“The Greeks knew that many problems have no solution,” journalist Robert D. Kaplan says on this episode of The World in Time, about his inspiration for writing “The Tragic Mind.” “They knew that leaders and people in their daily lives often face only bad choices. And yet the world at the same time is beautiful. The Greeks could admit a beautiful world and that the world ultimately could not be fixed. In this book, I define tragedy not as the triumph of evil over good, or the common misfortunes of life that we all face, or vile crimes against humanity…Tragedy is about the difficult choices that we all make between one good and another good where, whichever you choose, you will cause suffering.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Robert D. Kaplan, author of “The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power,” about his career reporting on wars and revolutions around the world, the myth of American exceptionalism, and what ancient thinkers like Euripides understood about thinking tragically. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“Among Shakespeare scholars,” journalist Elizabeth Winkler writes at the beginning of “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies,” “the Shakespeare authorship question—the theory that William Shakespeare might not have written the works published under his name—does not exist; that is, it is not permitted. As a consequence, it has become the most horrible, vexed, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. In literary circles, even the phrase ‘Shakespeare authorship question’ elicits contempt—eye-rolling, name-calling, mudslinging. If you raise it casually in a social setting, someone might chastise you as though you’ve uttered a deeply offensive profanity. Someone else might get up and leave the room. Tears may be shed. A whip may be produced. You will be punished, which is to say, educated. Because it is obscene to suggest that the god of English literature might be a false god.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Elizabeth Winkler, author of “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies,” about the history of the authorship question and the writers and scholars who have clashed over doubting the Bard. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“When you start looking at deeper, more accurate history,” writer Jared Yates Sexton says in this episode of The World in Time, “you start to realize that a lot of what we have learned through conventional history—and this is in public education, best sellers, documentaries, and television shows—a lot of the history that we have gotten is actually mythology. Take a look at the American Revolution. One of the things that you have been taught for all this time is that it was some sort of spontaneous passion of liberty and freedom in which all Americans turned against Great Britain. And, of course, this is not true.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Jared Yates Sexton, author of “The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis.”

This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Ben Jealous, author of Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing, about Jealous’ personal history and his career, and how both inform what he makes of our current moment.

“I think the mood in 1860 would have a haunting familiarity to people today,” Edward Achorn says at the start of this episode of The World in Time, discussing the setting of “The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History.” “The politics in the country seemed to have broken down. People were talking at each other. They were no longer listening to each other. They were increasingly using violence or looking toward violence as a way to settle their differences. So the whole political system was breaking down…There was a long, protracted fight over the selection of a House speaker, which is normally a pretty much rote action. There was a view…that Washington had become this festering swamp full of elites who didn’t have any sort of connection with common people in America.” And it was in this moment that Abraham Lincoln, a relatively unknown figure, became a presidential candidate. This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Ed Achorn, author of “The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“I think that I started the book,” historian Stacy Schiff says of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” “with this thirst for somebody who—I’ve just been writing about the Salem witch trials for many years. And I was looking for someone who had the courage of his convictions, to stand up and take an unpopular stand, which is something that takes a very long time for anyone to do in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692, when it was very dangerous to take that stand. As it is dangerous again in the 1760s. And Adams very much fit that description. The more time I spent with him, the more time I was convinced and remain convinced that he teaches you that one person can actually make a difference and that ideas actually matter.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Stacy Schiff, author of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“If there was one thing that I would want people to take away from American Midnight,” Adam Hochschild says on this episode of The World in Time, “it’s the idea that democracy, despite all the different checks and balances and the separation of powers and whatnot written into our Constitution more than two hundred years ago, is fragile. It can easily be shattered and broken. It can easily be threatened.” And during the stretch of time covered in his latest book, which spans World War I and takes place on the American home front, “I really think a lot of the basic democratic freedoms that we take for granted in this country we lost during that period.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, about civil liberties, strikes, and Emma Goldman, among other subjects. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“For most of my adult life, I have been trying to understand why we are who we are,” Andrea Wulf writes at the start of “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.” “This is the reason why I write history books. In my previous books, I have looked at the relationship between humankind and nature in order to understand why we’ve destroyed so much of our magnificent blue planet. But I also realize that it is not enough to look at the connections between us and nature. The first step is to look at us as individuals—when did we begin to be as selfish as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did this—us, you, me, or our collective behavior—all come from? When did we first ask the question, how can I be free?” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Andrea Wulf, author of “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self,” and takes us to Jena to begin answering these questions by introducing us to a few German Romantics, including Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Novalis, and Friedrich Schiller. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“We’re at a moment now,” Kermit Roosevelt III says of our national mythology on this episode of The World in Time, “where the standard story isn’t working for us anymore. And I think in part it’s not working for us because it actually teaches us bad lessons. It teaches us that violent revolution against the national government, treason against the national government, is American patriotism, which I think is a bad lesson. But it’s also inaccurate in a lot of ways. And it requires us to identify with people like Thomas Jefferson, which, frankly, I find pretty difficult and I think a lot of people find difficult…And there’s a struggle about how to deal with that because people want a story that’s accurate, that’s honest, that doesn’t downplay bad things that have been done in the past, which our standard story does a lot. But they also want a story that allows us to see an America that we believe in, that we can love, that we can feel patriotic attachment to. And that’s what I’m trying to offer.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Kermit Roosevelt III, author of “The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“These are indeed dark times,” Aaron Sachs, author of Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times, says at the start of this episode of The World in Time. “And as a historian, I’ve been wondering my whole professional life how these dark times compare to other dark times…I feel like it’s my job as a historian to to really investigate the claim that there’s no precedent for what we’re going through, because that idea is really disheartening in a lot of ways.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Aaron Sachs, author of “Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times,” about dark times and white whales.

“Tocqueville’s deepest belief,” historian Olivier Zunz writes at the beginning of “The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville,” “was that democracy is a powerful, yet demanding, political form. What makes Tocqueville’s work still relevant is that he defined democracy as an act of will on the part of every citizen—a project constantly in need of revitalization and of the strength provided by stable institutions. Democracy can never be taken for granted. Once the aristocratic chain connecting all parts of society is broken, democracy’s need for vigilance, redefinition, and reinforcement is constant if it is to ensure the common good on which it must, in the end, depend.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Olivier Zunz, author of “The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“There have been a number of biographies of Casanova, but the time is overdue for a biography of a different kind,” writes Leo Damrosch at the start of “Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova.” “He was the first to tell his own story, in a massive autobiography entitled “Histoire de Ma Vie”…The word histoire can mean ‘story’ as well as ‘history,’ and a story it certainly is. Previous biographers have tended to retell it as he told it, adopting his own point of view with only occasional queries. Some have betrayed a vicarious investment in his tales of seduction, just as many readers clearly have; it’s interesting that men with great political power, such as Winston Churchill and François Mitterrand, have been especially warm admirers of Casanova. In fiction such a character might be a charming rogue, but in real life Casanova’s behavior was often far from charming, and this is evident even when all we have to go on is his own narrative.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Leo Damrosch, author of “Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

During the American Revolution—and in all the years since—many believed that “privateering was a sideshow in the war,” writes Eric Jay Dolin in “Rebels at Sea.” “Privateering has long been given short shrift in general histories of the conflict, where privateers are treated as a minor theme if they are mentioned at all. The coverage in maritime and naval histories of the Revolution is not much better, with privateering often overshadowed by the exploits of the Continental navy.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Eric Jay Dolin, author of “Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution,” making the case that while “privateering was not the single, decisive factor in beating the British—there was no one cause—it was extremely important nonetheless.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“When Herodotus composed his great work,” Richard Cohen writes at the start of Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past, “people named it The Histories, but scholars have pointed out that the word means more accurately ‘inquiries’ or ‘researches.’ Calling it The Histories dilutes its originality. I want to make a larger claim about those who have shaped the way we view our past—actually, who have given us our past. I believe that the wandering Greek’s investigations brought into play, 2,500 years ago, a special kind of inquiry—one that encompasses geography, ethnography, philology, genealogy, sociology, biography, anthropology, psychology, imaginative re-creation (as in the arts), and many other kinds of knowledge, too. The person who exhibits this wide-ranging curiosity should rejoice in the title: historian.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Richard Cohen, author of Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past, about some of the historians discussed in his book, as well as the many mediums they relied on to shape their narratives. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“In 1739 the members of Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences met to determine the subject of the 1741 prize competition,” historians Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran write at the beginning of “Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race.” “As was customarily the case, the topic they chose was constructed in the form of a question: ‘What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of [the Negro’s hair, and the degeneration of both [Negro hair and skin]?’ According to the longer description of the contest that later appeared in the Journal des savants, the academy’s members were interested in receiving a winning essay that would solve the riddle of the African variety’s distinctive physical traits. But what really preoccupied these men were three larger (and unspoken) questions. The first two were straightforward: Who is Black? And why? The third question was more far-reaching: What did being Black signify? Never before had the Bordeaux Academy, or any scientific academy for that matter, challenged Europe’s savants to explain the origins and, implicitly, the worth of a particular type of human being.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Andrew S. Curran, co-editor of “Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race,” about the ramifications of this 1741 contest and the racist answers to these questions offered by Montesquieu; Georges-Louis Leclerc, count de Buffon; and other philosophers based in one of France’s wealthy slave-trading ports. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“Davos Man’s domination of the gains of globalization,” journalist Peter S. Goodman writes in “Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World,” “is how the United States found itself led by a patently unqualified casino developer as it grappled with a public health emergency that killed more Americans than those who died in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined. Davos Man’s marauding explains why the United Kingdom was still consumed with Brexit—an elaborate act of self-harm—at the same time that it was failing to get a handle on the pandemic. It explains how France became roiled by a ferocious protest movement, and how even Sweden, a supposed bastion of social democracy, now seethes with anti-immigrant hate. This is not how history was supposed to unfold.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Peter S. Goodman, author of Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World, about that history, starting with the robber barons of the Gilded Age, stopping by the Reagan era, and ending with 2022. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“A world without insects would be a particularly horrifying, grim place,” environmental journalist Oliver Milman tells us on the latest episode of The World in Time, “and certainly not a place we would want to live in—and indeed it wouldn’t be a place we would be able to live in.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Oliver Milman, author of “The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World,” about the many types of food that we would no longer be able to enjoy without bugs and whether we should be relieved by the existence of robot bees. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“In my sophomore year of high school, I came upon a remarkable book in a garbage pile next to the house where we rented an apartment in Queens,” scholar Roosevelt Montás writes at the beginning of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.” “It was the second volume of the pretentiously bound Harvard Classics series, and it contained a set of dialogues by Plato that record the last days of Socrates’ life. This first encounter with Socrates was a fortuitous as it was decisive. There is probably no better introduction to the life of the mind than Socrates’ defense of his philosophic activity in these dialogues.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Roosevelt Montás, author of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation,” about what came after Montás read Plato for the first time and why he considers access to a liberal education so vital. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“Existing biographies of Thomas Jefferson,” the historian Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy writes in The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University, treat the retired president’s singular founding of a university “as merely an epilogue, while institutional histories give little consideration to the biographical context…Beginning at the age of seventy-three—having lived already far beyond the average life expectancy of the period—he spent the last decade of his life preoccupied with the quest to establish the University of Virginia. He wrote out the minutes of the Board of Visitors, estimated the number of bricks required for each building, and on his last visit to the university even unpacked boxes of books intended for the library. Despite ill health and excruciating pain in his right hand, he produced architectural drawings and drafted legislation. Ignoring his impending bankruptcy, he donated his own money to begin a fundraising campaign and hosted dinners for members of the university community. Because the university was so much of his making, its history is inseparable from Thomas Jefferson’s life.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, author of The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University about Jefferson’s influence on public education and how to balance this legacy with his place in historical memory as an enslaver. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

In order to understand the American Revolution, historian Joseph J. Ellis writes in The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783, “we must be capable of thinking paradoxically. The American Revolution succeeded because it was not really a revolution. Which means it succeeded because it failed.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Joseph J. Ellis, author of The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783, about the words, paradoxes, and local influences that powered the American Revolution. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers,” David Wengrow, an archaeologist, and the late David Graeber, an anthropologist, write at the beginning of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, “what were they doing all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what did they imply? What was really happening in those periods we usually see as marking the emergence of ‘the state’? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with David Wengrow, coauthor of The Dawn of Everything, about these answers and what they mean for the future of a humanity facing ecological catastrophe. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“About twenty years ago,” the historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft says on the latest episode of The World in Time, “Umberto Eco said he was amused by a survey in which a quarter of British schoolchildren thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character. But in fact in a way that is what he has become. He has become something outside conventional history. This is demonstrated by his portrayal in popular culture. It dawned on me in recent years: if you go to a movie called Lincoln, it will be hero-worshipping, and respectful in the Spielberg manner, but it will stick quite close to historical fact. But if you go to a movie called Churchill…or Darkest Hour…they are complete travesties that bear no resemblance whatsoever to historical fact. And nobody minds.” Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Geoffrey Wheatcroft, author of Churchill’s Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

The journey at the heart of this week’s episode of The World in Time is “the most important story of our age” for writer and explorer Nicholas Crane. “We’re in the grips now of both a Covid-19 pandemic and rapid climate change, which are putting greater demands on international science than anything that’s gone before us. And if you track back through time and ask yourself, When did international collaboration on a scientific challenge begin?, you end up in 1735 in a port in western France on a ship called Portefaix bound for the Caribbean and South America.” Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Nicholas Crane, author of “Latitude: The True Story of the World’s First Scientific Expedition,” about the legacy of that voyage. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

For 150,000 years “humans didn’t behave much like us,” the veterinarian, philosopher, and legal scholar Charles Foster writes in Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness. “They weren’t, to use the phrase beloved and hated by archaeologists, ‘behaviorally modern.’ Probably they didn’t adorn their bodies, bury their dead with grave goods, make bladed or bone tools, fish, move resources significant distances, cooperate with anyone to whom they weren’t closely related, and probably they weren’t organized enough to kill large animals. Then something big happened. The speed with which it happened, and the amount that happened in Africa, are contested. That it did happen is not.” In this episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Foster discuss what exactly happened, and the history of humans having a more romantic relationship with science. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Charles Foster, author of Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“They were, by and large, descended from the well-to-do classes of colonial and early republican America, from New England merchants and divines, from Boston Brahmins and Anglo-Dutch Patroons,” Michael Knox Beran writes of the figures at the center of WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy. “But the Civil War and its attendant changes altered their place in life, and they emerged from the crisis as something different from what their forebears had been: as both a class and a movement, self-consciously devoted to power and reform. What to call them? The term WASP—White (or Wealthy, if redundancy is to be avoided) Anglo-Saxon Protestant—fumbles their background, betraying the sociologist’s inclination to use a term like Anglo-Saxon when the plainer, more obvious English one would do. (In this case, English.) For there is nothing especially Saxon or Angle about America’s WASPs. Insofar as they embody any English strain, it would be the Norman. Like the Normans, the WASP oligarchs possessed a corrosive blood-pride, one that they could only with difficulty reconcile with their sense of themselves as suffering idealists, groping their way through dark places in the hope of glimpsing the stars.” In this episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Michael Knox Beran discuss the history of the WASPs: their politics, geography, influence, and predicted obsolescence. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Michael Knox Beran, author of “WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

In this episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Philip Hoare discuss Albrecht Dürer’s brilliance, what his art meant to people throughout history, and the centuries-long ubiquity of his woodcut of a rhinoceros—an animal the artist had never seen. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Philip Hoare, author of “Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“The compulsion to silence others is as old as the urge to speak,” historian Eric Berkowitz writes in Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News, “because speech—words, images, expression itself—exerts power…Even in countries where free expression is cherished, we often forget that forgoing censorship requires the embrace of discord as a fair price for the general good. Tolerance is risky. Suppression, on the other hand, is logical—and across history, it has been the norm.” In this episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Berkowitz discuss this history and consider the future of censorship and free speech. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Eric Berkowitz, author of “Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Simon Winchester, author of “Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“I think we do ourselves a disservice,” Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Alan Taylor says on the latest episode of The World in Time, speaking about his book American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850, “if we romanticize the origins of United States and cast it as some sort of political utopia from which we have fallen. I think we’d do a lot better if we’d see that division and disagreement have been in place in the United States from the start.” Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Alan Taylor, author of American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“Life is on the move, today as in the past,” journalist Sonia Shah writes in her book The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. “For centuries, we’ve suppressed the fact of the migration instinct, demonizing it as a harbinger of terror. We’ve constructed a story about our past, our bodies, and the natural world in which migration is the anomaly. It’s an illusion. And once it falls, the entire world shifts.” This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham and Shah discuss the many movements that define life on Earth, the naming trends that created the idea of invasive species, and the hope that the next great migration might be one we finally embrace as a fact of humanity and the natural world. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Sonia Shah, author of The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Louis Menand, author of “The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Nathaniel Rich, author of “Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Dennis C. Rasmussen author of “Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Richard Thompson Ford, author of “Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Lance Morrow, author of “God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with David S. Brown, author of “The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Michael J. Sandel, author of “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with George Dyson, author of Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“No American president has ever counted himself fully satisfied with his press coverage,” the historian Harold Holzer writes in the introduction of “The Presidents vs. the Press.” “Their belief that they are better than their bad press, and that they bear a nearly sacred obligation to counter or control criticism, has remained fixed since the age of bewigged chief executives and hand-screwed printing presses.” Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Harold Holzer, author of “The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle between the White House and the Media—from the Founding Fathers to Fake News.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Jacob Goldstein, author of “Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“In November 1944,” Edward D. Melillo writes in his book The Butterfly Effect​, “Decca Records released a single featuring Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots. ‘Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall’ skyrocketed to number one on the top of the Billboard charts in the United States and inaugurated a long-term collaboration between the ‘First Lady of Song’ and the fabled record producer Milt Gabler. A century before this musical milestone, the Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid I founded the Hereke Imperial Carpet Manufacture to supply elaborate silk rugs for his Dolmabahçe Palace on the Bosphorus. These extravagant carpets, among the finest ever woven, featured between three and four thousand knots per square inch. Six decades earlier, on October 19, 1781, Brigadier General Charles O’Hara of His Britannic Majesty’s Coldstream Guards donned his distinctive scarlet officer’s coat, strode onto the battlefield at Yorktown, Virginia, and surrendered the sword of Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis to Major General Benjamin Lincoln of the American Continental Army. A trio of more incongruous events, spanning three centuries, is difficult to imagine, yet these episodes share an astonishing feature. They depended on the tremendous productive capacity of domesticated insects.” This week on the podcast, Melillo and Lewis H. Lapham discuss events like these across human history, which show how, despite any annoyance we might feel at the prospect, the world as we know it would cease to function without insects. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Edward D. Melillo, author of The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Derek W. Black, author of “Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“Disunion—the possibility that it all might go to pieces—is a hidden thread through our entire history,” the journalist and historian Richard Kreitner writes in Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. “Our refusal to recognize this, like patients who insist, against all evidence, that they are not ill, has been a major cause of our political dysfunction and social strife. Secession is the only kind of revolution we Americans have ever known and the only kind we’re ever likely to see.” On this episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Kreitner start at the beginning of the United States of America and trace this history of disunion up to the present. Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Richard Kreitner, author of “Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Thomas Frank, author of “The People, No.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Tracy Campbell, author of “The Year of Peril: America in 1942.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Edward Achorn, author of “Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Peter Fritzsche, author of Hitler’s First Hundred Days When Germans Embraced the Third Reich.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Richard J. King, author of Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of “Moby Dick.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Gaia Vince, author of “Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“The history of capitalism in America has been a tale of predation,” historian Eugene McCarraher writes at the beginning of The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, “an ambitious but inexorably grotesque and destructive endeavor in the manufacture of beatitude, and that story is arguably winding down to its conclusion. What better time to trace the outlines of that history and inquire into the possibilities that lie dormant in the present?” In the latest episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and McCarraher discuss and unpack the author’s argument that “we should welcome the demise of our misenchanted way of life as an opportunity for repentance and renewal. But redemption can only come if we tell a different story about our country and its unexceptional sins.” Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Eugene McCarraher, author of The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Matt Stoller, author of “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Andrew Delbanco, author of “The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War.”

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Harlow Giles Unger, author of “Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with the author of Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Ziya Tong, author of The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions That Shape Our World. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with the author of “The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

This week on The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham talks with David Wallace-Wells, author of “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with the author of “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Nigel Hamilton, author of War and Peace: FDR's Final Odyssey: D-Day to Yalta, 1943–1945.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Andrew S. Curran, author of “Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Philipp Blom, author of “Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Alan Rusbridger, author of Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Joseph J. Ellis, author of “American Dialogue: The Founders and Us.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with David Wootton, author of Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Sarah Churchwell, author of Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and “the American Dream.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with David Levering Lewis, author of “The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order.”

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Jim Holt, author of “When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought.”

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Steven Ujifusa, author of “Barons of the Sea: And Their Race to Build the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship.”

Episode 31: Roland Philipps by Lapham’s Quarterly

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Catherine Nixey, author of “The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

One of America’s most enduring myths involves the fledging country’s supposed fortitude in refusing to import the class structures of its forebears. But, historian Steve Fraser says in the latest episode of The World in Time, “right now, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to sustain that delusion.” Or, as he puts it at the beginning of his book Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion, “Class is the secret of the American experience, its past, present, and likely future. It is a secret known to all, but a source of public embarrassment to acknowledge. It lives on all the surfaces of daily life, yet is driven underground every time its naked self offends cherished illusions about how we deal with each other.” Lewis H. Lapham talks with Steve Fraser, author of Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion.

Episode 28: Stephen Greenblatt by Lapham’s Quarterly

Barbara Ehrenreich thought there was something strange going on with the smart middle-aged people she knew. They seemed to be obsessed with their bodies in a novel and unexpected way, exercising frequently, assessing the value of every bite they considered, and obeying every preventive measure offered by doctors. “I did not share this obsession, I will admit,” she says on this episode of The World in Time. Annual visits to the doctor, constant medical tests—it all felt futile, or at least unnecessary. “It's in my nature to question everything,” she explains, “so in each case…I would do some research, and see if this indeed did any good.” Her new book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, is a result of that research, and she discussed her findings, scientific and philosophical and cultural, with Lewis Lapham. And yes, Gwyneth Paltrow does come up. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Susan Dunn, author of A Blueprint for War: FDR and the Hundred Days That Mobilized America. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“Beyond any doubt the decades from the 1800s to the 1900s witnessed many extraordinary and traumatic challenges and wrenching and disorienting changes,” historian David Cannadine writes in the epilogue of Victorious Century, “as expressed and mediated through (among other things) the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, the paintings of Turner and Landseer, the novels of Dickens and Eliot, and even Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas and Oscar Wilde’s brilliantly brittle plays.” But “how far did the men (and apart from Queen Victoria, they were all men) who were ostensibly in charge of the affairs of the United Kingdom and the British Empire understand what was going on and know what they were doing?” The book chronicles many of these events hurtling by those supposedly orchestrating or managing them, starting in 1800 with Ireland being subsumed into the larger kingdom of Great Britain and ending with the general election in 1906, when the Liberal Party squashed the Conservatives for the last time. In this episode of The World in Time, Cannadine explains why he chose those dates as bookends and why the words of Karl Marx and the oft-quoted beginning of A Tale of Two Cities precede his book. Lewis H. Lapham talks with David Cannadine, author of Victorious Century: The United Kingdom: 1800-1906. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

The period of American history that extends from 1865 to 1896, Stanford historian Richard White writes in the introduction to The Republic for Which It Stands, “for a long time devolved into historical flyover country. Writers and scholars departed the Civil War, taxied through Reconstruction, and embarked on a flight to the twentieth century and the Progressives, while only rarely touching down in between. Such neglect has changed with recent scholarship that has revealed a country transformed by immigration, urbanization, environmental crisis, political stalemate, new technologies, the creation of powerful corporations, income inequality, failure of governance, mounting class conflict, and increasing social, cultural, and religious diversity.” In this episode of the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham and White try to dig into as many of these topics as they can, while discussing William Dean Howells’ role in capturing all these moments and whether it is fair to call the current moment the second Gilded Age. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Richard White, author of The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“Two and a half decades after the collapse of the USSR, it seems the strangest of anachronisms that Vladimir Illyich Lenin can continue to draw such crowds,” Victor Sebestyen writes of Lenin’s tomb. “Everyone knows the havoc he wreaked; few people now believe in the faith he espoused. Yet he still commands attention—even affection—in Russia.” That attention also made the historian’s exhaustive new look at the man overshadowing recent Russian history possible. For this episode of The World in Time, he discussed his biography of Lenin and the conclusions he reached about its protagonist: “Even when he was wrong about things, he was often wrong in an interesting and challenging way. But I actually grew to hate him much, much more as I was working on it.” Lewis H. Lapham talks with Victor Sebestyen, author of Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“For over two centuries, this topic has been subject to whitewashing and selective remembering and forgetting,” historian Holger Hoock writes. He is referring to the American Revolution, a war sanitized by sentimentality and historical distance but about as bloody as other moments in the past with a “Revolution” appended to its name. The facts Hoock cites are relentless: “More than ten times as many Americans died, per capita, in the Revolutionary War as in World War I, and nearly five times as many as in World War II. The death rate among Revolutionary-era prisoners of war was the highest in American history. In addition, at least 20,000 British and thousands more American Loyalist, Native American, German, and French lives were lost. The Revolution exacted further human sacrifice when at war’s end approximately one in forty Americans went into permanent exile, the equivalent of some 7.5 million today.” In May 2017, Hoock spoke with Lewis Lapham about his research on the Revolutionary War at an event at the New York Public Library. Listen to their conversation above. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Holger Hoock, author of Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“History does not tell us what to do,” Civil War scholar Eric Foner says, but it does help us understand how the world got this way, as long as you aren’t stuck playing the Great Men greatest hits in your studies. But that’s what most of us learn: a litany of good or important deeds done by familiar names that turns history into a constellation of memorized details instead of a reckoning. This pockmarked understanding of the past, and the efforts to render history into more than a sunny yet useless bit of impressionism, is the theme of Foner’s Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History. The essays within were published in The Nation between 1977 and 2017 and often hit home the stickiness of the past. In a book review about public history and Confederate monuments, he asks, “Why, one wonders, has our understanding of history changed so rapidly, but its public presentation remained so static?” Lewis H. Lapham talks with Eric Foner, author of Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“The book teaches me things,” Barack Obama explained to his friends when defending his decision to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “about white people…the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world.” In her introduction to The Dawn Watch, Maya Jasanoff writes that she came to agree with what the future president wrote in Dreams from My Father, that Conrad’s perspective was valuable “not just despite its blind spots but because of them. Conrad captured something about the way power operated across continents and races, something that seemed as important to engage with today as it had when he started to write.” In this podcast episode, the Harvard history professor traces the writer’s past and explains how she followed him across the sea and to the Congo to understand better what he saw and how the imperialism he observed in the nineteenth century evolved into what we see now in the twenty-first century. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826. Reportedly Adams’ last words were “Thomas Jefferson survives”—without realizing his former vice president had predeceased him. Despite the fact that the political colleagues faced off in one of the dirtiest presidential campaigns in American history, the pair ended their lives not only at the same time but as friends who had exchanged letters for years. But their previously acrimonious relationship as leading figures of our first political parties, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Gordon S. Wood points out in his new book, had an immense effect on the eventual shape of the United States’ political fault lines and culture. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Gordon S. Wood, author of Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Adrian Goldsworthy, author of Pax Romana. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

How do you sift through a place’s past once historical memory has settled? Does that process grow complicated when that place is home, and you have to contend with your own memories too? Roger D. Hodge, national editor of The Intercept, tries to get past the clichés that have piled up around Texas to find something new to say about the place he grew up, which has a story layered with the accumulated pasts of many people who see different things when they go on a long drive in West Texas. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Roger D. Hodge, author of Texas Blood: Seven Generations Among the Outlaws, Ranchers, Indians, Missionaries, Soldiers, and Smugglers of the Borderlands. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

“World War II exhausted superlatives,” Victor Davis Hanson writes. But despite the global conflict’s ability to stretch our imagination of what warfare could entail, its spark and preambles look familiar, says Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He explains how the war’s ending might have been predictable—and why he decided to go with the plural in his title. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Second World Wars​: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

The history of paper is a story of technology following a need, argues Mark Kurlansky. The Chinese invented paper to keep records cheaply and easily in a bureaucratic society. It wasn’t until centuries later that the Arabs—adept at mathematics, astronomy, and accounting—had reason to adopt paper. Europeans, plagued by illiteracy, long knew of paper (Arab merchants regularly offered it for sale), but it wasn’t until a thousand years after its invention that Europeans, having adopted Arab innovations in math and science, imported paper to replace cumbersome and expensive parchment made of animal hides. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Mark Kurlansky, author of Paper: Paging Through History. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads looks at the many ways the world connects itself, going well beyond trade routes to tell a story about the energies that shaped the course of history. In moving silk, spices, furs, gold, silver, slaves, religion, and disease on the Silk Road, the West became linked to people and ideas in the region between the Mediterranean and the Himalayas. It’s the origin, argues Frankopan, of our interconnected world. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. In a new book Pulitzer Prize–winning author Stephen Greenblatt takes up the tale of Adam and Eve, the world’s most famous origin story. Greenblatt tracks the tale from its creation, perhaps as a response to the Jews’ Babylonian exile, through its varied interpretations, from the time it was viewed symbolically (as it was by early Christian historians) to its acceptance as a literal event (by no less an authority than Saint Augustine) to its deep influence on Renaissance art and literature and its collision with the modern world, most consequentially with the thought of Charles Darwin. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

In France the period from the summer of 1870 through the spring of 1871 has come to be known as the terrible year: France suffered a humiliating defeat in its war against Prussia, with Paris sieged and the capture of Emperor Napoleon III. Citizens of Paris who refused to capitulate to a new national government in Versailles formed the Paris Commune, which was brutally repressed. One Parisian trying to make sense of it all was Gustave Flaubert, whose novel A Sentimental Education had been published the year before. The novel has come to be seen as prophetic of the events of the terrible year—Flaubert believed the violence of the commune could have been avoided if more people had read his novel. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Peter Brooks, author of Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

The northernmost Civil War battle was fought in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and though Confederate soldiers never came within three hundred miles of Manhattan, New York City was far from untouched by the conflict—the ships dispatched by President Lincoln to quell the rebellion’s beginning at Fort Sumter, for example, sailed from New York harbor. Rebel sympathizers, abolitionists, immigrants, and freed slaves all called the city home and the conflict colored every aspect of New York life. Lewis H. Lapham talks with John Strausbaugh, author of City of Sedition: The History of New York City During the Civil War. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Until the fifteenth century the only sea that mattered (politically, socially, and economically) was the Mediterranean. As sixteenth-century European explorers set sail in search of land and opportunity, it was the Atlantic that carried them from old worlds to new. Since the middle of the twentieth century, argues Simon Winchester, it’s been the Pacific Ocean that dominates trade, travel, and scientific research, and it’s on, in, and under the Pacific that the future of the world will be forged. Lewis Lapham talks with Simon Winchester, author of Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Why did World War I begin? Why did America enter the conflict? What place does the war hold in American historical memory? These are questions historian Michael Kazin asks his Georgetown University students, and many of them are stumped. When Woodrow Wilson plunged the country headfirst into its first European fight, he was met with resistance from nearly every corner of American society—in New York City, a women’s march for peace was organized along Fifth Avenue. Today there is no memorial on the National Mall to the American soldiers who fought in the war, but understanding the complex social, political, and economic forces that birthed the war—and American involvement in it—is more crucial than ever. Lewis Lapham talks to Michael Kazin, author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914–1918. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

The life and thought of Niccolò Machiavelli has been badly misunderstood, argues historian Erica Benner. Far from his usual depiction as a politically amoral henchman, Machiavelli was in fact a prescient critic of princely power and religious zealotry. He lived the problems of government and fought to change a corrupt world. Lewis H. Lapham talks to Erica Benner, author of Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lexicographers write and edit dictionaries, and while they’re becoming a rare breed, language—ever evolving—is a growth industry. There are only some fifty full-time lexicographers in the U.S. They spend their time reading, writing, and synthesizing the words we use, eschew, and transform. Lewis Lapham talks with Kory Stamper, lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and the author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Every man is an ecosystem, ejecting some of the 39 trillion microbes each person on earth contains. While microbes are among the oldest living organisms on earth, it wasn’t until 1675 that scientists began to understand their existence—or their scope. Lewis Lapham talks with Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, about discovering communities of microbes that exists within us. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

How do you measure change? It is often said that the twentieth century saw more change than any other period. But today’s interest in modern technology obscures the massive changes the world has undergone over the past millennium. Lewis Lapham talks with Ian Mortimer, author of Millennium: From Religion to Revolution: How Civilization Has Changed Over a Thousand Years, about the history of change and why it matters. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

In 1791 an American military expedition led by General Arthur St. Clair to assert U.S. claims in the region north and west of the Ohio River was attacked by a confederation of Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware Indians that hoped to stop the country’s westward expansion. With nearly one thousand U.S. casualties, the American defeat was the worst the country would ever suffer at native hands. Americans were shocked, perhaps none more so than their commander in chief, George Washington, who saw in the debacle an urgent lesson: the United States needed an army. Lewis H. Lapham talks with William Hogeland, author of Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West, about the United States’ first standing army and its victory over the coalition of native forces that sought to halt the country's expansion. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

In the sixteenth century 300,000 people lived in the imperial quarter of Beijing, which housed the bureaucracy of the Chinese state. At the time Europe had only three cities—London, Naples, and Paris—with as many residents. European governments were by contrast small and static. Over the past five hundred years, partly in response to the grand scale of government power in Asia and the Islamic world, Western nations have gone through a series of revolutions in government: from Thomas Hobbes’ imagining of the modern nation state to liberal reforms advocated by John Stuart Mill and William Gladstone and the advent of the welfare state. Lewis Lapham talks to John Micklethwait, co-author, with Adrian Wooldridge, of The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, about the history of government in the West and rethinking the machinery of the state in the twenty-first century. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

From the end of World War II to 1980 virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Middle East; since 1990 virtually no American soldiers have been killed anywhere except the Middle East. Lewis Lapham speaks with Andrew J. Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, about America’s shift from the Cold War to war in the Middle East. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, about the language of poverty and American myths about class, work, and equality. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.