Latest / Comps List Radio / Episode 18: Special Guest Walter Russell Mead, Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno," 1855

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Episode 18: Special Guest Walter Russell Mead, Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno," 1855 · Comps List Radio

• Robert Ferguson: From H-Pol World Headquarters and the World Wide Web, this is Comps List Radio with Robert Ferguson and Marie Todden. And this is a very, very special episode. We are joined by two wonderful guests, Rebecca Leffler, who works with us at H-Pole, who listeners will have encountered and viewers will have will have seen on a couple of previous episodes, and Professor Walter Russell Meade, who I will allow Marie to give a Full introduction to in a moment. But this is this is really a great episode. And it steps outside a little bit of what we've done kind of up until this point of sort of strict historiography. And Marie and I have been looking for a different way to go with an episode. So this turned out to be just a wonderful opportunity. typically the way that we do this is that Marie gives us an introduction to the author of the work, but I'm gonna ask Marie this week to give us an introduction to our to to our very important guest and and maybe introduce the work a little bit that we're discussing because I I'm pretty sure a lot of our readers or our listeners won't be familiar with it. So Marie. Yes. So as Rom said we're doing something a little different today. We've got a wonderful guest on. So our guest is Professor Walter Russell Meade. He is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft at the University of Florida's Hamilton School. The Raven L. B. Curry, the third Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at the Hudson Institute, and the Global View Columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He is also the former Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. His 2001 book, Special Providence, won the Lionel Gelber Award for the Best Book in English on International Relations. And in 2012, the Foreign Policy Research Institute gave him its Benjamin Franklin Prize. He followed it with God and Gold, a study of four centuries of conflict between the English speaking powers and their rivals, and most recently The Ark of a Covenant, a history of the US Israel relationship. Professor Mead is a South Carolina native and a graduate of Groton and Yale, where he won prizes for history, debate, and his tradition of New his translation of New Testament Greek. He wrote on everything from international affairs to religion, culture, and the media. Very impressive. And we are It is so great to have you on today. And before we get started with the discussion of the book, I do want to introduce the book briefly since as Rob said our listeners are probably not quite as familiar with this work. So today we're going to be talking about Herman Melville's Benito Sereno. It was published in 1855. It ran anonymously in three installments in a magazine called Putman's Monthly. It's the story is set in 1799 off the coast of Chile, and it follows Amasa Delano, who is this good-natured American sea captain from Massachusetts. Delano spots a battered Spanish ship drifting toward a remote island and he rows over to help. The ship is called the San Dominique, and its captain, Don Benito Mussolini, explains that it is carrying Well that was quite the slip, wasn't it? my, what a slip. We could dive into that if we had time. We will not have time to dive into that today. Benito Sereno. And he explains, the captain explains, Captain Sereno explains that he is the ship is carrying enslaved Africans and it's endured this series of terrible natural misfortunes. Sereno's pale, he's nervous, he can't quite seem to give an order. He's never out of earshot of his seemingly devoted servant, a small black man named Babo. Now, unbeknownst to Captain Delano, the ship was not it had not endured a series of spoiler alert here. Yeah, just a few, just a few, and I'll let you spoil the rest of it. so no misfortunes, although he doesn't know, but Babo had orchestrated a slave revolt. On the ship. He had killed most of the officers and Spanish passengers. And he has Sereno as his captive. So Melville really puts us in the mind of Captain Delano as he tries to make sense of these confusing scenes and he that he's been witnessing on board. And it shows how his preconceived notions are a major barrier to him being able to comprehend his predicament. And that's all I'll tell you about the book before we get in with Professor Me here. So Professor Meade, I'm wondering when you first came across the book and why you think it is so important for us to talk about today. Well, I I read this book for the first time as a undergrad in a in a seminar on in American studies. and it was it it really struck me at the time, and I have kept coming back to it over the years. I've taught it. Actually, when I teach classes on American foreign policy, this is often the first book that I assign. because I think there's really no better short, and it's you know, at 110 pages, it's it's short certainly short by Herman Melville standards. a short introduction really to a kind of core core vision of Americans. It's encountering the world. One of the things that makes it even a little spicier than that is it's actually based on an actual event that occurred. So it's a sort of fictionalization of a of an actual event. And the Amasa Delano captain in the ship is actually a collateral ancestor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Amasa Delano's in real life, his brother is. was the guy who made the the the Delano family fortune, which was a big part of Roosevelt's life and was very successful in the China trade, may I say, often involving opium, in ways that Franklin Roosevelt in as president would later say, hey, I understand a lot about China. My family was in the China trade, you know. So it's it's this amazing example of a fiction original account that sort of has has interesting entanglements with American history then and now. And I think one thing that struck me reading it is it's really a novella about reading and misreading. So Captain Delano is described as singularly undistrustful. He has a very good nature. And when he boards the ship, there are a series of instances where his curiosity is piqued that something is awry. But almost as instantly as he recognizes that something is amiss, he overrides that observation. his thoughts are described as having a kind of tranquilizing effect on him, right? I'm wondering, what do you make of Captain Delano's lack of willingness to see things as what they are, right? So it's not that he's not observant. It's that he almost immediately refuses to entertain these observations that he makes. I think A lot is going on in this, but it it certainly shows the kind of power of a certain American mindset that Americans will look at Iraq in 2003 and think, this is a country ready for democracy. or they might look at Russia today and say, here's a here's a partner. there is a kind of an optimism in the American spirit. grounded I think on on basically the, you know, very favorable historical circumstances that that we've enjoyed as a country and and on sort of, you know, living an American life in general, you do better being optimistic and looking for win win solutions. That's not always the way the world works. And frankly, it's not always the way America works, but people have a hard time seeing it. I you know, in as a novel or novella The interesting thing to me is that most novels are about the arc of a character. You know, someone, a young person matures, or two people either fall in love or fall out of love. You know, things happen and people change. The amazing thing about this novel is that nobody changes. That is, at the beginning of the novel, Captain Delano can do anything, but understands nothing. While Benito Sereno, the Spanish captain, understands everything and can do nothing. And at the end, each of them is simply more the way they were at the beginning. Delano sails away from Peru, enriched by the experience materially, but with no clue in his lovely head about what has actually happened, really, no understanding. And Benito Sereno is. Having reached a point of where he sort of understands the horrors of slavery as well as the horrors of his own predicament, dies. Perfect knowledge, you know, perfect inability. He he reaches that. So it's that the characters encounter each other, but aren't changed. Neither is changed by the encounter. It's really remarkable. Yeah. so let me just step back a little bit because it it's so interesting to approach you know, foreign relations, international relations, foreign policy through literature. and what are your what are your I mean, I I think it's a it's a remarkably interesting way to do it. How do your students, many of whom I assume are coming at it from an IR background or have been trained in very specific methodologies, how how do they how do they react to this? And how do they how do they approach it? Well, often with Puzzlement, but and some of them, you know, are sort of outraged by, you know, Melville's description, you know, when Melville is looking through Amasa Delano's eyes, we're getting the way an eighteenth century New England American would think of and speak about black people and slavery. So it's not it's not filtered or processed the way a lot of younger people kind of expect things to be. So there's a bit of a shock there. And I've I've found that, you know, when you talk people through it and you help them understand that this is actually a an amazingly anti-slavery tract that is condemning ultimately the American Union for its toleration of slavery. And it's published in the in the years actually leading up to the Civil War. You know, the book itself is a primary historical document of a moment of time in American perception, and it's extremely revealing in that way. but there is this hurdle to overcome. What I often do to help them understand this is to run through the you know how. Amasadelano responds to this apparently derelict, troubled Spanish ship. You know, first you you look at the ship, it's in terrible shape. It's, you know, it's it's physically a mess, it's a drift. and the first thing he does is he sends humanitarian aid. He sends food and water. Okay, well now we'll we'll fix them by by meeting their needs. All right. Well that that doesn't work. You know, then they've got food to eat now, but the ship is still a mess. All right. Well, now we're going to send technical assistance. And he sends you know, canvas and rope and really skilled sailors who can teach the the poor people on this ship how to have a proper ship with proper gear and sailing equipment and even a pilot to help them right navigate. and then when that doesn't work, when all else fails, regime change. So what you actually see him doing is moving through a pattern of American encounter with foreign cultures that repeats over and over again in in our actual history as well as in the plot of this novel. Yeah, I mean I I think that that that that's an amazing way of putting it. I didn't think of it quite in those like iterative terms like that. But yeah, that's remarkable. Right. And so what it what it illustrates is the American mindset which repeats these patterns that people don't know consciously they're repeating. So you have all kinds of examples in American history of against political leaders. Who have not studied the history of American foreign policy. And yet, as circumstances occur and they and then they and they meet up with certain policy problems, they respond out of these cultural patterns in ways that very, very often reproduce what their predecessors have done. And that, for example, in, you know, that was. The perception that really started me writing that book God and Gold, which is a whole book about the kind of the American, Anglo-American encounter with the world, when I when I looked at Ronald Reagan's evil empire speech about the Soviet Union as an evil empire, and I would, and I happened to be reading some Oliver Cromwell speeches at the same time. And in a speech he gave to Parliament, I think in 1656. He talks about Spain as an evil empire, and his description of Spain and why England had to fight a war with Spain absolutely checked in at all kinds of levels with Ronald Reagan's description of the Soviet Union. Now Reagan was not, he was Ronald Reagan was many things, but a student of the speeches of Oliver Cromwell, he most certainly was not. And so, you know, it's an example of the kind of independent repetition of a pattern of which the the the person who's doing it is is not necessarily aware. Then when I turned around and looked at okay, well, what were the Spanish saying about Cromwell and what were the Soviets and other opponents of Reagan saying about Reagan? Actually, you find the same kinds of patterns, the same things that this that the Spanish were saying about Cromwell. He's a hypocrite. he's guilty of all the same crimes, his allies are just as bad as ours, etc. you know, the the English are inhuman plot of global domination, their relentless greed. I mean, you could take it from, you know, an Iranian or a Hamas press kit about the United States today, these patterns, the patterns of discourse, patterns of perception of the other go through hundreds of years. And while that, you know, you you can overdo those kinds of similarities, it's nevertheless, I think, an interesting set it's it's a pattern that you ought to pay attention to. Very interesting. Marie and Rebecca, I'm gonna let you jump in here in in a minute, but I I just have a quick, you know, you you mentioned how, you know, policymakers don't really have much of a American policymakers, oftentimes very powerful ones, don't have really a sense of American foreign policy history going too far back. I I remember I I can't remember which of your books you mentioned it, but it was a criticism of American foreign policy thinkers for not thinking there was an American foreign policy before nineteen forty-five. And I and I'm struck by that comment in light of what you just said, you know, that there's so many that there's this cycle of of repetition that is endemic in American encounters with the world that certainly predates Ronald Reagan and it certainly even and predates nineteen forty five. Yeah. I mean in in many ways, I think you can say that American foreign policy You know, the arguments we're having today are very similar to the arguments in George Washington's cabinet. you know, so should we align with fr revolutionary France in a crusade for democracy around the world? Should we build a commercial empire, you know, in connection sort of with Great Britain, ultimately supplanting Great Britain as the as the master of a of a global commercial liberal empire? Should we you know forget about outsiders unless they attack us and then like crush them, you know, which you often saw in terms of our approach to the Native American populations. you know, so all of these different ideas are not new in American politics. And they're not really taught systematically. In other words, you don't, you know, when you study American history, you study abstract IR or American foreign policy, you very often s study it through the abstract lens of IR. Right. And this, I think, is actually not a very good way to do it, personally speaking. I, you know, I certainly don't deny that there's some interesting things that people find in that discipline, and I'm not you know, attacking anybody's intellectual respectability or anything like that. I just think that well, if you're trying to deal with someone like a Vladimir Putin, probably the worst possible preparation to do that is to spend most of the first thirty years of y of your life in American higher education and and conventional education systems studying theory. You would be much better off if you'd run away from home at 16, jumped on a tramp steamship, and ended up playing poker with a one-eyed pimp in Rotterdam. You would actually be much better prepared to deal with a lot of the realities that are out there in the world. Fiction and literature is one of the ways that young minds can be prepared. For the variety of human experience, for the reality of cultural difference, and for the impact of history on the present. And I think, you know, if if you cannot, it seems to me there's there you cannot argue that as we've had more people with PhDs and IR involved in American foreign policy, the results of American foreign policy have demonstrably improved. There is, if anything, a negative correlation between professional preparation and results. So we ought to be thinking about this as a country in a time of great difficulty. And so so history, which and and history through the minds of great historians who you know, a guy like Thomas. Carlisle with the French Revolution is writing about history using the techniques of epic poetry. And he's quite explicit about that. And you can follow that thread through the book, The French Revolution. Moby Dick actually took car he borrows a lot of Carlisle's prose style in Herman Melville in Moby Dick, but all and and the notion of Telling the human story through events on this ship provides a very powerful lens. So I'm not saying that students should not be exposed to various forms of IR theory. Why not? But that a deep classical humanities education is fundamentally necessary to produce the kinds of to to nurture, I won't say produce. But to nurture the kinds of minds and perception that can give people the wisdom and the insight needed to to steer a country like the United States through times like the present. Going back to what you were talking about regarding perception, if you know this novel is about reading and misreading and kind of commitment to a view of human nature, Babo is very strategic and he's very strategic and cunning in the way which he chooses to present himself, taking advantage of the view that he would be presented as a slave. And so I'm wondering if you think looking at Babo's character as it kind of thrusts the progress of the novella, if this is a commentary on the strategic use of being overlooked, that if you're overlooked, you can actually get quite close to power without it really arousing any kind of suspicion. Well, you know, I think that only works when you're dealing with somebody as stupid as a masa Delano. you know, I think you you've got there is certainly Melville's understanding of the intelligent underling who has their own purposes that are not those of the master or the ruler and is therefore, you know, able to exploit the blindness of the other. to get somewhere. But we we should remember Babo dies, his revolution fails, which again is, you know, an interesting thought for for for the contemporary world. the you know for all of Amasa's blindness, which is caused by his culture, that culture has him You know, in this remote part off the south coast of Chile, which was about as remote as a place could be at that time, in a well well-managed ship, well provisioned, everything is great. He can, you know, it works much better than than the other ships that are down there. And his crew does what it's told, you know, and has a kind of unity of purpose that obviously they don't have on the Spanish boat. And in the end, he prevails over those who seek to kind of exploit his weakness. so that there there are lots of twists and turns there. but I think you know Babo ends up successful. He Babbo is successful in a sense in his communication, so to speak, with Benito Serena. Because he has gone from the apparently loyal servant to the tyrannical master of Benito Sereno. But at the end, what we understand that Benito Sereno's kind of final revelation is, is that there was no moral difference, or at least a very difficult to discern and think about moral difference between the ru the the Spanish imposing an unjust rule. on the enslaved Africans on the ship, and then the enslaved African murderous mutiny and hostage taking, that there's a tremendous moral ambiguity question mark over everything having to do with history there. And so Babo's and and it's the Melville suggests that it's the understanding of this that sort of sends Benito Sereno into his final decline. So in that sense the the rivalry between Benito between Benito Sereno and Babo, which is ostensibly settled in Benito Sereno's favor by Delano's intervention, actually, despite that intervention, results well in both Babo and Benito Sereno die. So it's a you know, it's it's a little bit like Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, another novel of roughly this era, in the same, you know, there's there's a profound moral ambiguity at the heart of a novel in which everyone thinks that morality is quite simple and straightforward. It's very interesting, again, I think, in terms of just American general literary history, but also as as encouraging us to think more deeply about the sheer human complexity of the world in which we live and act. Yeah, I mean I I think you the again it it's got me thinking about this notion that Sereno and Babo and the the the the enslaved the the the the slaves on the ship, the Spanish officers, you know, the the death toll is large on both sides. Right. It's a catastrophe, however you you want to to frame it. made up of this very complex moral structural political situation, social situation. And the American intervenes, the the naive American intervenes, apparently resolves it, right, and sails away enriched, learning nothing. Yeah. Ready to rinse and repeat. Yes, exactly. Exactly. It's you know, it's I think it's very, very useful for young people getting interested in American foreign policy to have this profoundly skeptical and yet sort of not deconstructive vision of the American role in the world. Yeah. And of course, Delano arrives, you know, and he thinks he's the greatest commander ever because everybody listens to him. His ships orderly, and I'm sure he's a good commander. There's no he's probably a very good captain. But again, with an overinflated sense of his own capacity as an officer, who then he looks at the Spanish, who he doesn't realize are being held captive. And it it's just sort of easy for him to assume, well, you know, they've got a different command structure. They're probably not as good as us. And again, this inflated sense of his own. abilities based on the fact that he's coming out of the of the culture in Massachusetts at the time, or a a commercial culture that even though it's spreading around, you know, the seas and in various ports, that is relatively orderly, that is relatively you know, well structured. He's Jack of the Beach from Ducksbury, Massachusetts. He's not gonna be murdered by some piratical Spaniard at the far ends of the earth. It can't happen. Providence is better than that. And of course it doesn't happen. And it's certainly more due to Providence than to any intelligent action on Delena's part. I mean, it really is, you know, Melville at his best has this capability of making all sides of a question alive and in your mind. And that alone make you know, I think trains you To be a better observer of human nature. I forget who it was who said that the most the greatest test of intelligence is the ability to have two different, completely different ideas to hold them in your mind at the same time and kind of look at them in the round. And, you know, again, in the world of foreign policy, if you're thinking, you know, what should American policy toward Iran or Ukraine or international development and sub-Saharan Africa or whatever, if you can't entertain these levels of complexity, you you can't achieve a real understanding, a useful understanding of what's going what's happening in front of you. Now hopefully, you know, Providence will intervene yet again. But you know, as Bismarck said, as as I used for special providence, God has a special providence for drunks fools in the United States of America. And clearly that's at work on with Benito Sereno here. Right. Rebecca, s Steve, you have a question. Yeah. I wondered if you had any thought on why the novella is called Benito Sereno, right? So the main character is obviously Captain Delano. It could have been called the name of the ship, San Dominic. So I'm wondering if the title itself kind of orients us to how we should think about the novella and think about obviously Benito Serena's end, right? Dies, I think days, weeks after Babo's death. so I wonder if you have thoughts on that. I have never really thought of the title as being important here. you know, Moby Dick is the object of the chase, but really, you know, the the main character is Ishmael, the the narrator, or arguably Captain Ahab. You know, I think Melville at this time was still a best selling author. And so his his titles had a commercial thing. And Benito Sereno is exotic. You know, we're gonna read about foreign affairs and and a lot of early American writers wrote a lot about exotic places. Melville's novels of his life on the South Pacific, but even somebody like Washington Irving, you know, who's he wrote about the conquest of Grenada, his Spanish stuff, the the the exotic. Hawthorne sets a lot of its things in Italy. Because most Americans at the time didn't have the opportunity to travel internationally and didn't have movies and so on. So the the novel is their window into the world. And I would guess that evoking some kind of of exoticism had something to do with it here. But you know, that that's the kind of question un unless we get a chance to ask Melville ourselves at some point, it'd be hard to get an answer to. Well, the next episode will be a seance. So we'll we'll try that. I mean, Marie and I did say we wouldn't do another one after what happened last time, but Halloween. Halloween is c so we we we we might have to do that. Professor Mead, I was just hoping to ask or or here one question I was thinking. You mentioned that Babo's revolution fails. in the book and it does fail. However, he leaps on board the whaling boat, knowing what's going to happen to him if he leaps on board the whaling boat. He willingly accepts his fate. And it makes me think w when we're thinking in these terms, yes, from an American perspective, his revolution failed. But the the revolutionaries managed to do a whole lot of damage to their oppressors before it did. It kind of makes me think like we we don't always know what the objectives of the other are in American foreign policy. And sometimes it's not always victory in ways that we would understand it. It might just be revenge. Well, I think, you know, if you take victory off the table, what's left is revenge. And I d I do think in general Americans come out of a cultural experience where, you know, if victory's not possible, you look for the best settlement you can get. A great example in our domestic history is the is the Confederate Armies surrendering rather than going into a long term guerrilla war at the end of of the Civil War. As I'm not sure, you know, what would have happened then, but it wouldn't have been Wouldn't have been good for anybody. and you know, and and that's what they did. you know, obviously in other cases you have, well, you know, I think the the Iranians and at least the Hamas wing of the Palestinian national movement, you know, if we if we can't be happy, nobody will. there's definitely that idea. Now behind that is the idea of ultimate victory. If we resist long enough, we will win. God will bring about the victory and so on and so forth. But that doesn't mean that you're that you're looking for a sort of temporary accommodation or something. and there's a glory to victory and and to revenge. and I think we should Another song that I sometimes play for my students is the the I'm a good old rebel song of a of a southern soldier after the Civil War who, you know, says, I can't take up my musket and fight now no more, but I ain't gonna love and that is certain sure. I'm glad I fought again I only wish we'd won, and I ain't asked no pardon for anything I done. And there is that You know, you you've lost the war, but you're that doesn't mean that you accept the justice of the victor, and it doesn't mean that if you had a chance, you might try to reverse the the verdict. So Babo I think Baba would have s would have felt that at least he died a free man, and he died in the moment of fighting for freedom. Which is better than life as a slave. That's still defeat because what you want is liberty. But if you can't get liberty, you can you can be yourself, you can fight for yourself right up through and live until they're gonna get they offer you death or slavery. You choose death as the last act of a free person. So I have a background in American history, and this has all been very fascinating. And reading this literature has really complicated the narrative that I saw. leading up to the civil war because as I'm looking at this, I'm looking, okay, this is 1855. The story here, he's obviously commenting on what he's seeing, you know, slavery tearing apart the country. And I think that part is evident. I think that the he he makes this so complicated because like you said earlier, there's not necessarily a good guy and a bad guy. There's an extremely naive, capable captain and there's an enslaver who has his ship has been taken over by the enslaved, but his But the the men like Bobbo who have taken over the ship aren't seen as a morally just in what they're doing. And the way that Bobo dies, I think you're I think you explaining here that, you know, he dies a free man and that's what matters. It makes me wonder what Melville is saying about can he see this conflict coming the way that some can at by 1855? Does he complicate the narrative here by saying neither no one can win in this fight? I think it's a I think it's actually a radical anti-slavery tract in that, you know, Amasa Delano is representing, you know, the society that Amasa Delano represents is as much a slave ship as the Spanish ship. And that the moral difference that Delano is constantly congratulating himself on between him and the Spaniard is is less a i is is less clear than he would like it to be. And I think this is a message, you know, this is partly North looking at the South and thinking of itself as very moral and so on. and it's definitely a critique of p you know, it It's a critique of the idea that that a an order that includes slavery is or can be just or decent, and or that the restoration of it would be a good act without overlooking the idea that if there had been, say, a Haitian style slave revolt in the American South, that might have not brought brought much joy to anybody either. So but but I think his, you know. his view, and you can see this also in Moby Dick, Melville is less let's say Melville Melville's view of the world is less impacted by racial stereotypes and prejudices than of almost any other American, certainly white American of his era. And I I think in his life, I do think it's his experience on the multiracial Sa whale ships in the South Seas that kind of brought him to a realization. We see this happening as the character Ishmael bonds with Kuiqueg, where savagery disappears is a meaningful concept in in Melville's mind. And and so when he s looks at the phenomenon of the slavery. Whether it's in the American South or on the Dominic the San Dominic Dominic ship, he sees it with absolutely clear eyes. and this I think to you know, this is one of the reasons I think it's just such an enduring book and sort of a shocking book to see something that is 175 years in the past that is so contemporary in some ways in its in its vision. I mean, he's a Melville is a genuinely shocking man in his way. So Primarily, well, we we we've spent some time talking about literature as a window into you know American foreign relations and the history of American foreign relations to to an extent, but also as a as a balance to maybe some of the more prevalent IR frameworks that scholars that foreign policy scholars will encounter or will have studied. I think our our audience is probably primarily historians. And I think historians would generally, I think, you know, agree with your statement about IR frameworks. But I was wondering if we could take a moment to speak about how historians view the world and what they could learn from literature and maybe what they could and and their approach. Yeah. Well, I mean, in some ways, I think if there's a kind of a a spectrum, and at one pole you have political scientists who think that they are discovering universal laws of human nature applicable in any situation. And then at the other, you have historians who insist that every situation is so unique and so different that history doesn't teach you anything, because any attempt to sort of colonize the past by turning it into a useful lesson of the present is a betrayal of the essence of the historical enterprise. And you know, I kind of sit in the in the muddy middle there of thinking, okay, actually, you know, political the the the mental operations of political science can devise kind of rules of thumb that can be useful, but but the moment you trust them too much, they will turn around and bite you. At the same time I think that yes, it's absolutely true that the the more deeply you explore a particular historical event or period, the more you're impressed by its uniqueness. Nevertheless, human nature, and now I'm boy, I'm really going back to sort of Greco-Roman historiography here. Human nature does have some continuities and a study of history. can illuminate the things about people in in all kinds of interesting ways. So I think you need a bit of both. I I think you need to season it. And overall I would say that contemporary intellectual or academic culture, and there's a big difference of course between intellectual culture and academic culture, something that many acad that more intellectuals than academics recognize. is grounded in specialization, which is a useful and necessary part of analysis, but can be an obstacle to synthesis. And frankly, when you turn from academic study to acting in the world, one has to make a shift from analysis to synthesis at some point. And you have to start ruthlessly violating norms of of sort of you know careful scholarly academic you know tithing of of Dill and Mint and cumin in order to deal with the weightier matters of the law. And so you know that so I kind of find myself, I mean, you know, as maybe I should have reminded our our audience at the beginning of this, I'm a total quack. The only academic qualification I have is an undergraduate degree in English literature. So feel perfectly safe ignoring everything I say. and I, you know, so there's that disclaimer. But I actually have found that that not having been trained in these disciplines and yet having a respect for the intellectual quality that many people bring to their study, not all, but many bring to their study, has has been a kind of a sweet spot intellectually for me. And so I don't perceive great bound the same, I don't perceive boundaries between the matters studied by different disciplines in quite the same way that people do who are sort of immersed in the culture of the academy. And is you know, again, in in in the real world, so to speak, you find people who are Middle East specialists, but the Middle East doesn't formally include Pakistan. So there's a tendency not to pay a lot of t attention to Pakistan, which is a big mistake if you actually well, you know, that that the actual world does not Really conform to the boundaries but that our disciplines would put on the world. And again, that to me is a very important reason why students should be reading things like literature, which absolutely cross these boundaries. And not even that they cross these boundaries, these boundaries don't exist for them. You know, perhaps Maybe you shouldn't be allowed to take a PhD in the humanities unless you've really read Middlemarch and digested poor Mr. Kasaban with his grand theory of everything and and all the problems with it. But in any case, I think that that I really do want to advocate for literature and history. But even history as literature as much as history as a specific discipline. I wrote a piece in a in some collected volume not long ago saying that if you if you look at the classical studies movement in America, there's some really great things about it, but they tend to overvalue philosophy as the, you know, the like if we're gonna have the classics, we're gonna study Plato. you know, Thucydides, Polybius. For one thing, they they had actually more in Polybius probably had more real impact on the way people were thinking about politics and constitutionalism than many of the philosophers, but also that the way that the ancient Greeks develop a way of writing about history, of organizing information into narratives, of processes of verification. Of things that no historian would do today, but which were actually quite important, of having characters give speeches based on what someone with that character would say in a given set of circumstances as a way of interpreting rather than reproducing events. these were tremendous intellectual achievements, in a sense comparable to say what the discovery of perspective does in the arts. And we have not really, I think, our the historical culture hasn't sort of taken as good a look at this as an as an intellectual achievement of the human mind that is the foundation of the way we think and a and interpret events still today. it is very interesting. And again, Greek history is as good as Greek sculpture, Greek philosophy, Greek math. It's amazing. And we so the from the ancient, ancient literature, and again, they would see even a a a certainly a Herodotus, but even a Thucydides would see more commonality between what they were doing and say Homer. Than a contemporary American historian would likely see between history and literature of the time. And while there's a lot to be said for the kind of essentially Prussian model of historical inquiry coming down out of the nineteenth century, there's a lot that has been gained by it, and and I think more every day, we still do need the Greeks. Well, you know, one of the things that, you know, this podcast, we've been encountering some of the great works of American historiography, most of which predate nineteen seventy. Not all of them, but most of them that we've discussed do. And I think, Marie, one of the things that struck us is we've read all of these kind of in in a relatively short period of time, is how much they admit that they're influenced by the Greeks. Right. And how frequently they're making classical allusions. And that they did perceive what they were doing as a literary enterprise, whether it's C Van Woodward, whether it's Louis Hart, whether it's J John Hope Franklin, even Douglas Adair, all of these people, Carolyn Robbins, people that we've read, all of these historians viewed their work as a s in connection with classical history. Yep. And they viewed modern. methods of verification and research as enhancing their ability to do what the Greeks were trying to do rather than channeling them into a different enterprise. Mm-hmm. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it's it it it is interesting the you know, I I there were things that I expected to uncover as we began this project, Professor Mead. I don't think it was that. When we started doing reading the all all all of the you know the these great older books. And but w I I know I'm better for it, Marie. And I think I hope my work is better for it. Absolutely. Absolutely. I agree completely. And I think you've converted Professor Mead, at least one historian today, that literature is absolutely necessary when studying American history. No other reason than these are original documents. They are original source documents. Windows into how people saw and thought at a particular moment in time. Exactly. And it's just eighteen fifties. It's just that moment. You have to go back and wonder. And it it really did complicate that for me. And so I do plan, but if not, you know, to read the entire novella, definitely parts of it in my survey, in my United States survey classes, because it does help to complicate this narrative. And I just think I mean, reading this and knowing that and and knowing how I'm gonna share this with my students, it's been a pleasure. I am so glad that you you convinced us to or you offered to do this podcast for us because it's been an absolute pleasure. And I envy your students. It's been fascinating to sit here and listen to you. I envy your students who get to do that. Well, I have to say next semester Rebecca and I are gonna be teaching together. So I think it's gonna be really I'm gonna be an adventure. Yes, yeah. Yeah, definitely. I'm looking forward to hearing about it, Rebecca. Yeah. Professor Mead, before you go, have you got one last book recommendation for people? gosh. Well, I mean, I I gave you two titles and you picked a shorter one. I I do think that Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution is one of the it may be the most underappreciated, truly great contribution to historical thinking. it is it was his attempt for with with about a 50 year gap to make sense of what at the time was the most colossal upheaval that civilization had ever experienced. And while, you know, there are problems with sources, you know Again, as to say, with Gibbons, somebody else would write that history differently. As a l today, as a literary monument and as an example of of a mind grappling with a phenomenon, it's remains important. But but also his portraits of people, of motivations, of the different elements in French society and how they're struggling to make sense of things. This sense of of a of an organized human society has sudden has lost faith in its own institutions and values. And yet it still needs to to be governed. It still needs to act. And you know how people are swirling and fighting for order, how different minds respond to it. it's it is an extraordinary story. Brilliantly written, brilliantly told. And I find it has probably shaped my thinking about a world which is in revolutionary times today, to an extent that not many other books have done. Excellent. Well, I I think coming out of the our next hiatus, maybe Marie, we'll we'll do that book. That sounds good. All right. Rebecca, Professor Mead. thank you very much for joining us. We really appreciate it. And to our listeners, thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.