Historically Thinking

Updated: 09 Jul 2025 • 396 episodes
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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.

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The liturgy of the Christian church is often dismissed today as archaic, arcane—or dead. But as Cosima Clara Gillhammer shows in her new book Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy, these ritual forms were once the very heartbeat of Western culture and continue to shape not only our cultural memory but even

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His friend the great scholar Desiderius Erasmus referred to Thomas More as “a Man for all seasons.” But which season? Or which Thomas More? Is he an advocate of conscience? A heroic defender of the Catholic faith? A saintly martyr? A fanatical zealot unwilling to listen to cool reason? An amateur inquisitor who lit the

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In 1945, Kim Il-Sung was a minor figure with no political power in Korea. Within months, he was elevated by Soviet authorities to lead North Korea. Historian Fyodor Tertitskiy joins us to discuss The Accidental Tyrant, his new biography of Kim, and explains how this obscure guerrilla commander became one of the most du

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Joseph Smith was the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, known by those outside the church during his life and today as the Mormons. But Joseph Smith was many things besides: the child of a struggling family gradually moving westward in search of opportunity, a day laborer, visionary, seer; trea

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11 Jun 2025 • EN

Revolution to Come

In our conversation, Dan Edelstein traces the intellectual history of revolution as an idea—from its origins in classical antiquity to its dramatic transformation during the Enlightenment, to its seeming maturation in the 20th Century

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This week’s episode features not one but two conversations—with Aron and Strauss—which, while it may sound like a jazz-age songwriting duo, is in fact a pairing of two distinguished historians: Stephen Aron and Barry Strauss. They join our ongoing series of interviews exploring historians’ early love of the past and th

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