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The great English essayist and linguist Samuel Johnson was writing during the Enlightenment – the period some historians identify as the beginning of the modern age. American author and philosopher David Foster Wallace worked more than two centuries later, in the “post-modern” style. But these two writers shared a common problem: once modernity fractured society’s sense of shared moral norms, how could you write persuasively about morality? This episode looks at how Johnson and Wallace attempted to solve this problem; what struggles plagued their solutions; and why our modern, pluralistic landscape makes their work more valuable than ever. Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Kirsten Hall Herlin Featured Scholars:  Walter Jackson Bate (1918-1999), Professor of English, Harvard University Matt Bucher, Managing Editor, The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies Jack Lynch, Professor of English, Rutgers University D. T. Max, Staff Writer, The New Yorker Special thanks: Dutton Kearney For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The problem of gun violence is as old as guns themselves. According to historian Priya Satia, America’s present epidemic of gun violence has its roots in the industrial revolution. Satia tells the story of British gun-maker Samuel Galton, Jr., who was called to task by his Quaker community for manufacturing rifles. As a professed pacifist, Galton had to wrestle with the large-scale uses to which his weapons were put. So where do we look for answers about how to regulate guns? Some claim the answer has to lie in the past, in the nation’s founding documents. Others argue that novel technologies demand novel solutions. Solving the problem of gun violence may be a case where we need to make a strong modernity claim.  Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Christopher Nygren, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh Featured Scholars:  Catherine Fletcher, Professor of History, Manchester Metropolitan University Priya Satia, Professor of History, Stanford University Special thanks: James DeMasi, Chloé Hogg, Jonathan Lyonhart, Pernille Røge, Jennifer Waldron, Catherine Yanko. For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-racism and to the racial hierarchies that haunt the modern era? Rolena Adornol, David Orique, María Cristina Ríos Espinosa tell the story of how Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary to New Spain, came to racial consciousness in the presence of slavery. His intellectual rebellion spurred slavery’s apologists to more strident and sinister modes of defense – but also laid a lasting Christian groundwork for the fight against racial injustice.   Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Terence Sweeney, Assistant Teaching Professor, Honors College, Villanova University Featured Scholars:  Rolena Adorno, Sterling Professor Emerita of Spanish, Yale University María Cristina Ríos Espinosa, Professor of Arts, Humanities, and Culture, University of Sor Juana’s Cloister, Mexico City David Orique, Professor of History, Providence College Special thanks: Chiyuma Eliott, Michael Sawyer For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Race is sometimes treated as a biological fact. It is actually a modern invention. But for this concept to gain power, its logic had to be spread – and made visible. Art historian Ilona Katzew tells the story of how Spanish colonists of modern-day Mexico developed theories of blood purity and used the casta paintings – featuring family groups with differing skin pigmentations set in domestic scenes – to represent these theories as reality. She also shares the strange challenges of curating these paintings in the present, when the paintings’ insidious ideologies have been debunked, but when mixed-race viewers also appreciate images that testify to their presence in the past. Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Christopher Nygren, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh Featured Scholar: Ilona Katzew, Curator and Head of Latin American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Special thanks: Elise Lonich Ryan, Nayeli Riano, Jennifer Josten For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the “traditional American family?” Popular images from the colonial and pioneer past suggest an isolated and self-sufficient nuclear family as the center of American identity and the source of American strength. But the idea of early American self-sufficiency is a myth. Caro Pirri tells the story of the precarious Jamestown settlement and how its residents depended on each other and on Indigenous Americans for survival. Early American history can help us imagine new kinds of interdependent and multi-generational family structures as an antidote to the modern crisis of loneliness and alienation.  Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Caro Pirri, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh Featured Scholars:  Jean Feerick, Professor of English, John Carroll University Steven Mentz, Professor of English, St. John’s University Special thanks: Molly Warsh For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Genealogy, in Charles Darwin’s terms, is the study of “descent with modification.” Taken as an analogy for the study of history, genealogy can guard against the potential dangers of claiming modernity. Against the effort to erase the past, genealogy asserts that our ancestry will always be with us. Against the effort to master the past, genealogy reminds us that our descendants have the freedom to create new futures. Sociologist Alondra Nelson tells the story of how African Americans have used DNA-informed genealogy to recover African identity despite slavery’s erasure of family history. Genealogical thinking can help us shape a disposition to the past that recognizes the legacy of injustice while also fostering human flourishing in the future. Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Ryan McDermott, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh; Senior Research Fellow, Beatrice Institute Featured Scholars:  Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study Caro Pirri, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard University Special thanks to: Eduard Fiedler, Christopher Firestone, Thomas A. Lewis, Thomalind Martin Polite, Sara Trevisan For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We often think of modernity as a distinct time period in history – one that is said to start at different places, but which always includes us. Yet people have been claiming to be modern since at least the third century BC. Harvard scholar Michael Puett takes us back to ancient China, when a series of emperors laid claim to modernity in order to consolidate their rule. Puett argues that modernity is best understood not as a period on a timeline but as a claim to freedom from the past. By recognizing how “modernity claims” try either to erase the past or to master it for our own uses, we can appreciate what is at stake in our own invocations of “modernity." Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Ryan McDermott, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh; Senior Research Fellow, Beatrice Institute Featured Scholar: Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard University Special thanks: Travis DeCook, Rokhaya Dieng, Gina Elia, Thomas A. Lewis  For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, visit https://genealogiesofmodernity.org/season-ii. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know many stories about how modernity came about. But what does it mean to be “modern”? This episode comes at the question through the test case of mountain climbing and rock climbing. Claims to becoming modern through climbing often point back to Italian humanist Francesco Petrarch’s ascent of Mt. Ventoux in 1336, a climb that made him, according to many historians, “the first modern man.” But Petrarch was by no means the first person to climb Mt Ventoux, and his own account is, if anything, counter-modern. By surveying evidence of much earlier climbing in Europe and pre-contact North America, the episode argues that humans have always been climbing mountains and scaling cliffs for a wide variety of reasons. Only recently did they start to think of these achievements as making themselves “modern.” It turns out that to claim to be modern is one of the most modern things you can do.  Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Ryan McDermott, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh Featured Scholars:  Shannon Arnold Boomgarden, Director of Range Creek Field Station, University of Utah Larry Coats, Career-line Associate Professor of Geography, University of Utah Peter Hansen, Professor of History, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Dawn Hollis, Independent Historian Special thanks to: Jake Grefenstette, John-Paul Heil, Jason König, Michael Krom, Michael Puett Media and scholarship referenced: Hansen, Peter. The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2013. Hollis, Dawn. “Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Genealogy of an Idea.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 26:4 (2019): 1038-61. For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, visit https://genealogiesofmodernity.org/season-ii. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the dawn of European exploration, the Renaissance polymath Francis Bacon dreamed of resurrecting the Garden of Eden. Driving this vision was a relentless quest to fully understand—and catalog—God's created order. Guests Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Ann Blair, Harvard University Rebecca Bushnell, University of Pennsylvania Staffan Müller-Wille, University of Cambridge James Rosindell, Imperial College London Amy Tigner, University of Texas at Arlington Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Absorbing the full reality of climate change will require more than a scientific approach. Some American Jews are showing how religious ritual can help us metabolize catastrophic grief while also pointing towards a future rebirth. Guests: -Jennie Rosenn, Founder & CEO of Dayenu -Andrue Kahn, Central Synagogue -Malkah Binah Klein, Community leader This episode was produced by Liya Rechtman. Zachary Davis is the host of Ministry of Ideas and Writ Large and the Editor-in-Chief of Wayfare Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The story of Galileo has long been cited as evidence the Catholic Church is inherently opposed to scientific research. But in fact, astronomy has been built into the history of the Catholic Church – sometimes built literally into the churches themselves.  Guests Guy Consolmagno, Director of the Vatican Observatory Ann Blair, Harvard Professor of History John Heilbron, Historian of Science Emeritus, University of Berkeley Stephen Barr, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Delaware Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scientific origin stories promise to tell us who we really are. But that deepest question of human existence can never fully be answered by science.  Guests Erika Milam, Princeton University Cecilia Heyes, Oxford University This episode was produced by Simon Brown and Maria Devlin McNair. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices