The disease cholera first arrived in North America in 1832, at the ports of Quebec and Montreal. From there it spread along the waterways of the continent, reaching great cities, small towns, and isolated farms. It killed more quickly than any disease Americans had yet endured, and it killed horrifically. Its victims vomited, suffered from explosive diarrhea and terrible spasms, turned blue, and finally entered the coma that preceded death. A healthy man at breakfast could be a corpse at midnight—or even sooner.

In this conversation, Paul Kelton explains how newspapers allowed Americans to watch the pandemic approaching; why medical authorities blamed alcohol, diet, poverty, race, and supposed moral failure; and how public-health measures intensified the danger for Irish immigrants, impoverished workers, incarcerated people, enslaved African Americans, and Indigenous peoples forced westward. Cholera’s movement through Jacksonian America initially followed its waterways. It then benefited from its systems of confinement, enslavement, human trafficking, and dispossession.

Paul Kelton is Professor and Robert David Lion Gardiner Chair in American History at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on Indigenous North America, early American history, and the relationship between colonialism, medicine, and epidemic disease. His latest book is Hidden Terrors: The Scourge of Cholera in Jackson’s America.

At his death on December 24, 1873, the Baltimore merchant Johns Hopkins left $7 million. which established both a hospital and the first American research university bearing his name. From its beginning Johns Hopkins pursued a distinctive and often eccentric course, moving from early dominance and innovation to decline and then renewal, all amidst recurring debates over what direction the university should take.

Those debates concerned questions that remain unsettled. Should a university emphasize advanced research or undergraduate education? Should research be pursued wherever an investigator’s curiosity leads, or directed toward practical ends? How much influence should donors, foundations, corporations, and governments possess? And what happens when an institution created to be different becomes the model everyone else follows?

In this conversation with Andrew Jewett, author of Johns Hopkins: The First 150 Years, we see that Hopkins’s history is more than its own. It is also the story of the creation of the American research university and its development into one of the most powerful—and increasingly uneasy—set of American institutions of the twenty-first century.

Since the invention of the printing press, printers have published books. And ever since books have been published, they have been sold. Yet today’s guest observes that, remarkably enough, there is a “paucity of literature on the history of the buying and selling of books.” While there have been plenty of studies of publishing and reading, “the commercial transactions that allowed books to pass from the producer to the reader are seldom explored.”

In his new book, The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century, my guest Andrew Pettegree attempts to remedy that deficiency. In his large net he captures such specimens as self-publishing, book pedlars, publishers’ representatives, printing on speculation, paperbacks, bookstore chains, and book clubs—nearly all of which turn out to be much older than one might expect. At the heart of his story is the intertwining of publishing and bookselling, which remained merged into the middle of the twentieth century and has, in many ways, become entangled once again in the era of digital books.

Andrew Pettegree is Bishop Wardlaw Professor at the University of St Andrews. Trained as a historian of the European Reformation, he is now one of the leading historians of communication, printing, publishing, and the book trade. As part of this study, he is the founder and director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue, a free resource that now describes more than 1.6 million editions published between 1450 and 1700, and has located almost seven million surviving copies in libraries, archives, and museums around the world.

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The story of the Emperor Charles the Great, or Charlemagne, and his wider family is often told as one of glorious triumph followed by unfortunate decline. Emerging in more or less the 750s in what is now France, the Carolingians were part of a religious, political, social, and cultural order that was still haunted by the passing of the Western Roman Empire three centuries before. While many Roman practices endured, as did trade in the Mediterranean basin, institutional life had deteriorated in nearly every respect.

Into this disorder came Charles, and following him an ever-growing host of clerics, bureaucrats, and soldiers, who reordered alphabets, liturgies, and borders, leaving behind a legacy that lasts until this very moment. But what if, my guest James Palmer suggests, there was always a dark side to this success that haunted all its protagonists? What if that process of ordering and tidying could often look—on not very close inspection—very disordered and messy itself? And how might we then think differently about the early Middle Ages?

James T. Palmer is Professor of History at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The author of four previous books on the early Middle Ages, his latest is Charlemagne’s Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Carolingian Empire, and it is the subject of our conversation today.

Published October 21, 2026 (Episode 480)

During the era of the American Revolution, food and drink had political meanings and could express what Americans thought their government should be. Protests over tea—and the brewing of tea alternatives—mammoth cheeses delivered to Thomas Jefferson and mammoth cakes baked for Election Day; from planting gardens to setting tables: all of these could be statements of political purpose. And these were activities and practices engaged in not only by white men with sufficient property to qualify them to vote, but by poor white men, women, enslaved people, and Native Americans. Through growing, preparing, serving, and eating food, they too could participate in nation-building.

In this conversation, Nancy Siegel explains how ordinary foods became instruments of protest, persuasion, satire, commemoration, and political participation—and why the history of democracy can be found in kitchens and gardens as well as legislatures and battlefields.

Nancy Siegel is Professor of Art History and Culinary History and Assistant Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication at Towson University. Her new book, Political Appetites: The Power of Food in Revolutionary America, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press on October 13, 2026. It inspired the WMHT Public Media documentary Feeding the American Revolution, hosted by Siegel and premiering December 8.

In September 1872, in the countryside north of Toronto, horses began to fall ill. Their noses ran, they coughed, and their breathing became “labored and severe.” In the worst cases, the sufferers could do nothing other than stand in their stalls “as if benumbed and paralyzed.” Eventually, an increasing number of them began to die.

Within days of the illness being identified, it was spreading throughout the new Canadian Confederation. By mid-October it had invaded New England and upstate New York; by late October it had nearly ended traffic on the Erie Canal. In early November it reached New York City and Boston. Eventually, it would spread through nearly every corner of North America and into parts of the Southern Hemisphere.

Thomas G. Andrews is professor of history and faculty director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research and teaching encompass environmental, animal, Indigenous, labor, and western American history.

He is the author of Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the George Perkins Marsh Prize, and Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies. His latest book reconstructs the extraordinary equine influenza outbreak of 1872–73 and uses it to reconsider capitalism, urbanization, animal labor, Reconstruction, and the Panic of 1873.

On December 16, 1944, as American troops retreated or fled before advancing German soldiers on the first day of what is now known as the Battle of the Bulge, Lieutenant Colonel Ray Love Trautman found himself leading an ad hoc formation of stragglers and stranded soldiers. This might not seem strange—that’s a lieutenant colonel’s job, isn’t it? But while Ray Trautman had the rank of a lieutenant colonel, his training was that of a librarian. He was, to be sure, the Army’s chief librarian, but that was hardly preparation for combat.

This is just one of the many amazing revelations in Molly Guptill Manning’s new book, A Librarian’s War: The Man Who Fought World War II with Books and Brought the Joy of Reading to Millions. She tells the story of how Trautman, having earned a degree in library science at Columbia, joined the Army, created the largest library system in the world, and championed the Armed Services Editions of books and magazines.

This is not simply a biography of Trautman. It is also a history of the Second World War as a war of ideas, of intellectual life under some of the most difficult imaginable circumstances, and—maybe—of the future of reading.

Molly Guptill Manning is a historian, curator, and professor of law at New York Law School. Her scholarship examines legal history and the intersection of law and culture, with particular interests in freedom of expression, censorship, voting rights, and access to books.

On July 18, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts—one of the first Black regiments in the Union Army, and the first raised in the North—led an assault on Fort Wagner, one of the fortifications defending Charleston, South Carolina.

Their attack was preceded by an eight-hour bombardment that did little damage to the fort’s walls or defenders. Moving through heavy Confederate small-arms fire, with their commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, at their head, the 54th made their way up the walls and into hand-to-hand combat, but were bloodily repulsed. By the end of the action, Shaw and some 250 men had been killed, wounded, or captured.

With his death, Robert Gould Shaw became a hero of the abolitionist movement, eventually memorialized in bronze at the head of his regiment on Boston Common. But as my guest Kevin Levin argues in his new book, A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, he was a much more complicated and ambiguous person than even his contemporaries claimed him to be.

Kevin M. Levin is an award-winning historian and educator based in Boston. His work explores the history and memory of the Civil War, particularly the ways Americans have remembered slavery, emancipation, Black military service, and the Confederacy. His books include Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder, and now A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. He has written about Civil War history and memory online since founding Civil War Memory in 2005 and is an honorary fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.