Lapham’s Revolutionary America: Jill Lepore and Gordon S. Wood
The World in Time / Lapham’s QuarterlyShow Notes
“What’s extraordinary in those speeches that Lincoln gave on the eve of the war,” says Gordon S. Wood in this episode of The World in Time, “is his realization of how diverse America had become. We’ve got Frenchmen, we’ve got Spaniards, we’ve got Germans, we’ve got Irish, we’ve got all these different Scots, how are we going to hold together? We’re not a nation. Lincoln says, Well, we have an answer to that, and it’s that good old Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal.”
On June 7 of this year, news came that the American historian Gordon S. Wood had died at the age of 92. In commemoration of him, this episode presents in its entirety a conversation Wood recorded with Lewis H. Lapham in 2017 about Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time, draws from archival conversations that Lewis H. Lapham recorded with scholars and historians of the American Revolution, occasionally complementing those archival conversations with new ones. As introduction to the series, this episode begins with an excerpt from a 2018 conversation about These Truths, Jill Lepore’s single-volume history of the U.S. It concludes with an audio version of “‘As Though They Were Blood of the Blood’: Jefferson’s Declaration and the Problem of American Identity,” an essay adapted from the foreword Gordon S. Wood wrote to Ted Widmer’s new book, The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
More from The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly
“Friendship is an enormous part of my life, and it was an enormous part of Arendt’s life,” Roger Berkowitz says on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “She was said to have a genius for friendship by her friends. She was an exile, stateless for eighteen years, and she really did come to believe that friendship is what she called a ‘homeland.’ She didn’t think of herself as German, or Jewish, or American, or European. She said, ‘The only people I love are my friends.’ Friendship is hard, and she uses this beautiful metaphor. She says, ‘Friendship exists on the knife’s edge.’”
“Rabbi Luria’s Kabbalist creation story, however baroque, accounts boldly for both moral evil and natural calamity,” Annie Dillard wrote in her 1999 book, For the Time Being. “The creator meant his light to emanate, ultimately, to man. Grace would flow downward through ten holy vessels, like water cascading. Cataclysm—some say creation itself—disrupted this orderly progression. The holy light burst the vessels. The vessels splintered and scattered. Sparks of holiness fell to the depths, and the opaque shards of the broken vessels imprisoned them. This is our bleak world.”
As a companion to last week’s episode of The World in Time, we are sharing with listeners the first episode of Passages: On Morrison, a limited podcast series hosted by Namwali Serpell. The series takes the form of a traveling salon. In this first episode, Serpell and poet Tracy K. Smith read the opening of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison's debut novel, and discuss all that the passage emits and erases. They also explore how the cultural treatment of Morrison as a literary icon or monument has obscured a true appreciation of her literary form, an appreciation that comes from turning to the page. Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To make a tax-deductible gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. You can find information about the Quarterly’s ongoing revival here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
“The canon raised Toni Morrison,” says Namwali Serpell on this episode of The World in Time. “The canon is how she became who she is. Faulkner, Woolf, Shakespeare. She is much more interested in taking what’s there and reading it accurately, honestly. Let us be clear-minded and clear-sighted about what is there. But we don’t need to destroy it. And in fact, the Melville I read after reading Morrison’s analysis of the whiteness of the whale is a richer Melville.”
This bonus episode of The World in Time brings together a pair of conversations, one about the making of a movie, another about the making of an archive. Director John Kirby and producer Libby Handros talk to acting editor Donovan Hohn about their collaboration with Lewis Lapham on his 2005 "dramatic documentary musical," The American Ruling Class, now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Then writer and technologist Paul Ford, architect of the Harper's Magazine digital archive and co-founder of Aboard, a software consultancy, joins Hohn for a conversation about the new Lapham's Quarterly digital archive, whether technologists can move fast without breaking things, the gold rush origins of Silicon Valley, what Lewis Lapham would have made of our new Gilded Age, the magnificence of George Eliot's Middlemarch, and much else.