Episode 243: The Story Paradox

Explicit content warning

01/24/22 • 57 min

Storytelling, writes my guest Jonathan Gottschall, is the way in which people have for thousands of years not only bound themselves together into communities, but the art which built civilization. But story-telling is also the best way of forcing people apart, for manipulating one another, for destroying the capacity to think rationally. Behind our greatest ills, he argues, are mind-disordering stories. This naturally has implications for how we tell stories about the past. Jonathan Gottschall is distinguished research fellow in the English department at Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania. He is the author most recently of The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Stories Builds Societies and Tears Them Down, which is the focus of our conversation today.

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Behind the Book: Down the Road to the Cedars

This is the first in a new series of podcasts. Long time listeners will remember that when my book Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life was published, I did a number of podcasts with experts delving into aspects of Daniel Morgan’s life—from the place where he lived, to how he was flogged, to the rifles that he carried. But I thought that this was unsatisfactory for a podcast called “Historically Thinking”. It’s the conversations that historians have before they write a book that show how a research project comes together, and how historical thinking gets done. So, in something of a leap of faith, I’m going to have conversations with other historians on topics that apply to a project that I’m now working on...more about that, perhaps, at the end of our conversation. In effect I'm doing podcasts on spec, which fills me with superstitious dread. My guest today Mark Anderson, author of Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians’ First Battles in the Revolution. It's a fascinating study of native politics, diplomacy, and war on the Canadian border during the first year of the American Revolution, a politics which would have confused a Renaissance Italian diplomat. Mark has previously written The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony: America’s War of Liberation in Canada, 1774-1776. In a previous life, before establishing himself as one of the few American authorities on revolutionary-era Canada, he was an officer in the United States Air Force.

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Episode 244: Hitler’s First One Hundred Days

On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany. Occurring simultaneously with Franklin Roosevelt's "One Hundred Days", Hitler's first one hundred days were even more dramatic and consequential–the most sudden change, Peter Fritzsche writes, in all of German history. "A very partisan and divided society, fragmented between left and right, between Social Democrats, Communists and National Socialists (Nazis), between Catholics and Protestants, seemingly transformed itself – by terror from above and “conversion” from below – into a seemingly unified society recognized widely as a 'people’s community'." In his book Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich, Fritzsche examines this transformation in its tumultuous, kaleidoscopic, and terrifying details. He describes elections and arrests, bonfires and executions, the patriotic rallies and anti-Jewish boycotts, getting at the transformation that Germany experienced between January 30th and May 10th. "Compared with day one, Jan. 30, 1933, Germany was not recognizable on day 100, at least to outsiders. To sympathizers, German history had healed itself in 100 days." Peter Fritzsche is the W.E. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of History at the University of Illinois in Champagne-Urbana. The author of numerous fascinating studies of German history, Hitler's First Hundred Days is his lates.