Kim Philby–Soviet spy within the British Secret Service– ended his life with medals from Franco, Stalin, and Churchill.
Which tells you something about the twentieth century.
https://t.co/2k2gNCMM4q
One of the most fascinating parts of this story is that many people in the 1930s knew perfectly well what Stalinism looked like.
Some simply chose to ignore it.
https://t.co/2k2gNCMM4q
Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt, and Cairncross weren't simply betraying Britain.
They were helping build a Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. They were some of the boots smashing human faces.
https://t.co/2k2gNCMeeS
The Cambridge Five–Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt, and Cairncross–are usually remembered as glamorous British traitors or symbols of class hypocrisy.
Antonia Senior asks a different question: What did Stalin want from them?
https://t.co/QkvUWOUVe5
History is not one thing but many things.
It is:
cities under siege,
political systems under pressure,
families under coercion,
and technologies changing how humans live together.
Recent episodes at https://t.co/QkvUWOUVe5
Recent episodes of Historically Thinking have ranged from:
• Athens and Sparta
to
• slavery in small Virginia households
to
• how guns reshaped early modern Europe
Different subjects but the same habit of mind.
Go to https://t.co/QkvUWOVt3D
One week:
☢️ nuclear deterrence
Next week:
🛡️ Byzantine walls collapsing under cannon fire
That’s the joy of historical conversation.
More at https://t.co/QkvUWOUVe5
Over the last few weeks on Historically Thinking:
• firearms and state formation
• slavery in intimate spaces
• Europe and historical perspective
• nuclear weapons and international systems
• the fall of Constantinople
History is unruly.
https://t.co/QkvUWOVt3D
The Greeks competed at everything.
Even civilization itself.
🎧 Listen now wherever you find your podcasts, and find out more at https://t.co/QkvUWOUVe5
Civil War history is not only battles and generals.
It is also confinement, deprivation, bureaucracy, and survival.
🎧 Listen to Episode 445 of Historically Thinking
https://t.co/ExFIdVJDPm
Prison camps in the American Civil War were not just humanitarian disasters.
They reshaped military policy, racial attitudes, and postwar memory.
https://t.co/ExFIdVJ5ZO
In WWII, an American soldier’s odds of capture were roughly 1 in 100.
In the Civil War, they were closer to 1 in 5.
Captivity was not exceptional—it was a defining experience.
https://t.co/ExFIdVJ5ZO
Why are Civil War prison camps so central to the war—and yet so marginal in how we tell its story?
A conversation on captivity, policy, and memory.
https://t.co/ExFIdVJ5ZO
Andersonville was not an anomaly. It was one of many.
In fact, the American Civil War normalized large-scale prisoner-of-war camps—an innovation that shaped every modern conflict since.
https://t.co/ExFIdVJDPm
During the Civil War, nearly 400,000 Union and Confederate soldiers became prisoners of war.
The odds of capture were roughly 1 in 5.
New episode: W. Fitzhugh Brundage on the rise of prison camps and the making of modern warfare.
https://t.co/ExFIdVJ5ZO
Why did one equation change engineering, physics, and navigation? @RArianrhod explains in her book "Vector: A Surprising Story of Space, Time, and Mathematical Transformation".
🎧 Listen to it at https://t.co/QkvUWOVt3D