This is Nassau Hall. When it was built, it was the largest building in colonial America. Anyone walking through it today when visiting Princeton University might have some strange resonance with their own college experience.

This is a bonus episode of Historically Thinking, hopefully the first of several short episodes that will deal with higher ed in the time of COVID. It's changed much else, and it would seem (as the autumn semester of 2020 begins,

“In terms of time, my work will start with the 140th Olympiad” wrote the historian Polybius at the beginning of his History:  Before this time things happened in the world pretty much in a sporadic fashion, because every incident was specific,

Hello, the French thinker Blaise Pascal wrote this when considering the ability of humans to think: Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour,

In 1892, the whaling ship Progress under the command of Captain Daniel W. Gifford made an unusual voyage, not out to sea for a two to three year voyage, but up the St. Lawrence River and into the Great Lakes—the entire time under tow,

In 1280 a enormous eruption disturbed the peace of the Chinese city of Yangzhou. It was “like a volcano erupting,” wrote one who experienced it, “a tsunami crashing.” Ceiling beams three miles away were thrown down,

My great-grandfather Louis Corsiglia emigrated to the United States as a boy from Genoa, and he was a lifelong anti-imperialist Democrat. So it followed from those two things that a dictum of his was that “A Sicilian is no more an Italian than a Filipi...

This week’s conversation is a rather unusual. There’s one guest, as there usually is, but this time there are two hosts—or, two people asking the questions. - The guest is David Staley, whom longtime listeners to the podcast will recognized from Episo...

On January 15, 1817, a group of some of the most prominent African-American leaders called a public meeting at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, which had at that time one of the largest communities of free blacks in the United...

In the movie The Third Man, Orson Welles delivered this sensational adlibbed speech: You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo,