nova Scotia meeting Massachusetts officials. This moment complicates traditional narratives that focus exclusively on European reactions to the Revolution.

The conversation also reveals the surprising weakness of American diplomatic communication. Silas Deane waited in France for months without receiving the official document he needed to present at Versailles. Meanwhile, British officials acquired copies with ease. The episode illustrates the contrast between revolutionary aspirations and administrative realities.

The final section follows the transition from news to memory. Mary Katharine Goddard’s January 1777 printing, complete with the names of the signers, marks a turning point. The Declaration ceased to be merely current information and began to become an artifact. The document that had once circulated through newspapers and rumor slowly entered the realm of commemoration and preservation.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. What changes when we view the Declaration as news rather than scripture?

2. Why were public readings so important?

3. How did communities perform independence?

4. Why did some ministers struggle with the Declaration?

5. What challenges arise when revolutionary ideas are translated?

6. Why did Indigenous leaders respond differently than Europeans?

7. What does the Silas Deane episode reveal about the Continental Congress?

8. How did British newspapers shape reception of the Declaration?

9. Why did the Declaration eventually cease to be news?

10. What was gained—and lost—when it became a historical artifact?

For Further Investigation

Books

• Emily Sneff, When the Declaration of Independence Was News (Oxford University Press, 2026)

• Michael Auslin, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

• Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Vintage, 1998)

• Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Knopf Doubleday, 2018)

• Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas

• David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard, 2008)

Primary Sources

• Dunlap Broadside (National Archives)

• Goddard Broadside (New York Public Library)

• Treaty of Watertown (Historical Society of Watertown)

• Abigail Adams to John Adams, 13 July 1776: “I cannot but feel sorry that some of the most Manly Sentiments in the Declaration are Expunged from the printed coppy. Perhaps wise reasons induced it.”

Related Episodes

• The Man at the Center of Two Revolutions: Martin Clagett on William Small, Thomas Jefferson’s teacher and James Watt’s collaborator

• Republic and Empire: Andrew O’Shaughnessy on the global causes and consequences of the American Revolution

• Quaker Founder: Jane E. Calvert on John Dickinson, Quaker Constitutionalism, and America’s “Penman of the Revolution”

• The Great Atlantic Freedom Conspiracy: Micah Alpaugh on correspondence, revolution, and social movement

• Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery: Cara Rogers Stevens on

  rethinking Jefferson

Tags

America 250; Declaration of Independence; Emily Sneff; American Revolution; Newspapers; Print Culture; John Dunlap; Mary Katharine Goddard; Thomas Jefferson; Public Memory; Early America; Historical Thinking

Introduction

“There was a time when the Declaration of Independence was news.”

“Most books written about the Declaration have pursued questions about its precedence and authorship as well as its legacy. In 1776, when the Declaration was news, it was part of an ever-changing and circulating amalgam of accurate and inaccurate information, gossip, military intelligence, speculation, and opinion. At approximately one thousand three hundred and twenty words from ‘When in the Course of Human Events’ through ‘Our Sacred Honor,’ the Declaration took fewer than ten minutes to read and filled only one or two columns of a typical newspaper. This was a text that could be communicated swiftly, but it was also a text for which the context in which it was communicated mattered. The questions of who experienced the news of independence and when and how they did so reveal a critical, overlooked history of the American Revolution.”

Those are the words of my guest Emily Sneff in her new book When the Declaration of Independence Was News. It is a book that reframes the Declaration and enables us to see it in a new way: at a moment when the success of the Revolution was far from inevitable, and when the mere existence of the Declaration forced people to choose sides—or to reconsider everything they had previously believed about authority, loyalty, and politics.

In this conversation we discuss how news of independence spread through newspapers, broadsides, public readings, churches, diplomatic networks, and translation. We follow the Declaration from John Dunlap’s printing office in Philadelphia to German-language newspapers, and treaty councils with native American tribes; to the office of the Colonial Secretary in London, to London newspapers, and to the court of Versailles.

About the Guest

Emily Sneff is an independent historian specializing in the history and memory of the American Revolution. Her research has focused particularly on the Declaration of Independence and its transmission, reception, and preservation. When the Declaration of Independence Was News is her first book.

For Further Investigation

• Emily Sneff, When the Declaration of Independence Was News (Oxford University Press, 2026)

• The Website of Emily Sneff

• Michael Auslin, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

• Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Vintage, 1998)

• Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Knopf Doubleday, 2018)

• Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas

• David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard, 2008)

Related Episodes

• The Man at the Center of Two Revolutions: Martin Clagett on William Small, Thomas Jefferson’s teacher and James Watt’s collaborator

• Republic and Empire: Andrew O’Shaughnessy on the global causes and consequences of the American Revolution

• Quaker Founder: Jane E. Calvert on John Dickinson, Quaker Constitutionalism, and America’s “Penman of the Revolution”

• The Great Atlantic Freedom Conspiracy: Micah Alpaugh on correspondence, revolution, and social movement

• Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery: Cara Rogers Stevens on

  rethinking Jefferson

Tags

America 250; Declaration of Independence; Emily Sneff; American Revolution; Newspapers; Print Culture; John Dunlap; Mary Katharine Goddard; Thomas Jefferson; Public Memory; Early America; Historical Thinking