Historically Thinking

By: Al Zambone
Listen for free

  • Summary

  • Conversations about historical knowledge and how we achieve it.
    Copyright © 2021 Historically Thinking
    Show More Show Less
Social Sciences World
Show More Show Less
Episodes
  • Episode 392: Papa von Ranke

    Episode 392: Papa von Ranke
    Jan 13 2025
    He was and has been criticized as a “mere burrower into archives”; as a dry man without any ideas; as a painter of miniatures rather than of broad portraits; as a conservative by liberals, and insufficiently dogmatic by conservatives; as motivated by the Lutheran religion of his forebears, but also as a scholar set against teleology and mysticism. This was Leopold von Ranke, born in 1795, dying in Berlin in 1886. Over his long life, he not only influenced the historical world by his writings, but by his students, and their students. Through his teaching and his examples, he altered not only the historical profession in Germany, but in the United States as well through the horde of Americans who passed through faculties of history whose members had been trained by Ranke, or by one of his students. He did not invent the footnote or the insistence upon using primary sources, but arguably more than anyone else established them as part of the apparatus of history as a social science. With me to talk about Leopold von Ranke is Suzanne Marchand, Boyd Professor of European Intellectual History at Louisiana State University. This September, she was elected to the Presidency of the American Historical Association for 2026. This is her fourth appearance on Historically Thinking; she was last with us as part of our continuing series on intellectual humility and historical thinking.
    Show More Show Less
    55 mins
  • 391: Roman Roads

    391: Roman Roads
    Jan 7 2025
    Listeners to this podcast are certainly aware of the saying that “all roads lead to Rome”; and, given this audience, you might even be aware that this probably derived from the observation mīlle viae dūcunt hominēs per saecula Rōmam, made by the 12th century theologian and poet Alain de Lille. But what is the history of the Roman roads, or rather, what is the history of how people imagined and related to the Roman Roads? And how has that imaginary influenced the ways that we think of Rome, the classical world, roads, travel, and perhaps even the powers of the state? That Roman roads actually have produced a social imaginary should perhaps be a little more mysterious to us. After all, as my guest writes: Many roads do go without saying. They’re not aesthetically exciting. They’re functional and mundane. We notice roads when they have problems – a traffic jam or accident. When the journey is smooth they’re not worthy of comment. (I noted, while researching, how rarely the word ‘road’ is indexed.) And yet for centuries the Roman roads have been a source of fascination. Those were the words of Catherine Fletcher, Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University, and author most recently of The Roads to Rome: A History of Imperial Expansion. This is her second appearance on Historically Thinking; she was last here in Episode 166 talking about her book The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West.
    Show More Show Less
    Less than 1 minute
  • Episode 390: Atlantic Ocean

    Episode 390: Atlantic Ocean
    Dec 30 2024
    “He was a bold man who first ate an oyster,” observed Jonathan Swift; and in fact the first human interaction with the Atlantic Ocean was probably eating shellfish, traces of which can be found along the Western Cape of South Africa dating back 160,000 years ago. When humans began to finally live in numbers along the ocean coast, their culture changed. They took their food from it, and from the shoreline, and their metals from the rocks and marshes along its coast. In time they built boats capable of venturing along those coasts, and then gradually farther and farther out. All of this, my guest John Haywood argues, was foundational for what was to come. He writes: The history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic is…the where and when that Europeans served their apprenticeships in ocean navigation, commerce and colonialism, and that saw them formulate the ideologies they used to justify their territorial claims and their exploitation of colonized peoples. When Europeans finally broke out onto the world’s oceans in the sixteenth century, they already had everything they needed to secure global domination. John Haywood is a historian of the Vikings, and of the early maritime history of the North Atlantic. The author of numerous books, his latest is Ocean: A History of the Atlantic before Columbus.
    Show More Show Less
    Less than 1 minute

What listeners say about Historically Thinking

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.co.uk reviews

Amazon reviews
No Reviews are Available