Historically Thinking

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

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.

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

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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. 

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

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