Historically Thinking

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

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

Sometime in the 800s, an anonymous monk in the abbey of Fulda–now in modern Germany–copied out a Latin history in one of the great inventions of the age, the handwriting known as Carolingian miniscule, which is more or less they system that we use today to print the English alphabet. Thanks to that monk, today we have

While Islam has often been characterized as unitary and unchanging, by both Muslims and Westerners for their own particular reasons, that has never been the case–and today’s world is no exception. Legalists and mystics debate, and radical groups exist at the same time as Muslim feminists who advocate new interpretation

The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the “scramble for Africa”, during which European powers imposed colonial regimes upon nearly the entire African continent. Yet the decades preceding that imperial feeding frenzy were times of revolutionary ferment and change, both politically and economically. In his new book

Robert Bruce Lockhart was at various times in his life a diplomat, a conspirator, an gatherer of intelligence, and a propagandist. He was always a maverick, a charmer, a bit of a cad with a touch of the bounder, and a devotee of the high life when he could afford it, and often when he could not.  In his busy life he ra