The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly
Episodes
Episode 39: Alan Rusbridger
21 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Episode 38: Joseph J. Ellis
07 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Lewis H. Lapham talks with Joseph J. Ellis, author of “American Dialogue: The Founders and Us.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for t...
Episode 37: David Wootton
09 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Lewis H. Lapham talks with David Wootton, author of Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison. Thanks to our gene...
Episode 36: Sarah Churchwell
26 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Lewis H. Lapham talks with Sarah Churchwell, author of Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and “the American Dream.” Thanks...
Episode 35: Jill Lepore
12 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
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 thi...
Episode 34: David Levering Lewis
28 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Lewis H. Lapham talks with David Levering Lewis, author of “The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His C...
Episode 33: Jim Holt
31 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Lewis H. Lapham talks with Jim Holt, author of “When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought.”
Episode 32: Steven Ujifusa
27 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
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
13 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Episode 31: Roland Philipps by Lapham’s Quarterly
Episode 30: Catherine Nixey
29 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Lewis H. Lapham talks with Catherine Nixey, author of “The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World.” Thanks to our gener...
Episode 29: Steve Fraser
15 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
One of America’s most enduring myths involves the fledging country’s supposed fortitude in refusing to import the class structures of its forebear...
Episode 28: Stephen Greenblatt
01 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Episode 28: Stephen Greenblatt by Lapham’s Quarterly
Episode 27: Barbara Ehrenreich
18 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Barbara Ehrenreich thought there was something strange going on with the smart middle-aged people she knew. They seemed to be obsessed with their bodi...
Episode 26: Susan Dunn
04 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
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....
Episode 25: David Cannadine
20 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“Beyond any doubt the decades from the 1800s to the 1900s witnessed many extraordinary and traumatic challenges and wrenching and disorienting chang...
Episode 24: Richard White
02 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The period of American history that extends from 1865 to 1896, Stanford historian Richard White writes in the introduction to The Republic for Which I...
Episode 23: Victor Sebestyen
02 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“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...
Episode 22: Holger Hoock
19 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“For over two centuries, this topic has been subject to whitewashing and selective remembering and forgetting,” historian Holger Hoock writes. He ...
Episode 21: Eric Foner
05 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“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 yo...
Episode 20: Maya Jasanoff
22 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“The book teaches me things,” Barack Obama explained to his friends when defending his decision to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “ab...
Episode 19: Gordon S. Wood
08 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826. Reportedly Adams’ last words...
Episode 18: Adrian Goldsworthy
24 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Lewis H. Lapham talks with Adrian Goldsworthy, author of Pax Romana. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided b...
Episode 17: Roger D. Hodge
10 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Episode 16: Victor Davis Hanson
27 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“World War II exhausted superlatives,” Victor Davis Hanson writes. But despite the global conflict’s ability to stretch our imagination of what ...
Episode 15: Mark Kurlansky
12 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 i...
Episode 14: Peter Frankopan
26 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Episode 13: Stephen Greenblatt
13 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 Gre...
Episode 12: Peter Brooks
28 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 defea...
Episode 11: John Strausbaugh
16 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The northernmost Civil War battle was fought in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and though Confederate soldiers never came within three hundred miles of Man...
Episode 10: Simon Winchester
02 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Until the fifteenth century the only sea that mattered (politically, socially, and economically) was the Mediterranean. As sixteenth-century European ...
Episode 09: Michael Kazin
20 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 histori...
Episode 08: Erica Benner
05 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The life and thought of Niccolò Machiavelli has been badly misunderstood, argues historian Erica Benner. Far from his usual depiction as a politicall...
Episode 07: Kory Stamper
20 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Lexicographers write and edit dictionaries, and while they’re becoming a rare breed, language—ever evolving—is a growth industry. There are only...
Episode 06: Ed Yong
08 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Every man is an ecosystem, ejecting some of the 39 trillion microbes each person on earth contains. While microbes are among the oldest living organis...
Episode 05: Ian Mortimer
23 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 technol...
Episode 04: William Hogeland
12 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 attac...
Episode 03: John Micklethwait
28 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 Europ...
Episode 02: Andrew Bacevich
17 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 Am...
Episode 01: Nancy Isenberg
02 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 A...