“Life is on the move, today as in the past,” journalist Sonia Shah writes in her book The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. “For centuries, we’ve suppressed the fact of the migration instinct, demonizing it as a harbinger of terror. We’ve constructed a story about our past, our bodies, and the natural world in which migration is the anomaly. It’s an illusion. And once it falls, the entire world shifts.”

This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham and Shah discuss the many movements that define life on Earth, the naming trends that created the idea of invasive species, and the hope that the next great migration might be one we finally embrace as a fact of humanity and the natural world.

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Sonia Shah, author of The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move.

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.

Episode 73: Sonia Shah

“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.

Episode 87: Peter S. Goodman

“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.

Episode 94: Kermit Roosevelt III

“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.

Episode 96: Adam Hochschild

“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.

Episode 97: Stacy Schiff

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.

Episode 99: Ben Jealous

“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.”

Episode 100: Jared Yates Sexton

“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.

Episode 102: Robert D. Kaplan

“I’m an essayist, not a podcaster,” says Lapham’s Quarterly acting editor Donovan Hohn, “but then the same could be said of Lewis, who took the form and the medium of the podcast and did with it what he’d done all of his adulthood: have conversations with people whose voices he wished to hear. Seasoned listeners to The World in Time may rest assured that similar conversations will resume shortly. This episode, my first behind the microphone, won’t be a conversation, but it will be a duet. I’ll be sharing the microphone some with Lewis Lapham.”

This week on the podcast Donovan Hohn hosts two episodes devoted to the life, career, and memory of our founding editor, Lewis H. Lapham. In this first episode, Hohn announces the Quarterly’s plans for Summer 2025, shares excerpts from a keynote address Lapham delivered at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities in 2011, pays tribute to Lapham the essayist, and gives an account of the months preceding and following Lewis’ death in July 2024.

Episode 1: Lewis H. Lapham, Part One

“Lewis was always engaging with some important piece of literature from the past,” says historian and classicist Emily Allen-Hornblower in this episode of The World in Time, edited from audio recorded at the memorial service held for Lewis H. Lapham in September 2024. “You can be chatting about the insanity of the current political landscape and quickly things would shift to how history repeats itself, how humanity simply does not learn. And Thucydides or Cicero would rear their heads. To quote Cicero, ‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’ Lewis understood that without the past, we lose the ability to think productively or even understand the present. He made himself a warrior for the humanities, putting up a splendid fight on behalf of the arts and letters. ’Til the end.”

In this second of two episodes this week, we are joined once again by Lewis, first in the tributes and remembrances of his friends and colleagues and then in his own voice. Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis introduces the proceedings. Former Harper’s Magazine literary editor Ben Metcalf recalls Lapham the mentor. Emily Allen-Hornblower reads from Homer and Baudelaire. Actor Alec Baldwin reads Mark Twain’s essay “At the Funeral.” Actor Christopher Lloyd performs Prospero’s epilogue from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Producer and director Sandy Gotham Meehan shares a letter by Flaubert. In audio from our archives, Lewis Lapham reads from “’Round Midnight,” his preamble to Music, the Fall 2017 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.

Episode 2: Lewis H. Lapham, Part Two

“I really loved it,” Francine Prose says of Nixon-era San Francisco in this episode of The World in Time, “but I also knew I wasn’t going to live there forever. Everyone I knew was living in these group houses in Berkeley, and then in the city itself, with ten people or fifteen people. I talk about the Reno Hotel, a former nineteenth-century hotel that had been built for boxers, and the city had given it to artists and designers and said, You can live there, don’t burn it down. And so they carved out these incredibly beautiful spaces for themselves. But this was before the tech revolution, when the Mission was still kind of wild and free, and it wasn’t all the glass cubes and people in tech. It was a great city to live in then. There was a kind of freedom there. Certainly compared to what I’d come from. My good fortune was that I wasn’t around a lot of hippies giving acid to two-year-olds. The book takes place during the Vietnam War. We went out and protested McNamara. My husband was the one who scaled the Pentagon, the walls of the Pentagon. We were very idealistic. Maybe unrealistically idealistic, but hey, I’ll take it.”
 
This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Francine Prose, author of 1974: A Personal History, about the San Francisco she remembers from her youth, about her relationship with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Tony Russo, about the final defeat of 1960s counterculture, and about the eerie echoes of Prose’s favorite movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Episode 3: Francine Prose

“They would take you around, introduce you to all of their contacts, translate for you, and help you put together the story,” says scholar-journalist Kira Brunner Don in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And I often felt like, you pay them, of course, a day rate, but there was this understanding that real news was made by American journalists who flew in and told you what was what. All of us were depending on journalists from the country, or writers from the country, who knew it far better than we did and really had the context and the sensibility. But there was this unspoken rule that they’ll be biased. I really felt like I wanted to create something that instead focused on the actual voices of the people who live in the countries we’re covering.”

This week on the podcast Donovan Hohn hosts a two-part episode. First, he speaks with Kira Brunner Don, former executive editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, about the making of our first issue, States of War, from Winter 2008, and about the magazine Brunner Don edits now, Stranger’s Guide. In part two of this episode, Hohn speaks with Nathan Brown, translator of Verso’s new dual-language edition of Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, about the history of Baudelaire’s magnum opus. Brown gives us a guided tour of “Recueillement,” the Baudelaire poem read at Lewis Lapham’s memorial service, which Brown has translated anew for Lapham’s Quarterly, under the title “Introspection.”

Episode 4: Kira Brunner Don and Nathan Brown

“I think the conflict for Twain is that he does want to be taken seriously as a writer,” says Ben Tarnoff on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The tricky part is that he does have a deep affinity for the low culture of the frontier expressed primarily through humor and tall tales. That he connects to that at an intuitive level. He has an ear for it. But he worries that if he goes too far in that direction, he’ll never be able to develop a reputation as a real writer. And that’s something he really wants, too. And arguably, his breakthrough—which I argued that he achieves in the West first—is coming to recognize that those two aren’t mutually exclusive, that that’s a false choice, that he can actually do both, and do both quite well, and that what he thought was a weakness could be a strength.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn hosts a two-part episode all about Mark Twain. First, he speaks with Ben Tarnoff, author of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, about how Twain’s time in the far West shaped his indelible literary voice and helped give birth to stand-up comedy. In part two of this episode, Hohn speaks with writer John Jeremiah Sullivan about why Twain appears to be undergoing a cultural revival, and about how tracking Twain’s travels in newly-digitized archives led to Sullivan’s discovery of a lost Twain eulogy—and its lost writer, Adele Amelia Gleason. Finally, to conclude the episode, Sullivan shares with World in Time listeners yet another long lost passage, this one written by Twain himself, which Sullivan recovered while searching through a database of digitized Indiana newspapers.


Episode 5: Ben Tarnoff and John Jeremiah Sullivan

“So what is a drug?” asks scholar-essayist Justin Smith-Ruiu in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “It’s a dry good that is transported and then sold in a particular measurable unit, and until you have those units of measurement and standardization for the purposes of commercial exchange, you don’t really have drugs. Of course, you have ayahuasca and fly agaric and whatever else, and you have people, at least going back to the Paleolithic, consuming these. But you don’t have the system of commodities that makes drugs a particularly modern phenomenon. And what happens as they are commodified—which you could also describe in the same way as saying what happens as they are transformed into drugs, as ayahuasca, for example, is transformed into a drug—is that they’re pulled out of the cultural and ritual context in which they had once made sense, and turned into intoxicants, turned into substances, the purpose of which is to remove you from the burdens of your life.”

 

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn revisits the topics of Intoxication (Winter 2012) and Disaster (Spring 2016), speaking first with Justin Smith-Ruiu, author of the forthcoming book On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality, about the history of drugs and the history of California; about trips, long and strange, good and bad; and about Smith-Ruiu’s experiments—in philosophy and literary nonfiction as well as in psychopharmacology. Later in the episode, Hohn speaks with poet Rachel Richardson about California on fire; about the ways technology gives us a distorted, fishbowl view of disasters, natural and otherwise; about the documentary poetics of C.D. Wright; and about the classical Greek poetic form of the cento, two contemporary examples of which Richardson shares from her new collection, Smother.


Episode 6: Justin Smith-Ruiu and Rachel Richardson

“In a famous episode, he says his name is Nobody, which in a way is obviously a lie,” says writer, scholar, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn in this episode of The World in Time. “But in another way is sort of true because he has become a nobody, right? And another way to describe the sort of narrative arc of The Odyssey is: he has to go from being a nobody and reclaim his identity and be a somebody again. So, the question of the nature of identity—you know, he’s been changed by twenty years of aging, by trauma, by terrible suffering, and yet when he gets home, he has to ‘prove,’ quote-unquote, that he is the same person who left. And that, I think, raises one of the most fascinating questions of the epic—and this speaks to something we know about from our own lives—which is: is there a part of you that remains the same despite the changes that we undergo in life? And that’s the sort of paradox, I think, that’s at the center of the poem. Everybody changes in twenty years, and yet you feel the same in many ways. The Odyssey delves into these very profound questions.”



This week’s episode of The World in Time is the first in a series of episodes about The Sea (Summer 2013). Donovan Hohn speaks with Daniel Mendelsohn about his new translation of The Odyssey, traveling back to antiquity in search of the origins of the Homeric epic. Then, in archival audio from 2013, editorial board member Aidan Flax-Clark interviews Lewis H. Lapham about his childhood reading of Moby-Dick, about Lapham’s greenhorn voyages, and about a doomed shipwreck hunt in the early 1960s that Lapham wrote about for The Saturday Evening Post.

Episode 7: Daniel Mendelsohn and Lewis H. Lapham

“There’s something I find strangely moving about the ‘Extracts’ section of Moby Dick—before we even get into the text—by virtue of the attention that has been paid to the whale,” writer Wyatt Mason says in this episode of The World in Time. “It’s astonishing as you’re reading through. It’s proof of two kinds of life. It’s proof of the life of the creature itself. But it’s also proof of the life of the mind and the attention that we pay—meaning, we readers and we writers pay—through time to this creature, which is very different from the elephant because most of us never see one in our lifetimes. If we’re fortunate, we might, but for the most part, no. So they reside or they live in texts.”



With this episode, the second in an intermittent series on the literature, history, and science of the sea, The World in Time launches onto the waters of Moby Dick. The episode begins with excerpts from a pair of conversations Lewis Lapham recorded during his final years as host. First, Lapham speaks with Richard J. King about his 2019 book, Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick. In the second excerpted interview, recorded in 2022, Lapham talks with Aaron Sachs about Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times. The episode concludes with a new conversation. Wyatt Mason and Donovan Hohn talk about the first time they read Moby Dick, about teaching Melville’s novel to incarcerated students enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative, and then, like a pair of sub-sub-librarians, they swim through two curious documents, “Etymologies” and “Extracts,” that precede the famous first sentence of Melville’s tragic Leviathan American novel.

Episode 8: Herman Melville, Extracted (with Wyatt Mason)

“In tyranny, you may not have a whole lot of political freedom, but you can still live a pretty free life under tyranny,” says Roger Berkowitz in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “In your private world, you can live under a dictator and still read what books you want and talk to people as long as you don’t act out in the public sphere. Totalitarianism is quite different. It tries to get inside your head, and make you, and make everyone, believe. And it has secret police, and snitches, and surveillance. And it tries to fully organize society. It’s the most organized and successful attack on freedom that one can imagine. And so for Arendt, you can’t just be an individual and sit in jail and be free if you’re going to protect yourselves from the dangers of totalitarianism and the end of constitutional, free government, which is what she’s worried about. You need to act politically, and you need to act politically with a certain amount of power.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn sits down for a conversation with Roger Berkowitz, writer, scholar, and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. They discuss the life and work of Hannah Arendt and two essays that share a name, “Civil Disobedience”—one by Arendt, the other by Thoreau, both recently collected in a volume that Berkowitz edited and introduced. Their conversation touches broadly on the works of the two writers, on their differences and disagreements, on the political tumults that inspired their famous essays, and on the lessons to be learned from them in the present day. 


Episode 9: Roger Berkowitz

“Well, I mean for starters it still is the greatest first sentence ever,” says Francine Prose in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I mean, three words. A three-word first sentence. I think if you were to ask a kind of range of readers, ‘Can you think of a first sentence?’ You know, you probably get ‘It was the best of times, and the worst of times’ or ‘the worst of times, and the best of times,’ and people would get it backwards. But then you get ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Because it establishes this kind of—you know, so much of the book is about authority. About authority, and the lack of authority, and what authority is, and who has it, and what you do with it. And that sentence is just pure authority. Pure narrative authority. ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Bingo. It’s like, ‘Okay, well, we’re going to call you Ishmael.’”

 
This week on the podcast, the Quarterly’s editor-at-large Francine Prose returns for an in-depth conversation with Donovan Hohn about Moby Dick’s first chapter, “Loomings.” They consider the meanings of the verb to loom, whether Ishmael is likeable or funny, whether the American sermon influenced Melville’s oratorical prose, why the antebellum religious press condemned the novel, and what the best medicine might be for “the universal thump.”

 
Earlier episodes in this series: Episode 7 with Daniel Mendelsohn and Episode 8 with Wyatt Mason.

Episode 10: "Loomings," with Francine Prose

“This is a sea that will take your life,” says Matthew Hollis in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “This is the cruel sea. This is the hard sea. And it takes extraordinary skill and good luck to survive it. But we come quickly to realize in this poem that actually there is a different kind of allegorical turmoil within as well. It’s one of the things that makes this poem so compelling, it seems to me, because it does have ideas about moral choices, and it does have ideas about belonging that seem as important today as they were then. One of the great things that strikes me with the great parts of the Anglo-Saxon opus is how modern it feels—or rather, to put it a different way, how timeless the cares and concerns and worries of human beings can be. Some of the fears about loneliness, some of the fears about pain, some of the worries about doubt, about making a good life or the life of right choosing, are issues that trouble us in exactly the same way, or challenge us in exactly the same way, as they did this sailor.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with poet Matthew Hollis about his new translation of The Seafarer, about the world from which this mysterious tenth-century Anglo-Saxon poem emerged, about the history of the poem’s improbable survival, and about its rediscovery by the Romantics and the Modernists. Into the conversation the episode weaves audio samples from different translations and different recordings, including one made by Lewis Lapham, another by Ezra Pound, and a third by Matthew Hollis himself.


Episode 11: Matthew Hollis on "The Seafarer"

“In this part of the essay, Emerson is talking about walking a lot, you know, sort of walking through nature, taking a stroll,” says James Marcus in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “He has this rather sublime experience, and he describes it in this way: ‘Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the universal being circulate through me. I am a part or particle of God.’ Now, I mean, that is lofty stuff, and it can edge over into silliness. In a way, if you picture it, it starts to be silly and that is why Christopher Cranch’s cartoon is hilarious, because a literalization of it is kind of ridiculous, in a way. Part of the thing I love about Emerson is that he wasn’t afraid to seem silly in his eagerness to render the experience. What he's talking about—if you get away from the actual image of an eyeball with a top hat on—is a kind of ecstatic merger with the universe, where the walls drop, the boundaries drop, the currents of the universe move through you. If you look at it that way, he’s talking about a classic ecstatic experience.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with writer and biographer James Marcus about his book Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s sense of self was, Marcus says, “kaleidoscopic,” and so is this episode, presenting not one Emerson but many: Emerson the public intellectual who cherished the privacy of his study, Emerson the lapsed minister who left the church but continued to preach on the lyceum circuit, Emerson the initially reluctant but eventually ardent abolitionist, Emerson the Swedenborgian mystic, Emerson the loner who deeply loved his friends Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau, Emerson the son estranged from his father, Emerson the father undone by grief for his dead son, and, finally, Emerson the volunteer firefighter. Marcus and Hohn also go searching for Emersonian influences in “The Mast-Head” chapter of Moby Dick. But they spend most of the conversation with the essayist from Concord, that artisan of indelible sentences, whom Melville once compared to a great philosophical whale who could dive “five miles or more,” sounding the depths.


Episode 12: James Marcus on Emerson and Melville

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 attacked by a confederation of Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware Indians that hoped to stop the country’s westward expansion. With nearly one thousand U.S. casualties, the American defeat was the worst the country would ever suffer at native hands. Americans were shocked, perhaps none more so than their commander in chief, George Washington, who saw in the debacle an urgent lesson: the United States needed an army.
 
Lewis H. Lapham talks with William Hogeland, author of Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West, about the United States’ first standing army and its victory over the coalition of native forces that sought to halt the country's expansion.
 
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.

Episode 04: William Hogeland

The life and thought of Niccolò Machiavelli has been badly misunderstood, argues historian Erica Benner. Far from his usual depiction as a politically amoral henchman, Machiavelli was in fact a prescient critic of princely power and religious zealotry. He lived the problems of government and fought to change a corrupt world. Lewis H. Lapham talks to Erica Benner, author of Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World.

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.

Episode 08: Erica Benner

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 historian Michael Kazin asks his Georgetown University students, and many of them are stumped. When Woodrow Wilson plunged the country headfirst into its first European fight, he was met with resistance from nearly every corner of American society—in New York City, a women’s march for peace was organized along Fifth Avenue. Today there is no memorial on the National Mall to the American soldiers who fought in the war, but understanding the complex social, political, and economic forces that birthed the war—and American involvement in it—is more crucial than ever.
 
Lewis Lapham talks to Michael Kazin, author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914–1918.
 
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.

Episode 09: Michael Kazin

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 defeat in its war against Prussia, with Paris sieged and the capture of Emperor Napoleon III. Citizens of Paris who refused to capitulate to a new national government in Versailles formed the Paris Commune, which was brutally repressed. One Parisian trying to make sense of it all was Gustave Flaubert, whose novel A Sentimental Education had been published the year before. The novel has come to be seen as prophetic of the events of the terrible year—Flaubert believed the violence of the commune could have been avoided if more people had read his novel.
 
Lewis H. Lapham talks with Peter Brooks, author of Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year.

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.

Episode 12: Peter Brooks

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 Greenblatt takes up the tale of Adam and Eve, the world’s most famous origin story. Greenblatt tracks the tale from its creation, perhaps as a response to the Jews’ Babylonian exile, through its varied interpretations, from the time it was viewed symbolically (as it was by early Christian historians) to its acceptance as a literal event (by no less an authority than Saint Augustine) to its deep influence on Renaissance art and literature and its collision with the modern world, most consequentially with the thought of Charles Darwin.

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.

Episode 13: Stephen Greenblatt

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 32: Steven Ujifusa

Lewis H. Lapham talks with the author of “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.”

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.

Episode 44: Brenda Wineapple

This week on The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham talks with David Wallace-Wells, author of “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.”

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.

World In Time

Episode 45: David Wallace-Wells

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company.

Worl In Time

Episode 49: William Dalrymple

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with David S. Brown, author of “The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry 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.

Episode 67: David S. Brown

Donovan Hohn, the acting editor of Lapham's Quarterly, interviews historians, writers, and journalists about books that bring voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. New episodes are released weekly.

The World in Time

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