The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

“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.