Historically Thinking

Al Zambone
  • 4.9 (84)
  • HISTORY
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

We believe that when people think historically, they are engaging in a disciplined way of thinking about the world and its past. We believe it gives thinkers a knack for recognizing nonsense; and that it cultivates not only intellectual curiosity and rigor, but also intellectual humility. Join Al Zambone, author of Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life, as he talks with historians and other professionals who cultivate the craft of historical thinking.

  1. 1H AGO

    Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South

    “In the generation just before the Civil War, something like one-quarter of America’s enslaved people lived on large plantations with fifty or more forced laborers—in essence, work camps, where contact with whites might be limited and mostly utilitarian. Another quarter lived on plantations where twenty to fifty persons were held in slavery. The typical owner of, say, thirty captive Black workers knew his enslaved people individually, even if their true feelings often remained hidden from him. That leaves half the South’s enslaved population living on properties where fewer than twenty Black people were held in bondage. Households that included, say, five or ten enslaved folk were very numerous. Callousness and exploitation were baked into the system, but slavery on this scale also required physical closeness between white and Black. This sort of environment was home to nearly two million African Americans by 1860, and it represented the predominant pattern in Virginia, which held within its borders the largest enslaved population of any colony or state throughout the period from 1619 until 1865. These smaller farms and homes formed a system where, for the most part, the exploiters and the exploited knew one another personally, sometimes even intimately.” These are the words of my guest Melvin Patrick Ely in his new book A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slave Holding South. An eminent historian of slavery and the American South, Ely’s last book was Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Freedom from the 1790s to the Civil War, for which he received the 2005 Bancroft prize. In A Terrible Intimacy he returns to the archives he knows better than anyone, the court records of Prince Edward County, Virginia, teasing from them what they reveal about what is perhaps the most complicated subject in American history.

    33 min

  2. 6D AGO

    The Firearm Revolution: Catherine Fletcher on how the firearm changed society

    “Over the course of the sixteenth century,” writes my guest Catherine Fletcher, “the handgun made a transition from a novel and decisive military technology to become an everyday object, in use across society and carrying a new set of cultural associations that would persist through the coming centuries.” This was the firearm revolution. In this conversation, Fletcher explores how an evolving technology became a transformative one—not simply changing warfare, but altering the structure of society itself. Guns moved from battlefields into cities, homes, and daily life. In doing so, they reshaped how states exercised power, how individuals understood violence, and how social order was enforced. Catherine Fletcher is a historian of the Renaissance and early modern Europe, and is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University.

    30 min

  3. MAR 25

    Syria: Daniel Neep on the Modern History of a Very Old Place

    The history of modern Syria is usually reduced to a story of autocracy, repression, and occasional revolt. And it is a short story, stretching back only to the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire, or perhaps to the secret terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement that divided the Near East between Britain and France.  But my guest Daniel Neep has a different perspective. He believes that such narratives overlook “the pre-​colonial foundations for modern Syria that were undertaken by reformers, infrastructure builders and identity entrepreneurs in the late Ottoman Empire.” They also neglect “the role that Syrians themselves played in determining the precise course of these borders” as well as the ways in which Syrians “ have fiercely clung to their right to live with respect and dignity.” These are some of the arguments which he develops in his new book Syria: A Modern History. Daniel Neep is Senior Editor at Arab Center Washington DC and a non-resident fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He has taught Middle East politics at George Washington University, Georgetown University, and the University of Exeter, and was previously Syria research director with the Council for British Research in the Levant. He has lived in Syria for five years, including for the first year of the uprising, as well as in Amman, and Beirut, and now lives in Washington, DC.

    36 min

  4. MAR 19

    The Great Historian: Andrew Meyer on Sima Qian and the invention of history

    About a century before the birth of Jesus, during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, a remarkable man began a nearly unprecedented intellectual endeavor. Sima Qian, like his father before him, was an official in the imperial court. Working on a plan left behind by his father, Sima Qian began writing a history of China for the two thousand years before his own time. The scope of his labors, and the historiographical discipline and philosophy of history that he brought to them, make him a sort of combination of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Plutarch. Yet in many ways, his personal life was just as extraordinary.  With me to discuss this monumental figure in the writing of history, either in China or anywhere else, is Andrew Meyer, Professor of History at Brooklyn College, and an expert in early Chinese intellectual history. He was recently on the podcast discussing his book To Rule All under Heaven: A History of Classical China: From Confucius to the First Emperor.

    39 min

  5. MAR 11

    Introducing Historically Thinking Field Guides

    In this short episode, Al introduces a new feature of the Historically Thinking podcast: the Historically Thinking Field Guides. Drawing on nearly 450 past episodes, these guides gather conversations around major historical themes—beginning with a first guide devoted to the Second World War—so listeners can explore topics through curated sets of episodes, questions, and commentary. Al also explains how the podcast is evolving on Substack, where listeners can receive expanded show notes, weekly “Friday Reflection” discussions with questions and reading lists, and future essays and collections of historical links. It’s a brief update on where the podcast is going in 2026—and an invitation to explore the growing archive of Historically Thinking. For more, go to www.historicallythinking.org

    7 min

  6. FEB 25

    Worse Than Hell: W. Fitzhugh Brundage on Prisoners of War and Prison Camps of the American Civil War

    During the American Civil War an estimated 194,000 Union soldiers and 214,000 Confederate soldiers became prisoners of war. No prior or subsequent American conflict has seen such numbers. During the Second World War, approximately 124,000 Americans were held captive, but the chance of being captured in that conflict was roughly one in one hundred; during the Civil War it was closer to one in five. Captivity was not a marginal experience. It was central to the war. Indeed, the gigantic scale of prisoner-of-war camps was one of the conflict’s most consequential innovations. Every modern war since has produced successors to Andersonville, Point Lookout, Rock Island, and Florence. Yet prisoner-of-war camps remain oddly peripheral in our narratives of the Civil War, overlooked both as institutional innovations and as formative experiences for soldiers and their families. My guest, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, argues in A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War that captivity reshaped military policy, political rhetoric, racial attitudes, and postwar memory. Prison camps were not aberrations; they were integral to the modernizing logic of total war. For more on the guest, show notes, sources, and related episodes, go to the Historically Thinking Substack at www.historicallythinking.org ChaptersIntroduction - 0:00 Historical Treatment of POWs - 2:35 Parole System and Napoleonic Wars - 4:47 Scale and Logistics of Civil War Prisons - 7:42 Lincoln's Dilemma: Sovereignty vs Prisoner Exchange - 10:56 Andersonville: Conditions and the Deadline - 31:48 Point Lookout and Union Prisons - 47:25 Prison Society and Community - 57:45 Black Prisoners of War - 65:33 Elmira Prison and John W. Jones - 82:11

    44 min

  7. FEB 18

    Civil War Religion: Timothy D. Grundmeier on Lutheranism, the Civil War Era, and American Culture

    Lutherans are a strange denomination in American religious history and culture. For Catholics they are certainly Protestants. For Protestants they are crypto-Catholics. While they have been around since the Swedes established their short-lived colony on the Delaware River, they have typically received as much attention in the American imagination as the short-lived Swedish colony on the Delaware River.  But my guest Timothy D. Grundmeier has a different point of view. He argues in his new book Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith that Lutheranism was a central component of nineteenth-century American religion and of the era of the Civil War. This is because Lutherans were numerous, the nation’s fourth largest denomination by 1900; they were uniquely positioned in the American religious landscape; and they almost invariably expressed the opinion of the “moderate majority” in Union states outside the Northeast. And, as with every other aspect of American society, Lutheranism was reshaped by the struggle of the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Timothy D. Grundmeier is professor of history at Martin Luther College in New Ulm, Minnesota. Lutheranism and American Culture is his first book. Chapters 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:02:60 - What is Lutheranism? 00:06:21 - The Civil War Era Defined 00:09:01 - Three Varieties of American Lutheranism 00:19:44 - The Old Lutherans and Missouri Synod 00:27:38 - How the Civil War Fractured Lutheranism 00:39:36 - The Slavery Debate: Walter and the Norwegians 00:47:20 - Lutheran Quietism After the Civil War 00:52:38 - The Great Lutheran Realignment 01:02:35 - Ideas, Institutions, and Cultural Context

    32 min

  8. FEB 11

    To Rule All Under Heaven: Andrew Seth Meyer on the Revolution of Classical China, and How It Changed Human History

    The two hundred and eighty years between the death of the philosopher Confucius and the reign of the first Emperor of China saw one of the most profound revolutions in human history. Not only did it end with the creation of an imperial rule that persisted through successive dynasties for 2,132 years, but it also saw the creation of “new traditions of thought and practice…great monuments of art, literature, and philosophy…that still inform social life in our own lifetime.” The era of the “warring states”, as scholars call it, was critical not just for China or East Asia, “but to that of humanity writ large.” Yet this era remains almost unknown in the English-speaking world. “If one enters any bookstore…in search of a book about classical Athens, the conquestions of Alexander, or the early Roman Republic,” writes my guest Andrew Meyer, “one will have many options. But if one looks for such a book about the corresponding period in early Chinese history, there are none. I wrote this book to fill that gap.” Andrew Seth Meyer is Professor of History at Brooklyn College. A specialist in the intellectual history of early China, he is the author of The Dao of the Military: Liu An's Art of War and co-author of The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China. His latest book is To Rule All under Heaven: A History of Classical China, from Confucius to the First Emperor, which is the subject of our conversation today. Chapters 0:35 - Book Overview & Historical Context 4:47 - Dating the Warring States Period 8:42 - What Are the Warring States? 11:08 - Social Structure & Aristocracy 18:39 - Rivers & Regional Differences 24:45 - Military Power & Wealth 31:37 - Four Great Questions: State Models 40:51 - Centralization vs Regional Autonomy 51:26 - Education & Intellectuals

    28 min
See All (300)

4.9
out of 5
84 Ratings

About

We believe that when people think historically, they are engaging in a disciplined way of thinking about the world and its past. We believe it gives thinkers a knack for recognizing nonsense; and that it cultivates not only intellectual curiosity and rigor, but also intellectual humility. Join Al Zambone, author of Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life, as he talks with historians and other professionals who cultivate the craft of historical thinking.

Information

  • Creator
    Al Zambone
  • Years Active
    2015 - 2026
  • Episodes
    300
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Historically Thinking
  • Show Website
    Historically Thinking

You Might Also Like