Doing History
By Holly White October 08, 2019

Doing History 4: Bibliography

Bibliography for Doing History 4: Understanding the Fourth Amendment Want to learn more about the Bill of Rights and the Fourth Amendment? We’ve compiled a list of suggested books, articles, popular blog posts, and online resources that you might find helpful. We either used these works ourselves for production research or they were suggested by our guests. Happy researching!… Read More

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By Holly White October 08, 2019

Doing History 4 Legal Lexicon; or A Useful List of Terms You Might Not Know

“Doing History 4 Legal Lexicon; or A Useful List of Terms You Might Not Know” We are pleased to announce the release of “Doing History, Season 4: Understanding the Fourth Amendment.” Law is all around us. This 4-part Doing History series explains the early American origins and importance of the fourth amendment.  Although it doesn’t always make headlines as… Read More

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By oieahc November 26, 2018

Doing History: The Power of Biography

Today’s post accompanies the Doing History 3 series on Ben Franklin's World. You can find supplementary materials for the series on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. Biographies serve as a gateway to history. They serve this role because, as all of our guest scholars in the Doing History: Biography series related, biographies humanize the past. At their core biographies are about people, and as people, we are naturally curious about how others lived, worked, and experienced life. Read More

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By Catherine O’Donnell November 13, 2018

Doing History: A Biographer’s Dilemma: Can We Make Arguments Out of Lives?

Today’s post accompanies “Researching Biography,” episode 212 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 3 series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. By Catherine O’Donnell Always be arguing. It’s the historian’s version of David Mamet’s line for salesmen, “Always be closing.” I know that rule, and I know another one, too: don’t oversimplify. Because historians are not, to put it mildly, Occam’s Razor kind of people. We don’t think that the simplest answer is best; the simplest answer is the one we give three points out of ten on the midterm. The more causes the better, in our book. There are historians who readily combine these two directives to create bold arguments and to make those arguments reflect the complexities of human society. I am not one of them. Working my way through an archive, I become entranced by nuances and exceptions to the rule. “What is your argument?” I sternly ask myself. “My goodness, will you look at this,” I answer, helplessly. Read More

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By oieahc November 06, 2018

Doing History: Writing Biography

Today’s post accompanies “Considering John Marshall Part 2,” episode 211 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 3 series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. In prior weeks, Michael McGandy has written about biography from the perspective of a publisher and interviewed numerous historians of early America about why they chose to write biographies. Today, he conducts an in-depth conversation about the process of writing biography with historian and biographer Cynthia Kierner. Read More

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By Michael J. McGandy October 30, 2018

Doing History: Reconceiving Biography

Today’s post accompanies “Considering John Marshall Part 1,” episode 210 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 3 series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. By Michael J. McGandy When asked to consider the prospects for biography, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf reflected on their experience researching and writing as a team: But positioning Jefferson in his time and, more importantly for us, in his place, enabled us to see and know his world and the world of his contemporaries a little better. The pay-off for us is in the nuances, in glimpses of the dynamics of family life, in the performance of mastery, in the ways he fashioned himself as a patriarch. Biography can show us the way to good history; a good historical understanding is the prerequisite and justification for a worthwhile biography. The reciprocal relationship that Annette and Peter highlight here is, I think, an important insight. Not only are biography and history connected by processes of research and writing, they are associated with respect to the goals of a “worthwhile biography.” In sum: big-picture history without a fine sense of individual experience is as deficient as is detailed biography that lacks a strong sense of context, place, and pattern. Read More

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By Michael J. McGandy October 23, 2018

Doing History: Arguing Biography

Today’s post accompanies “Considering Biography,” episode 209 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 3 series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. By Michael J. McGandy I am an editor, I admit, who is wary of biography. When a junior scholar working on her first book raises the prospect of writing a biography or a book with a strong biographical line, I sound a note of caution. Are there other ways, I ask, of telling this story? I wonder if the author knows how biography is evaluated in the scholarly community. Frankly, I question, are the virtues of this form worth the manifest danger of putting her career at risk? Read More

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By Holly White October 19, 2018

Doing History Season 3- Biography

Doing History Season 3: Biography If biographies tell us about the past, why do bookstores and libraries always shelve them separately from history books? When historians write biographies, do they approach things differently? And if so how? These questions got us thinking and so we decided to dedicate season three of Doing History to them. The… Read More

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By Edith B. Gelles July 03, 2018

Abigail and Tom

Today’s post accompanies “Partisans: The Friendship and Rivalry of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson” episode 193 of Ben Franklin’s World. by Edith B. Gelles Abigail Adams adored Thomas Jefferson. “He is one of the choice ones of the earth,” she wrote to her sister after meeting him in 1784. Thomas Jefferson, in return,… Read More

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By oieahc December 26, 2017

We’ve Been Doing History’s History

Today’s post accompanies “Freedom and the American Revolution,” episode 166 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 2: To the Revolution! series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. History is a primary context for every decision we make; our understanding of the past—our own as individuals and collectively—is background, framework, presumption, and rationale. It’s not always conscious, and it’s not always exact or even correct. But it is there, informing us. It isn’t the case, either, that history is inescapable, or the past makes any specific future inevitable. Individuals and communities large and small can make change happen suddenly or deliberately. But when we recognize change, it is because we know what came before. Read More

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By Dael A. Norwood December 19, 2017

Global Trade and Revolution: The Politics of Americans’ Commerce with China

Today’s post accompanies “The Age of Revolutions,” episode 165 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 2: To the Revolution! series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. by Dael A. Norwood In February 1784, just over a month after the U.S. Congress had ratified the Treaty of Paris and proclaimed the end of the war for Independence, the ice damming New York’s harbor finally receded. In its wake came a small, square-sterned ship: the Empress of China.[1]  What set the Empress apart from the other ships leaving New York that winter was its ambition. It was bound for Canton, China –  Guangzhou – a port no other American ship had yet reached. Seeking that distant destination, the ship was loaded with more than just ginseng and Spanish dollars as it sailed down the East River; it bore Americans’ hopes for a new era of prosperity, too. Read More

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By Rachel B. Herrmann December 05, 2017

Histories of Hunger in the American Revolution

Today’s post accompanies “The American Revolution in North America,” episode 163 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 2: To the Revolution! series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. By Rachel B. Herrmann Poor Joseph Plumb Martin. The Connecticut private had been at it again—eating something a bit iffy to deal with his hunger. This time, it was “an old ox’s liver” that Martin had procured from camp butchers before chucking it into his kettle. The more he boiled it, “the harder it grew,” he recalled, but he ate it anyway. The next morning, Martin’s stomachache drove him to the doctor, who gave him “a large dose of tartar emetic.” After taking the medicine and exercising to encourage it to do its work, Martin promptly “discharged the hard junks of liver like grapeshot from a fieldpiece.”[1] Martin ate a fair amount of offal throughout his service. He sampled “A sheep’s head which” he “begged of the butchers,” and an ox’s milt, or spleen—which also made him vomit.[2] Not all soldiers shared Martin’s predilection for what chefs today refer to fondly as “the nasty bits,” but during the Revolutionary War, British and American soldiers suffered from the curse of bad army food. Read More

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