Historically Thinking

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 aga

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 o

“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 o

“India has 2,000,000 million gods, and worships them all,” wrote Mark Twain, following his 1896 speaking tour of British India. “In religion other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.” Twain was exaggerating, but perhaps only a little. Consider that Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism all took form some 2,

In the first months of 1939, before the world changed, Elzbieta Zawacka had an MA degree in Mathematics, and was an enthusiastic instructor in Poland’s “Women’s Military Training” organization, established to prepare women for service in a future war. When that war came, Elzbieta believed from the start that she was a

In the sixteenth century wealthy men and women began to collect books. With these they began to furnish a new room in the house which they called the studiolo. In the “little study” one could read in happiness and contentment, safe from an external world beset by wars and plague. They could conduct conversations with t