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.org

Introduction - 0:00

Historical Treatment of POWs - 2:35

Parole System and Napoleonic Wars - 4:47

Scale and Logistics of Civil War Prisons - 7:42

Lincoln's Dilemma: Sovereignty vs Prisoner Exchange - 10:56

Andersonville: Conditions and the Deadline - 31:48

Point Lookout and Union Prisons - 47:25

Prison Society and Community - 57:45

Black Prisoners of War - 65:33

Elmira Prison and John W. Jones - 82:11

Lutherans are a strange denomination in American religious history and culture. For Catholics they are certainly Protestants. For Protestants they are crypto-Catholics. While they have been around since the Swedes established their short-lived colony on the Delaware River, they have typically received as much attention in the American imagination as the short-lived Swedish colony on the Delaware River.

But my guest Timothy D. Grundmeier has a different point of view. He argues in his new book Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith that Lutheranism was a central component of nineteenth-century American religion and of the era of the Civil War. This is because Lutherans were numerous, the nation’s fourth largest denomination by 1900; they were uniquely positioned in the American religious landscape; and they almost invariably expressed the opinion of the “moderate majority” in Union states outside the Northeast. And, as with every other aspect of American society, Lutheranism was reshaped by the struggle of the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Timothy D. Grundmeier is professor of history at Martin Luther College in New Ulm, Minnesota. Lutheranism and American Culture is his first book.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Introduction

00:02:60 - What is Lutheranism?

00:06:21 - The Civil War Era Defined

00:09:01 - Three Varieties of American Lutheranism

00:19:44 - The Old Lutherans and Missouri Synod

00:27:38 - How the Civil War Fractured Lutheranism

00:39:36 - The Slavery Debate: Walter and the Norwegians

00:47:20 - Lutheran Quietism After the Civil War

00:52:38 - The Great Lutheran Realignment

01:02:35 - Ideas, Institutions, and Cultural Context

The two hundred and eighty years between the death of the philosopher Confucius and the reign of the first Emperor of China saw one of the most profound revolutions in human history. Not only did it end with the creation of an imperial rule that persisted through successive dynasties for 2,132 years, but it also saw the creation of “new traditions of thought and practice…great monuments of art, literature, and philosophy…that still inform social life in our own lifetime.” The era of the “warring states”, as scholars call it, was critical not just for China or East Asia, “but to that of humanity writ large.”

Yet this era remains almost unknown in the English-speaking world. “If one enters any bookstore…in search of a book about classical Athens, the conquestions of Alexander, or the early Roman Republic,” writes my guest Andrew Meyer, “one will have many options. But if one looks for such a book about the corresponding period in early Chinese history, there are none. I wrote this book to fill that gap.”

Andrew Seth Meyer is Professor of History at Brooklyn College. A specialist in the intellectual history of early China, he is the author of The Dao of the Military: Liu An's Art of War and co-author of The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China. His latest book is To Rule All under Heaven: A History of Classical China, from Confucius to the First Emperor, which is the subject of our conversation today.

Chapters

0:35 - Book Overview & Historical Context

4:47 - Dating the Warring States Period

8:42 - What Are the Warring States?

11:08 - Social Structure & Aristocracy

18:39 - Rivers & Regional Differences

24:45 - Military Power & Wealth

31:37 - Four Great Questions: State Models

40:51 - Centralization vs Regional Autonomy

51:26 - Education & Intellectuals

This is the first ever Historically Thinking Roundtable. Given that it's 2026, it’s appropriate that this roundtable focus on the 250th anniversary of the United States, and how historians can be involved in its commemoration.

Difficulties in doing this can arise from at least two reasons. One is that historians, like most academics, represent a relatively small slice of the political pie. And indeed, in these very partisan times, academics are some of the least trusted people in society–right around members of congress, according to a recent poll. Naturally academics and professionals in cultural institutions tend to get defensive about that, and beginning in a posture of attack and defense usually means that whatever happens afterward will not be good.

But there’s another problem, one related to historical thinking. Historians are taught to tell the whole story, however complicated and messy. They often find anything less than that to be distortion. And while arguably civic thought requires an element of gratitude, that’s not how historians think of their own craft.

These difficulties can be acutely felt by professionals in

With me to discuss these difficulties, and how to resolve them are:

• Bill Peterson, Director of the State Historical Society of North Dakota
• Trait Thompson, Executive Director of the Oklahoma Historical Society, host of the podcast, co-host of A Very OK Podcast
• Ben Jones, South Dakota State Historian, and Director of the South Dakota Historical Society,
• Ryan Cole, historian, Speechwriter at U.S. Senate, author most recently of The Last Adieu: Lafayette's Triumphant Return, the Echoes of Revolution, and the Gratitude of the Republic
• And Jill Weiss Simins, historian and Director of Special Projects, Indiana State Archives

Chapters

0:00 - Introduction

3:20 - Community Conversations in Red States

13:04 - Telling Complex History

20:28 - When Is Complexity Bad?

25:12 - Bridging Alienation and Division

31:10 - Primary Sources and Making Arguments

37:35 - Historical Distortion and Noble Lies

47:15 - America 250 Local Projects

He was at various times in his life known as Gaius Octavius Thurinus; Gaius Julius Caesar; and Caesar Augustus. He called himself Princeps, the first man in Rome; the Roman Senate would eventually call him pater patriae, the father of his country. Heir to his great-uncle Julius Caesar, this 19 year old was dropped into the tumult of Roman political violence, and emerged from it the sole and undisputed victor after decades of civil war. He murdered hundreds, and then became the founder of a new Roman system that brought peace and prosperity to Rome’s citizens and inhabitants. He was tyrannical and giving, cruel and clever, manipulative and noble. And he has claim to be one of the most successful politicians to ever lead a nation or a kingdom, who created a system which lasted for hundreds of years after his death.

With me to discuss Caesar Augustus is Adrian Goldsworthy, author of Augustus: First Emperor of Rome, now being reissued in its second edition. The annoyingly prolific author of a shelf of books, both of ancient history and historical fiction, Adrian Goldsworthy has been described as the OG scholar of the Roman Army and the Mr Darcy of Ancient History. Since his next book comes out in May, this promises to be the first of at least two conversations with him in 2026–and this is his sixth appearance on the podcast.

Chapters

1. Introduction: Caesar Augustus (0:00)
2. The Standard Received View: Syme's Roman Revolution (1:33)
3. The Importance of Names: Octavian vs Caesar (13:27)
4. Why Not Call Him Emperor? (22:56)
5. Why Did Julius Caesar Pick This Kid? (27:06)
6. Augustus's Talented Circle: Agrippa, Maecenas, and Livia (36:20)
7. Augustus's Travels and Provincial Administration (47:59)
8. Marriage Laws and Religious Reform (57:34)
9. The Aeneid: Propaganda or Great Literature? (64:08)
10. The Last 16 Years and Augustus's Legacy (71:52)

For a very long time humans have been getting sick. Sometimes we have gotten sick more easily than at other times. From time to time we get sick from things a human body has never before encountered. Sickness is always present with us. And while injury we can understand–like breaking a leg, or having a rock hit your head–sickness can be as mysterious to people in 2026 who trust the science as it was to our ancestors 4,000 years ago.

“Why did one patient heal,” my guest Susan Wise Bauer writes, “while another rotted? And what about the shivering, miserable sufferer who simply awoke with a sore throat and cough, after going to bed healthy and filled with plans the night before? It is the constant presence of sickness, not injury, that has shaped the way we think about ourselves and our world.”

Susan Wise Bauer’s books include The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home (fourth ed., 2024) and The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory. Her most recent book is The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy.

0:00 Introduction 1:45 What This Book Is and Isn't 4:35 Did Hunter-Gatherers Get Sick? 9:50 Guilt and Sickness 14:00 Doctors as Priests 21:30 The Four Humors 25:15 Humoral Theory and Colonialism 29:45 Occasionalism: God's Will and Disease 35:55 The Black Death 40:45 The History of Drugs 45:50 Vaccines: Jenner and Cowpox 50:30 The Early 20th Century: Disease Returns 54:25 The Pax Antibiotica 58:30 Wellness Culture 61:45 COVID and What Hasn't Changed 67:15 Closing

On November 1, 1755, the city of Lisbon was devastated by a terrible earthquake, and a new era of urban planning began. The reconstruction of Lisbon was, more or less, the first time that modern planners had the opportunity to transform an urban landscape and bring it into line with their vision of what the future should look like. What shifting tectonic plates did to Lisbon would, in the future, be the job of bulldozers and wrecking balls. We take that for granted now, but we shouldn’t.

In his new book The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World, my guest Bruno Carvalho tells two histories that our intertwined. One is the story of how histories were planned, built, or rebuilt. But the other is an intellectual history of how cities of the future were imagined. It turns out that those two stories don’t intersect as often as you might assume.

Bruno Carvalho is a professor at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on cities. He is also the author of Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro.

In this episode of Historically Thinking, we begin not with a historian’s voice, but with the voice of a seventeenth-century woman.

Lady Frances Culpeper Berkeley—born in England, twice widowed, and married in 1670 to Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia—speaks from the midst of crisis. Jamestown has burned. Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion has fractured the colony’s political order. Her husband has been recalled to England to answer charges before the Crown. Lady Berkeley, left behind, attempts to make sense of loyalty, loss, honor, and exile.

That voice is brought to life by my second guest, Amy Stallings, a historian and historical interpreter who believes the past is best understood not only through documents, but through embodied experience. Together, we explore Bacon’s Rebellion from an unfamiliar vantage point, the interior world of Lady Frances Berkeley, and the intellectual stakes of historical reenactment itself: what it reveals, what it risks, and what it makes newly visible.

00:00 - Introduction

00:28 - Lady Frances Culpeper Berkeley Introduces Herself

00:58 - Writing to Her Husband in England

02:55 - Sir William Berkeley's Accomplishments in Virginia

04:23 - The Royal Commissioners and Personal Betrayal

05:47 - Berkeley's Loyalty During the English Civil War

07:17 - Berkeley's Resistance to Parliament

08:15 - Berkeley's Return to Power and Jamestown's Glory

09:39 - Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion Begins

11:08 - Bacon Surrounds the State House

12:57 - Introducing Amy Stallings

13:41 - Theater and History Intertwined

14:27 - The Dissertation on Ballroom Politics

21:40 - Dance as Political Resistance

24:25 - English Country Dancing Before the Waltz

28:53 - First Character: Susan Binks, Tobacco Bride

28:53 - Learning History Through First-Person Interpretation

39:14 - Developing Lady Berkeley's Character

46:52 - Lady Berkeley's Isolation and Loss

46:52 - Lady Berkeley's Inheritance and Legal Battles

55:00 - The Challenges of Colonial Communication

57:00 - Sewing Period Costumes

61:51 - Conclusion