Show notes and more at historian.live!
I recorded this way back in September when I had ambitious dreams of doing a whole series on the history of British social clubs, but I’ve been unfortunately wiped with work and with the emotional toll of American politics lately, so I was never able to get the series off the ground. But what we have is a fantastic conversation with my colleague, Seth Thévoz, talking about his research on clubs in 19th Century Britain. Seth is the author of a really wonderful book on how London gentlemen’s clubs had a massive impact on 19th century politicians and politics. At the height, probably over 19 out of every 20 Members of Parliament were a member of at least one club. We talk about Seth’s book and then talk about the differences we see between clubs in the 18th and the 19th century.
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Show notes and more at historian.live!
I recorded this way back in September when I had ambitious dreams of doing a whole series on the history of British social clubs, but I’ve been unfortunately wiped with work and with the emotional toll of American politics lately, so I was never able to get the series off the ground. But what we have is a fantastic conversation with my colleague, Seth Thévoz, talking about his research on clubs in 19th Century Britain. Seth is the author of a really wonderful book on how London gentlemen’s clubs had a massive impact on 19th century politicians and politics. At the height, probably over 19 out of every 20 Members of Parliament were a member of at least one club. We talk about Seth’s book and then talk about the differences we see between clubs in the 18th and the 19th century.
This week I talk with Susan Lanzoni who talks about her book tracing the history of empathy. Empathy has, over the past 100 years, changed a lot in meaning. It started out as one of these untranslatable weird German words that art historians would throw around to discuss the mystical depths of aesthetic experience: einfühlung. This was the ability to literally feel into a thing—usually an object—when you were moved by it. When you were aesthetically moved by a painting of a mountain, you imagined that there was a kind of embodied feeling in the mountain itself. This was translated to empathy—in-feeling. But the term migrated from being applied to things, slowly, to being applied to people. After the Second World War, big professional groups of psychologists and social scientists were struggling with the twin problems of a population brutalized by the Second World War, firebombing and the holocaust, and the prospect of nuclear armageddon. One of the solutions was this human capacity to literally feel for other people—empathy. And slowly this arcane technical word migrated into common usage. It’s a wild conversation that will make you pause every time you use the word in daily speech!
Making of a Historian
Show notes and more at historian.live!
I recorded this way back in September when I had ambitious dreams of doing a whole series on the history of British social clubs, but I’ve been unfortunately wiped with work and with the emotional toll of American politics lately, so I was never able to get the series off the ground. But what we have is a fantastic conversation with my colleague, Seth Thévoz, talking about his research on clubs in 19th Century Britain. Seth is the author of a really wonderful book on how London gentlemen’s clubs had a massive impact on 19th century politicians and politics. At the height, probably over 19 out of every 20 Members of Parliament were a member of at least one club. We talk about Seth’s book and then talk about the differences we see between clubs in the 18th and the 19th century.
