Field Guide No. 2: Intellectual Humility and Historical Thinking
A series on curiosity, complexity, and being comfortable with uncertainty
I. Introduction
This week, instead of a Friday Reflection, I’m publishing the second Historically Thinking Field Guide—on Intellectual Humility, a habit of mind that underlies every serious engagement with the past. These Field Guides are meant not simply to collect conversations, but by collecting them together cultivate ways of thinking about the past.
This is very true about this week’s Field Guide. Since its beginning, Historically Thinking has been based on a simple claim: that history is more than stories about the past. It is a way of seeing the world, one that cultivates rigor, curiosity, and intellectual humility.
While other Field Guides are assorted conversations unified for the first time, this Field Guide was originally a series. Thanks to a grant from the Greater Good Science Center at Cal Berkeley, I was able to explore the relationship between historical thinking and intellectual humility: why they belong together, how they work together, and what they can teach us about navigating a world of uncertainty.
To do that I began by recording conversations with a few people who had thought a lot about intellectual humility, and one who has thought a lot about historical thinking. Then I talked to historians, just about all of whom were previously on the podcast. I asked them about their life with history: how it started, how it became serious, what the relationship is like at this point in their life. Most of all I ask them how they do history, as a way of getting at how every historian has to deal with the inevitable limits of knowledge that we all face. How do they deal with that? How do they acknowledge it? How can a historian acknowledge the limitations of knowledge but still make claims and arguments, still take intellectual risks?
II. Episodes in the Series
A. Introduction to the Topic
Intellectual Humility and the “Internet of Us”
Guest: Michael Patrick Lynch
About the Guest: Lynch is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and Director of the UConn Humanities Institute. His books include Truth as One and Many, The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data, and Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture.
What it’s about: Truth, arrogance, and thinking historically in the digital age.
Listen for: Lynch’s “no-internet” exercise
Originally published: April 3, 2023 (Episode 310)
Intellectual Humility, Social Psychologically Speaking
Guest: Igor Grossmann
About the Guest: Igor Grossmann is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo and Director of the Wisdom and Culture Lab.
What it’s about: What is intellectual humility when you measure it in the lab and trace it across cultures?
Listen for: The crippling effects of overconfidence (without which prediction markets and sports gambling couldn’t turn a profit)
Originally published: April 17, 2023 (Episode 313)
What’s Historical Thinking Got to Do With Intellectual Humility?
Guest: Lendol Calder
About the Guest: Lendol Calder is Professor of History at Augustana College. Recognized for his contributions to teaching and pedagogy, he coined the influential term “uncoverage” to describe a model of teaching survey courses that emphasizes historical thinking over “coverage” of content.
What it’s about: A review of the “moves” of historical thinking, and the need for intellectual humility to be one of them.
Listen for: How Calder came to think of intellectual humility as one of the moves of historical thinking
Originally published: September 28, 2023
B. Conversations with Practitioners
Jonathan Zimmerman
About the Guest: He is the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor in Education and Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in 1993 from Johns Hopkins University. His books have dealt with a wide range of topics related to the history of education, including sex and alcohol education, history and religion in the curriculum, Americans who taught overseas, and historical memory in public schooling.
Listen for: If and how acknowledging the limits of our knowledge make us better educators, students, and citizens
Originally published: December 21, 2023
Suzanne Marchand
About the Guest: Suzanne Marchand, Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University. A scholar of European intellectual history, Marchand has also ranged widely: from studying the study of archaeology, to Orientalism, to porcelain (which we previously discussed on the podcast), and most recently to Herodotus. She is the 2026 President of the American Historical Association.
Listen for: Can a long view of ideas—from Herodotus to Orientalism to porcelain—help us see the limits of our own assumptions?
Originally published: February 2, 2024
Leah Shopkow
About the Guest: Leah Shopkow is Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington. A historian of medieval France, she began her career by studying the history written by medieval chroniclers, resulting in her book History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. She has also edited William of Andres’ The Chronicle of Andres, and most recently written The Saint and the Count: A Case Study for Reading Like a Historian.
Listen for: What can students gain from “reading like a historian,” and how does that connect to intellectual humility?
Originally published: February 27, 2024
Mark Carnes
About the Guest: Mark Carnes is Professor of History at Barnard College. His academic specialty in nineteenth century American history led to his book Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (Yale University Press, 1989). His interest in how history appears in forms other than history books led him to edit Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies and Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other). In 1995, Carnes pioneered a role-playing pedagogy—now known as Reacting to the Past (RTP). He has written several of the games in the RTP series as well as Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College (Harvard, 2018), which he and I discussed long, long ago.
Listen for: Does role-playing help students practice humility as they step into the minds of people from the past?
Originally published: March 14, 2024
Joseph Manning
About the Guest: Joseph Manning is the William K. and Marilyn Milton Simpson Professor of Classics and History, Professor in the Yale School of the Environment, and Senior Research Scholar in Law. His historical work specializes in Hellenistic history, with particular focus on the legal and economic history of Ptolemaic Egypt.
Listen for: How should historians balance humility with bold claims about something as vast as climate’s role in shaping civilizations?
Originally published: May 20, 2024
Alexander Mikaberidze and Scott Eric Nelson
About the Guests: Alex Mikaberidze is Professor of History and Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. Dr. Mikaberidze specializes in 18th and 19th century Europe, particularly the Napoleonic Wars. He has written or edited some two dozen titles, including the critically acclaimed The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History and most recently the critically acclaimed Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace.
Scott Eric Nelson is Georgia Athletic Association Professor at the University of Georgia. Scott writes about the 19th century history, including the history of slavery, international finance, the history of science, and of global commodities. His first book was Steel Drivin’ Man: The Untold Story of an American Legend, about the black folklore legend John Henry, which won four national awards. More recently, he authored Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World
Listen for: The very interesting ways in which both these historians came to studying the past for very personal reasons
How to Use This Series
For classrooms: Each episode comes with questions designed to spark discussion.
For book clubs or seminars: Use the accompanying bibliographies in each episode as jumping-off points for deeper exploration.
For personal reflection: Each episode can be read or listened to on its own, but taken together they build a larger argument for the necessity of humility in thought and action.
Keep Exploring
Friday Reflections — weekly essays that extend the conversation.