Originally published on December 7, 2021 (Episode 236)
Introduction
“Let me put that into context.” For many of us, those words trigger a survival reflex—especially if uttered by a professor who then proceeds to lecture, comma-free, for ten minutes straight. But context really does matter, and in this episode of our historical thinking series we dig into what it means.
The official podcast definition of context, phrased as always as a question, is this: What background knowledge helps us understand these documents? A simple sentence—“After our wedding, my husband traveled alone to California”—reads very differently depending on whether it was written in 1850 during the Gold Rush, or in 1935 during the Dust Bowl. Context, in other words, is what turns bare words into lived meaning.
About the Guest
David Staley is Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University, with courtesy appointments in the Departments of Design and Educational Studies. His research spans digital history, the philosophy of history, methodology, and the future of higher education. He is the author of Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) and History and the Future: Using Historical Thinking to Imagine the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). You can follow him on Twitter @davidstaley8.
For Further Investigation
Some related conversations on the podcast are earlier ones with David Staley, particularly “The History of the Future”, and with David A. Bell, “Men on Horseback”
Julie Flavell, When London Was Capital of America (Yale University Press, 2010)
Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (Vintage, 1965)
David A. Bell, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)
David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Knopf, 2017)
Alan D. Beyerchen, Scientists Under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 1977)
💬 Listen & Discuss
What’s an example of context you’ve seen transform the meaning of a document, a story, or even a conversation? Share your thoughts in the comments—and consider sharing this episode with a friend who loves thinking about how we understand the past.
