The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly

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.

Further Reading
Paul Ford. “What Is Code?”, Bloomberg Businessweek, June 11, 2015.
Paul Ford. “My Father’s Death in 7 Gigabytes,” Wired Magazine, June 15, 2023.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Before he was twenty, George Washington had bought and sold and parlayed himself into nearly three thousand acres of prime land,” William Hogeland writes in Autumn of the Black Snake: George Washington, Mad Anthony Wayne, and the Invasion That Opened the West. “If he could amass enough land this way, he might build plantations, grow tobacco, marry well, become a burgess, join the Ohio Company, maybe even buy an officer’s commission in the British army. … Prospects were lengthening, and the view lay westward.”

This third installment of Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time, brings together a pair of conversations about the westward and eastward beginnings of American empire. The episode begins with a conversation between Lewis Lapham and William Hogeland about the conquest of the Ohio River Valley. Then, Lapham sails the Atlantic with Eric Jay Dolin, author of Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution.

The ad-free, unabridged edition of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, concludes with a reading of “The Battle at Fort Necessity: The Battle at Fort Necessity: How a Young George Washington, Fortune-Seeking in the Ohio Country, Helped Start the Seven Years’ War,” an excerpt from Hogeland’s Autumn of the Black Snake, performed by the author.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“He’s an intuitive ethnographer,” Andrea Wulf says of George Forster, the subject of her new book, on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “As they travel across the South Pacific and stop at all these different islands, he records the islanders’ languages, he observes their customs, he describes their appearances, their jewelry, their tools, their houses, and brings back such detailed accounts that they, to this day, are regarded as the best accounts of Polynesian culture before and around first European contact. He doesn’t demonize, but he also doesn’t romanticize. He very clearly says: Good and evil is in all societies. We find all these different shades of human life and human experiences in all societies.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with returning guest Andrea Wulf, about The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, a narrative and intellectual biography of the German polymath George Forster—a botanist whose investigations of the breadfruit disclosed the history of Polynesian migrations; a prose stylist whose account of Cook’s second voyage helped invent the genre of travel writing; an intellectual pugilist who quarreled with Rousseau and Kant and influenced Coleridge and Von Humboldt; a revolutionary whom Friedrich Engels called “the German Thomas Paine.”

The ad-free, unabridged edition of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, includes an epilogue about Forster’s Parisian exile during the tumult of the French Revolution.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Two years ago today, Lewis Lapham’s voice joined all those other departed voices of the past. This summer we’ve been welcoming his voice back to the microphone of the present, and today, in commemoration of the anniversary of his death, we are sharing this bonus episode. In the first years of the new millennium, Lewis Lapham made a movie, a “dramatic documentary musical” called The American Ruling Class, released in 2005. On August 1, 2026, The American Ruling Class is coming to the Criterion Channel. Lewis wrote much of it, narrated much of it, and starred in much of it, playing himself, or a version of himself—a wise, mirthful, sardonic mentor in pinstripes guiding a pair of greenhorn youths who set out to uncover the secrets of the American ruling class. This episode collects audio excerpts from the film.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“America’s founding is not just your conventional heroic struggle for noble ideas and ideals,” says historian Holger Hoock on today’s episode of The World in Time. “It is also a profoundly violent civil war—America’s first civil war—and a civil war in the British Empire.”

This second, war-torn episode of Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time, collects historical dispatches from the battlefields, excerpting two conversations that Lewis Lapham recorded: one with Hoock about his 2017 book Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth, the other with Joseph J. Ellis, from 2022, about The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773–1783.

The ad-free, unabridged Substack edition of the episode concludes with an audio version of an essay adapted from Peter C. Mancall’s new book, Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000 to 1680, the most recent and chronologically earliest addition to The Oxford History of the United States, other volumes of which include Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty and Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands. Titled “The Mystic River Massacre,” Mancall’s essay takes readers and listeners into a violent colonial prologue to the country’s violent, revolutionary birth.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.