Dear Teachers,
Welcome to the Genealogies of Modernity project! This podcast offers advanced high school and college-level students valuable insights into important stories in history that shaped the modern world. It also prompts students to consider how we think about history and our relationship to the past, and why those ways of thinking about the past matter in the present.
While each episode can stand alone, the first three episodes of Season 2 lay the groundwork for understanding the methods of thinking about the past that inform the rest of the series. (Season 1 was produced for graduate students and professors; we don’t recommend starting there.) We recommend listening to and discussing these three episodes in succession. Then, tune in to the remaining episodes as they correspond to the historical period you are studying. See below for summaries of each episode.
The Teaching Aids for each episode include:
Pre-Listening Journal/Discussion Questions: These questions are aimed at piquing students’ curiosity and prior knowledge and preparing them to connect with the ideas they will be hearing.
Listening Guide: These comprehension questions are meant to aid students’ understanding of the stories and arguments presented in each episode as they listen. These questions correspond to time-marked transcripts of each episode, which are available on the podcast website, and which can be a useful tool for teachers wanting to return to or quote specific sections of the audio in class.
Post-Listening Journal/Discussion Questions: These open-ended questions prompt students to agree or disagree with the thoughts presented in the podcast and to extend their understanding into other facets of their study of history and their own lives..
Links for Further Exploration: There are links to a curated selection of primary texts, images, and other resources for further research and exploration.
Key Terms
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A mode of thinking that sees the present (modernity) as a complete rupture from the past. In this mode of thinking, the past becomes obsolete, either because the present is so completely different that we can afford to erase the past, or because the present completely encompasses and subsumes everything from the past.
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A mode of thinking that sees the present in relationship to the past, much like the relationships in a family genealogy, but focuses primarily on how people have fabricated their histories in order to cover up abuses of power and to pretend to have noble origins.
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A mode of thinking that sees the present in a complex relationship with a plurality of stories from the past, and that holds enough distance from and perspective on the past to be open to gleaning new understandings of our present life from those stories. Creative genealogy is on the lookout for resources in the past that can bring about new beginnings, repair injustices, and reconcile conflicts. It recognizes that the past can be a resource even if we disagree with beliefs and systems that shaped our ancestors.
Mature Content Advisory
This podcast was produced for an adult audience. Some episodes contain potentially disturbing texts, including readings from primary sources that detail explicit accounts of survival-cannibalism, violence against Indigenous peoples, and derogatory racial terms, among other mature content. We recommend that teachers pre-listen to each episode and pre-read the discussion questions in order to determine if they are suitable for their students and in order to prepare for rich and nuanced discussions of the ideas they explore.
Episode Summaries
Episode 1: Climbing the Mountains of Modernity
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.
Episode 2: What is Modernity?
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."
Episode 3: What is Genealogy?
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.
Episode 4: Jamestown and the Myth of the Sovereign Family
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.
Episode 5: Picturing Race in Colonial Mexico
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.
Episode 6: A Medieval Anti-Racist
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 Adorno, David Orique, and 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.
Episode 7: A Genealogy of Gun Violence
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.
Episode 8: The Enemy of Morality is Not Modernity, It’s Me
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.
