Historically Thinking

Epizode

• Contested Continent: Peter Mancall on the Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680 03.06.2026 31min

  My guest Peter C. Mancall’s new book is Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680. It is, now, the first volume in the Oxford History of the United States, an ongoing multi-volume narrative series—a series whose story is worth an episode in and of itself.In Contested Continent, Mancall describes the foundation of that place which would eventually become the United States. It is a long era of human history which foreshadowed that which was to come, one in which peoples from four continents came together in a collision of violence and mutuality in North America. “Much of what happened,” he writes, “came to define the American experience, including the rise of a booming transatlantic economy based on the extraction of abundant American natural resources, the central role European migrants and their descendants played in the enslavement of Africans, the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the spread of self-governing polities where many people enjoyed religious liberty. None of those developments was inevitable. Nor did sweeping changes occur quickly.” Or we might say that like the glaciers of an advancing ice age, the events of this era often seem slow and ponderous, but ultimately they change everything that gets in their way.Peter C. Mancall is Distinguished Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, and Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute at the University of Southern California. He is the author of numerous books, including Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson and Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America.
• Stalin's Apostles: Antonia Senior on the Cambridge Five and their Service to the Soviet Empire 27.05.2026 30min

  In the 1930s, five young men at Cambridge University became members of the Communist Party. This is not too surprising, in retrospect; many others were doing so as well. But these five men were recruited by the intelligence services of the Soviet Union, and for seventeen years they betrayed the secrets of Britain and the United States.They are now often referred to as the Cambridge Five. They were Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. While their story has been told and retold and retold in Britain, always as a parable of class and the establishment, my guest Antonia Senior observes that very few have looked at the story of the Cambridge Five from the other side of the relationship. “What did Stalin want from them?,” she asks. “How did they fit into Stalin’s vision, and how did they further his cause?”Antonia Senior is a novelist, reviewer for The Times, and co-host of the podcast History Book Buffs alongside friend of this podcast Roger Moorhouse. Her latest book, Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire, was recently named a finalist for the 2026 Orwell Prize. In this conversation we discuss Cambridge in the 1930s, revolutionary violence, Soviet intelligence recruitment, Stalin’s imperial ambitions, Poland, espionage, ideology, and the enduring temptation to excuse tyranny in the name of an ever-distant utopia.
• The First Ghetto: Alexander Lee on Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism 20.05.2026 38min

  “It was a cold January afternoon when I first came to the ghetto. I got there much later than I’d hoped. I’d spent much of the day elsewhere and had just lost track of time. It was already beginning to get dark. The campo seemed deserted. Shutters were closed, and apart from the tinkling of water in the wells, there was hardly a sound. There were no streetlights, barely even the glimmer of a lamp. But in the branches of the trees, thousands of tiny lights were shining.”That is the opening paragraph of my guest Alexander Lee’s new book, The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism, in which he traces both the history of the Venetian ghetto and, through it, the history of modern antisemitism. In our conversation we discuss the origins of the word “ghetto,” the peculiar politics of the Venetian Republic, Jewish moneylending and commerce, the arrival of Iberian Jews fleeing persecution, the vibrancy of ghetto culture during its “golden age,” and how following the collapse of the Republic how segregation and antisemitism mutated into the twentieth century.Alexander Lee is a historian of Renaissance Italy and the author of numerous books, including Machiavelli: His Life and Times. He is also a columnist for History Today.
• Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece 13.05.2026 42min

  The story of classical Greece is often told, rightly or wrongly, as the story of the alliance, competition, and eventual war between Athens and Sparta. Even in antiquity, each city fascinated the other. Athenians imagined Spartans as disciplined, laconic conquerors; Spartans regarded Athens with a mixture of admiration, suspicion, and alarm. Yet despite their differences, both cities shared fundamental Greek assumptions about honor, competition, citizenship, and excellence.In his new book Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece , my guest Adrian Goldsworthy tells the story of classical Greece through the relationship between these two cities: from their legendary origins, through the Persian Wars, and into the tensions that would ultimately lead to the catastrophe of the Peloponnesian War. Along the way we discuss democracy, slavery, naval warfare, the strange logic of Greek politics, and why the Greeks never succeeded in becoming “Greece.”Adrian Goldsworthy is a historian of the classical world and the author of numerous books on Greece and Rome, including biographies of Julius Caesar, Augustus, and Philip and Alexander. He was last on Historically Thinking to discuss Augustus. This is his sixth appearance on the podcast.For more notes and resources, go to the Historically Thinking Substack
• 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople 06.05.2026 28min

  On May 29, 1453, the city of Constantine—Constantinople—ceased to exist. For over a millennium it had stood as a center of Roman political power, Greek learning, and the Christian faith. Now its walls were breached, its emperor lay dead among the defenders, and its inhabitants were carried off into slavery.Yet, as my guest Anthony Kaldellis argues, the city’s final resistance tells a different story from the one we often inherit. Its defenders did not regard their fate as inevitable. “Its fierce resistance at the end,” he writes, “stands as a final protest against narratives that would render it irrelevant… The Romans asserted a right to survive, and, by not surrendering, they refused to consent to their obsolescence.”  In this conversation, we examine the fall of Constantinople not as a foregone conclusion, but as a close-run struggle shaped by contingency, miscalculation, and missed opportunities.Anthony Kaldellis is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics and the College at the University of Chicago. A leading scholar of the later Roman Empire, his work focuses on Byzantine political culture, identity, and historiography. His most recent book, 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople, offers a new account of the city’s final siege grounded in a close reading of contemporary sources.
• Nuclear Weapons: An International History 29.04.2026 28min

  For four years—from July 16, 1945, the date of the first atomic test, to August 29, 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device—the history of nuclear weapons might appear to be an exclusively American story. But even that is misleading.From the earliest theorization of the chain reaction, nuclear development was international: a web of scientific collaboration, technological transfer, espionage, and strategic imitation. As my guest David Holloway argues, nuclear weapons have always had an international history—one that can only be understood by examining not just individual states, but their relationships, perceptions, and interactions.To approach nuclear weapons in this way, he suggests, “requires an effort to understand the different parties involved, their strategies, their policies, their behavior, and, above all, their relationships and interactions.” In this conversation, we explore that history—from Los Alamos to Moscow, from Atoms for Peace to nuclear brinkmanship, and from non-proliferation to the limits of the nuclear order itself.  David Holloway is Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, Professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (Emeritus) at Stanford University. His work focuses on the international history of nuclear weapons, Soviet science and technology, and the relationship between international history and international relations theory. His latest book, Nuclear Weapons: An International History, represents a culmination of decades of scholarship.Chapters0:02:31 — What Is International History?0:07:11 — The International Roots of Nuclear Science0:12:23 — Technology Transfer and the Klaus Fuchs Connection0:16:51 — The Soviet Bomb: Hesitation and Espionage0:19:06 — Atoms for Peace0:21:13 — The Thermonuclear Turning Point0:24:02 — Nuclear Weapons and Marxist Theory0:30:08 — Brinkmanship: Dulles, Khrushchev, and the Logic of the Brink0:33:50 — Non-Proliferation and the NPT0:43:57 — India, Pakistan, and the Blind Eye
• Europe: A New History 22.04.2026 28min

  At the very beginning of his forthcoming book Europe: A New History, my guest Roderick Beaton asks a simple but disarming set of questions: Why a “new” history of Europe? Why might we need one? And what makes this history new?His answer is not merely about newly discovered facts, or even reinterpretations of old ones. It is about events. “To study history,” he writes, “is to look for patterns to make sense of the things that happen…When things change, when new and unexpected events suddenly reshape the world that we thought we knew around us, the effect is like the turning of a kaleidoscope—the whole pattern changes.” The present does not leave the past untouched. It rearranges it.So we need a new history of Europe not because the past has changed, but because our vantage point has. “The story told in this book,” Beaton writes, “has been shaped by the changed and changing perspective of the mid-2020s; it could not have been told this way before.” In this conversation, we explore what it means to write history under those conditions—and what Europe looks like when its past is seen anew.Roderick Beaton is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek & Byzantine History, Language & Literature at King’s College London. A distinguished historian of Greece and Europe, he was knighted by King Charles III in 2024 for his services to history. He previously appeared on Historically Thinking to discuss his book The Greeks: A Global History.
• Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South 15.04.2026 33min

  “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.
• The Firearm Revolution: Catherine Fletcher on how the firearm changed society 09.04.2026 30min

  “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.
• Syria: Daniel Neep on the Modern History of a Very Old Place 25.03.2026 36min

  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.
• The Great Historian: Andrew Meyer on Sima Qian and the invention of history 19.03.2026 39min

  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. 
• Introducing Historically Thinking Field Guides 11.03.2026 6min

  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
• Worse Than Hell: W. Fitzhugh Brundage on Prisoners of War and Prison Camps of the American Civil War 25.02.2026 44min

  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.orgChaptersIntroduction - 0:00Historical Treatment of POWs - 2:35Parole System and Napoleonic Wars - 4:47Scale and Logistics of Civil War Prisons - 7:42Lincoln's Dilemma: Sovereignty vs Prisoner Exchange - 10:56Andersonville: Conditions and the Deadline - 31:48Point Lookout and Union Prisons - 47:25Prison Society and Community - 57:45Black Prisoners of War - 65:33Elmira Prison and John W. Jones - 82:11
• Civil War Religion: Timothy D. Grundmeier on Lutheranism, the Civil War Era, and American Culture 18.02.2026 32min

  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.Chapters00:00:00 - 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
• To Rule All Under Heaven: Andrew Seth Meyer on the Revolution of Classical China, and How It Changed Human History 11.02.2026 28min

  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.Chapters0:35 - 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
• Historically Thinking Roundtable: Historians, Historical Thinking, Civic Trust, and America at 250 04.02.2026 28min

  This is the first ever Historically Thinking Roundtable. Given that it's 2026, it’s appropriate that this roundtable focus on the 250th anniversary of the United States, and how historians can be involved in its commemoration. Difficulties in doing this can arise from at least two reasons. One is that historians, like most academics, represent a relatively small slice of the political pie. And indeed, in these very partisan times, academics are some of the least trusted people in society–right around members of congress, according to a recent poll. Naturally academics and professionals in cultural institutions tend to get defensive about that, and beginning in a posture of attack and defense usually means that whatever happens afterward will not be good. But there’s another problem, one related to historical thinking. Historians are taught to tell the whole story, however complicated and messy. They often find anything less than that to be distortion. And while arguably civic thought requires an element of gratitude, that’s not how historians think of their own craft. These difficulties can be acutely felt by professionals in With me to discuss these difficulties, and how to resolve them are:Bill Peterson, Director of the State Historical Society of North DakotaTrait Thompson, Executive Director of the Oklahoma Historical Society, host of the podcast, co-host of A Very OK PodcastBen Jones, South Dakota State Historian, and Director of the South Dakota Historical Society, Ryan Cole, historian, Speechwriter at U.S. Senate, author most recently of The Last Adieu: Lafayette's Triumphant Return, the Echoes of Revolution, and the Gratitude of the RepublicAnd Jill Weiss Simins, historian and Director of Special Projects, Indiana State ArchivesChapters0:00 - Introduction 3:20 - Community Conversations in Red States 13:04 - Telling Complex History 20:28 - When Is Complexity Bad? 25:12 - Bridging Alienation and Division 31:10 - Primary Sources and Making Arguments 37:35 - Historical Distortion and Noble Lies 47:15 - America 250 Local Projects
• Caesar Augustus: Adrian Goldsworthy on the First Emperor of Rome 28.01.2026 42min

  He was at various times in his life known as Gaius Octavius Thurinus; Gaius Julius Caesar; and Caesar Augustus. He called himself Princeps, the first man in Rome; the Roman Senate would eventually call him pater patriae, the father of his country. Heir to his great-uncle Julius Caesar, this 19 year old was dropped into the tumult of Roman political violence, and emerged from it the sole and undisputed victor after decades of civil war. He murdered hundreds, and then became the founder of a new Roman system that brought peace and prosperity to Rome’s citizens and inhabitants. He was tyrannical and giving, cruel and clever, manipulative and noble. And he has claim to be one of the most successful politicians to ever lead a nation or a kingdom, who created a system which lasted for hundreds of years after his death.With me to discuss Caesar Augustus is Adrian Goldsworthy, author of Augustus: First Emperor of Rome, now being reissued in its second edition. The annoyingly prolific author of a shelf of books, both of ancient history and historical fiction, Adrian Goldsworthy has been described as the OG scholar of the Roman Army and the Mr Darcy of Ancient History. Since his next book comes out in May, this promises to be the first of at least two conversations with him in 2026–and this is his sixth appearance on the podcast.ChaptersIntroduction: Caesar Augustus (0:00)The Standard Received View: Syme's Roman Revolution (1:33)The Importance of Names: Octavian vs Caesar (13:27)Why Not Call Him Emperor? (22:56)Why Did Julius Caesar Pick This Kid? (27:06)Augustus's Talented Circle: Agrippa, Maecenas, and Livia (36:20)Augustus's Travels and Provincial Administration (47:59)Marriage Laws and Religious Reform (57:34)The Aeneid: Propaganda or Great Literature? (64:08)The Last 16 Years and Augustus's Legacy (71:52)
• The Great Shadow: Susan Wise Bauer on the History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy 21.01.2026 34min

  For a very long time humans have been getting sick. Sometimes we have gotten sick more easily than at other times. From time to time we get sick from things a human body has never before encountered. Sickness is always present with us. And while injury we can understand–like breaking a leg, or having a rock hit your head–sickness can be as mysterious to people in 2026 who trust the science as it was to our ancestors 4,000 years ago. “Why did one patient heal,” my guest Susan Wise Bauer writes, “while another rotted? And what about the shivering, miserable sufferer who simply awoke with a sore throat and cough, after going to bed healthy and filled with plans the night before? It is the constant presence of sickness, not injury, that has shaped the way we think about ourselves and our world.”Susan Wise Bauer’s books include The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home (fourth ed., 2024) and The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory. Her most recent book is The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy. 0:00 Introduction 1:45 What This Book Is and Isn't 4:35 Did Hunter-Gatherers Get Sick? 9:50 Guilt and Sickness 14:00 Doctors as Priests 21:30 The Four Humors 25:15 Humoral Theory and Colonialism 29:45 Occasionalism: God's Will and Disease 35:55 The Black Death 40:45 The History of Drugs 45:50 Vaccines: Jenner and Cowpox 50:30 The Early 20th Century: Disease Returns 54:25 The Pax Antibiotica 58:30 Wellness Culture 61:45 COVID and What Hasn't Changed 67:15 Closing
• Inventing the Future: Bruno Carvalho on Cities, Planning, and the History of Urban Imagination 14.01.2026 28min

  On November 1, 1755, the city of Lisbon was devastated by a terrible earthquake, and a new era of urban planning began. The reconstruction of Lisbon was, more or less, the first time that modern planners had the opportunity to transform an urban landscape and bring it into line with their vision of what the future should look like. What shifting tectonic plates did to Lisbon would, in the future, be the job of bulldozers and wrecking balls. We take that for granted now, but we shouldn’t. In his new book The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World, my guest Bruno Carvalho tells two histories that our intertwined. One is the story of how histories were planned, built, or rebuilt. But the other is an intellectual history of how cities of the future were imagined. It turns out that those two stories don’t intersect as often as you might assume. Bruno Carvalho is a professor at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on cities. He is also the author of Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro.
• Lady Frances Berkeley/Amy Stallings: Bacon’s Rebellion, Colonial Virginia, and First-person Historical Interpretation 23.12.2025 31min

  In this episode of Historically Thinking, we begin not with a historian’s voice, but with the voice of a seventeenth-century woman.Lady Frances Culpeper Berkeley—born in England, twice widowed, and married in 1670 to Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia—speaks from the midst of crisis. Jamestown has burned. Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion has fractured the colony’s political order. Her husband has been recalled to England to answer charges before the Crown. Lady Berkeley, left behind, attempts to make sense of loyalty, loss, honor, and exile.That voice is brought to life by my second guest, Amy Stallings, a historian and historical interpreter who believes the past is best understood not only through documents, but through embodied experience. Together, we explore Bacon’s Rebellion from an unfamiliar vantage point, the interior world of Lady Frances Berkeley, and the intellectual stakes of historical reenactment itself: what it reveals, what it risks, and what it makes newly visible.00:00 - Introduction00:28 - Lady Frances Culpeper Berkeley Introduces Herself00:58 - Writing to Her Husband in England02:55 - Sir William Berkeley's Accomplishments in Virginia04:23 - The Royal Commissioners and Personal Betrayal05:47 - Berkeley's Loyalty During the English Civil War07:17 - Berkeley's Resistance to Parliament08:15 - Berkeley's Return to Power and Jamestown's Glory09:39 - Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion Begins11:08 - Bacon Surrounds the State House12:57 - Introducing Amy Stallings13:41 - Theater and History Intertwined14:27 - The Dissertation on Ballroom Politics21:40 - Dance as Political Resistance24:25 - English Country Dancing Before the Waltz28:53 - First Character: Susan Binks, Tobacco Bride28:53 - Learning History Through First-Person Interpretation39:14 - Developing Lady Berkeley's Character46:52 - Lady Berkeley's Isolation and Loss46:52 - Lady Berkeley's Inheritance and Legal Battles55:00 - The Challenges of Colonial Communication57:00 - Sewing Period Costumes61:51 - Conclusion