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Hello, gang, it's Claire. I'm here with a very exciting thing for you, which is a little taster episode of my friend Patrick's brand new show. You might know him better as Dr. Patrick Wyman, guest on our Alexander the Great episode and host of lots of very cool and famous history podcasts like Tides of History and Fall of Rome. He's just launched his new show, Past Lives, which is basically the opposite of tgs. Every week, this show focuses on the lived experiences of real people in the past, from the Stone Age to the near present.

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Peasants, laborers, artisans, merchants, soldiers, and the enslaved are too often overlooked in favor of kings, generals, and politicians. But not on Past Lives. Patrick focuses on what matters. The real people who populate our shared past. By understanding them, we can strive to better understand ourselves. These people were us, and we are them. They mattered, and so do you. Even better, I've recorded an episode of Past Lives with Patrick telling you all about a guy who did not suck and who I've mentioned a lot on the show, Walter Benjamin. Now sit back, relax, or whatever it is you do while listening to podcasts and enjoy the show.

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I'm Patrick Wyman. Welcome to Past Lives. If you lived a hundred years ago, who would you have been? What about a thousand years ago or 10,000? I can promise you this. You. Yes, you wouldn't have been someone you've ever heard of before. The stories we tell about the past tend to revolve around towering figures like Alexander the Great and Napoleon and Cleopatra. These individuals whose myths have their own centers of gravity. When we're taught history in school, it's largely through the lives and experiences of these people who we're told were significant, important, important. We learn to memorize their names and the dates of battles, coronations, and other key events associated with them. Now, don't get me wrong, we can learn a lot about the past from these people. Who they were and what they did. This is what historical figureheads are for. But they're not you. Now, you listening to this might be rich, famous and powerful, but statistically, you're probably not. There's nothing wrong with that. Most of us aren't rich and famous, but we, you, me, people like us are the raw material of history. The stuff history is actually made of. We always have been. Most of us do probably have a king or queen or two decorating our family trees as a matter of probability. With everyone having millions upon millions of ancestors, it's practically certain. But the vast majority of your ancestors and mine were the common clay of humanity. At best, they were advisors to those famous kings or military officers or members of the court. Maybe they were merchants or priestesses or administrators. Most of them weren't even that elevated. They were farmers clinging to the edge of survival. They were shepherds tending their flocks and herds, worrying about wolves and winter frosts. They were skilled craftspeople breathing in smoke from forges or digging wood splinters out of their fingers. Most of those people, our ancestors, left only tiny traces in the historical record, if they left any at all. A single clay tablet recording the sale of a pair of enslaved prisoners of war in ancient Assyria. An epitaph for a well to do Roman merchant. An entry in a medieval account book. The rusted fragments of an iron knife found among a few bones in a 2000 year old grave. And still, each and every one of those people was real. And they mattered. Past Lives is a show about those people and their stories. Every week we'll explore the lived experiences and world of a real person who lived in the past, spanning millennia and the entire globe. These are the stories of the people who came before us. By understanding them, we can strive to better understand ourselves and our place in this great ongoing endeavor that we call humanity. These people were us, and we are them. They mattered, and so do you. You'll have heard of some of the people we explore on Past lives before. The vast majority of them, however, will be new to you. Even if you're a huge history buff who has read widely and deeply across different times and places in the past, that's intentional. I've taken this approach not because there's nothing left to be learned from the towering figures who dominate the study of human history. Even those of us who took history classes in college mostly learned the subject through the lens of these greats. It's simply a way to reduce the vast sweep of our past into a more manageable form. And every year, fantastic scholars uncover new things about these great individuals, mostly men. And sometimes they fundamentally change the way we understand them. That's awesome. There's nothing wrong with an enthralling biography or a radical new treatment of a major figure. I'm partial to them myself. I've written my fair share of words about famous folks over the years. If you want recommendations, I'm happy to provide a few. Or a dozen, or a hundred. Enough to keep you thoroughly occupied until the heat death of the universe in the grand scheme of things. Great man history, as it's called, isn't a bad way of simplifying our human past. Into something we can confidently grasp. A lot of stuff has happened over the past 10,000 years or so, and in that time, millions of lives have been lived. But that's exactly why we're not doing great man history here on past lives. Let me tell you why. At a fundamental level, turning great people into the main characters of history is not only misleading, but also reductive. Because these people are all outliers. They're not normal, they're not ordinary. Being important or lucky enough to be recorded in some text to which we still have access centuries after that person's death is in itself unusual. The vast majority of people who have ever stepped foot on the surface of this planet left no trace of their existence. Not a mention in a tax record, not the foundations of the house they lived in, not a footprint in some wet mud that happened to survive the millennia they were born. They lived and they died. While we here in the 21st century might not know them, those largely unknown individuals in all their billions were no less or more human than we are. Whether they lived 10 years ago or 10,000, that much remains true. They lived different lives than we do, of course, but their experiences weren't so very different from ours. These were people. They had favorite foods. They sweated in the heat and shivered in the cold. Their backs and knees ached when they woke up in the morning. Despite an infant and childhood mortality rate that beggars modern belief, they loved their kids every bit as much as we do today. Past Lives is about these forgotten people. Not the kings and queens who ruled them, nor the chieftains, lords, aristocrats, and other notables whose names are so much more likely to have survived the vagaries of time. These forgotten people are, in my estimation, the true raw material of human history. Their lives, their experiences, their stories. That's the iron we ought to be using to forge a better, more inclusive, more representative way of understanding our shared past. A historical narrative that focuses entirely on the actions of a few people, mostly capital G, capital M, great men, is to treat them as the driving force behind everything important that has ever happened. Now, this isn't a knock on a propulsive Lincoln biography or an incisive Lincoln look at the Mughal founder Babur, or against any rigorous work of reportage on what really happened in the White House war room the night Osama bin Laden was killed. What I'm saying is that to study history exclusively through the lens of great men means missing out on a lot of really essential stuff about how the world perspective matters. I use the word perspective deliberately. One of the really common misconceptions about history that non historians tend to have is this idea of bias. Bias implies that there's a single true version of a given set of events. And if we just remove the bias from the accounts we have, we can get to that core singular truth. That's just not how it works. So allow me to explain. I'll give you a concrete example. The great Greek historian Polybius wrote the definitive account of the Roman Republic's rise to power in the Mediterranean. Polybius was closely associated with a particular clique among the Roman aristocracy, at the center of which was a guy named Scipio Aemilianus. Now, Polybius, unsurprisingly, is pretty complementary of Scipio Aemilianus. That shapes how he presents Aemilianus involvement in some pretty nasty events, like the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. If we approach Polybius work with the intention of removing his bias, we'd say, well, he probably exaggerated a bit when it came to Aemilianus, made him look better than he was, that kind of thing. That stands to reason. But how were we supposed to understand Polybius other and less immediately visible biases? How are we supposed to know how those biases informed what events he chose to include in his history, what he left out, what he chose to emphasize, and what really crucial thing he may have glossed over in just a few sentences? Enough outside evidence survives that tells us that Polybius, like any writer, was indeed making active choices about how to shape his story, centuries or millennia removed. We can't simply excise the writer from the work or presume to understand precisely what made them tick. That's the whole problem with the idea of bias. Now perspective, on the other hand, is an empowering concept, especially for a historian. Perspective says that everybody is working from their own, usually implicit assumptions about how the world works and what matters most. It says that even when we're recording firsthand accounts of something we've just seen, there's still plenty of room for those assumptions to inform our representation of those events. Let me give you another example. If you have kids, you've probably heard them recount a story about something that happened at school or daycare. Somebody cut someone else's hair with a pair of the classroom scissors, or there was a shoving match over the swing, or one kid threw some headphones, missed, and cracked the screen on the video board. If you asked five different children what happened, you are going to get five different different stories. In the absence of video evidence recording every single moment of the incident. Trying to figure out the actual sequence of events isn't exactly straightforward. And that's kids doing something innocuous. That doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. What happens when we apply this really basic observation to thornier, more complex events, political dealings, coups, conquests and the like. These are the kinds of events no single observer could hope to comprehend anyway, and certainly not without bottom bias. We're not going to get a clean recounting of stuff that took place by removing bias. Honestly, even the idea that a barebones understanding of what happened actually constitutes history seems pretty dubious to me. Far too often what happened is shorthand for focusing on the actions of those so called great people I was bemoaning a little while ago. History is so much more than that. For every great man bending the arc of history to his, almost always his will, there were uncounted others who had their own perspectives on what was happening, their own experiences of those events. We ought to embrace those perspectives. That starts by changing our approach to studying history, namely by questioning who and what matters most. History is a mosaic of different peoples experiences and stories. It seems natural to tell the story of the American Civil War through the eyes of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. Such a story leads us from the election of 1860 in Fort Sumter to Shiloh and Gettysburg, to Ford's theater and Appomattox, Lincoln's letters, Grant's and Lee's memoirs, Davis's official papers. Their records become the mortar and glass that comprises our mosaic and creates the larger and most widely accepted image of the time. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with that story. It's a fine way of doing a political overview of a crucial and transformative five year period in American history. But an overview is not the whole story, or even most of it. If we move away from Lincoln and Davis and Grant and Lee, and instead use other people's experiences as our little pieces of colored glass, we could construct an entirely different mosaic, thereby creating an entirely different portrait of the age. We could appreciate what the bullets must have sounded like whistling through the trees on little browntop. We could understand the jubilation of enslaved people when Union soldiers arrived in the South Carolina Lowcountry, burned down the hated Big House and told them what was in the Emancipation Proclamation. We could talk about guerrilla warfare, banditry, and the utter breakdown of civil society in border states like Missouri. Or we could talk about what was going through the mind of a 26 year old immigrant from Schleswig Holstein on the battlefield at Nashville in 1864, right before he was hit with a piece of shrapnel. That was my great, great, great grandfather, a fellow named Hans Jorte. If we build our mosaic of the Civil War from pieces like that, how might the broader picture of that age appear? That's history, too. It's history from the bottom up, or sometimes the middle out. This approach assembles a more complete narrative because it draws from the lives of ordinary people, that precious raw material I mentioned before. There's a fancy term for this kind of narrative approach. We call it sociological storytelling, as opposed to biographical storytelling, the kind with which most of us are familiar. Biography is all about understanding the course of a person's life, what they saw and experienced, and it uses that person as a lens for understanding the world in which they lived. Biographies tend to spend a great deal of time on the inner world of their subjects, their psychology, their motivations for doing the things that we know they did. That doesn't mean they leave out the broader world. Any competent biography of Abraham Lincoln is going to spend some time talking about how his experiences in Kentucky and Illinois shaped his character, how his views on slavery evolved in the context of the fight between abolition and slave power before the Civil War, and, not to put too fine a point on it, what made Lincoln so extraordinary compared to his contemporaries. That's also the weakness of biography. We tend to write biographies of outliers, not ordinary folks. Even when we do see a biography of a regular person, having access to enough information to assemble their full life story is a heck of a lot rarer than we'd like it to be. Sociological storytelling, by contrast, uses what we know about the world that existed around a given person to illuminate their subjective life and experiences. It looks for the ordinary rather than the extraordinary. How the surviving fragments of a known person's life might have fit into the societies of which they were a part. We can very easily do sociological storytelling for a famous and well documented person. In the case of Abraham Lincoln, that approach would focus on what aspects of his life and experiences were broadly shared across the antebellum United States. The extent to which contemporaries shared his views, what he ate and drank, even the chairs he sat in, and the way the ever present clouds of tobacco smoke around him smelt. A sociological approach to Lincoln would situate him firmly in his world first and then focus on the individual second. That's what we're going to do here on past lives. Most of the people we want to get to know better, our Raw historical material didn't leave enough traces in the record for us to reconstruct their entire life story. They appear in flashes, blinks of an eye, as if we've caught a glimpse of them running through a dense forest. Those glimpses, a mention of an enslaved person's sail in a crumbling ledger, a set of human remains, a throwaway line in a well known account of a king, are all we have to work with. All I have of my great great grandfather Hans Jort is his wartime Bible, a photograph of him as an elderly man, and a couple of grand army of the Republic ribbons along with the barest information from census returns. The diary we know he kept during the war is nowhere to be found now. We might throw our hands in the air and bemoan how little we can know about these people. We can lament the loss of the evidence, like Hans Droit's diary, that would have told us more about an individual's life story in their inner world. How the enslaved person recorded in that ledger felt about being ripped away from their culture and family and sold to the highest bidder. Who those human remains belonged to, or what my great, great great grandfather was thinking as the bullets whizzed and the shells exploded around him at Nashville. But even those glimpses matter, because they tell us that these people really did exist. They really were born, lived and died. And along that journey, their actions shaped the world around them. Those famous Roman senators and generals whose names we still remember, were surrounded by dozens or even hundreds of anonymous enslaved people who made their clothing, prepared their food and ran their baths. Thousands of humble Roman citizens, their names lost time, cast votes to put them in office. We can talk about the miracles of the Industrial Revolution all we want. The genius of inventors and the cleverness of the investors who poured capital into new technologies. But it was factory workers who made the things that propelled the world into a new age. Lincoln's views on slavery, even the fact of him being president at that moment of crisis, wouldn't have mattered unless hundreds of thousands of people like Hans Jord were willing to pick up a rifle and put on a blue uniform and march off to war. History is made of the millions upon millions of individual actions that ordinary people do every day. Not just what great men are up to. And that is what past lives is all about. Each season will focus on a particular unifying theme that spans space and time, giving us an opportunity to look at a variety of lives of regular folks. My hope is that by assembling such a wide variety of perspectives from different eras and regions around the world, we'll be able to illuminate some larger aspects of that theme. We'll have our very own mosaic view of a topic made up of the experiences of ordinary people. Our first theme will be slavery. Slavery as an institution has existed on this planet since the beginning of recorded history more than 5,000 years ago, and it almost certainly goes back even further than that. And several times in places like the antebellum south or the ancient Mediterranean, the entirety of the economic and social system was rooted in slavery. Elsewhere and at other times, enslaved people lived among the free masses, silently shaping their own lives as well as those of their masters in ways both large and small. Over the next 12 episodes, we'll look at 12 people who were enslaved at some point in their lives. They range in time and space from ancient Assyria, where a woman named Nanai Elai and her daughter were brutally kidnapped from their home, to Matilda Macrear, the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. Some of our subjects were counted among the lowest of the low in their societies. Others, not many, but a few were quite well off or even rose to extraordinary heights. For a few, slavery was a lifelong condition that followed them from birth to death, but for most, it wasn't. The experience of being enslaved marked a fundamental break with their past selves, a kind of social death. My hope is that by understanding a spectrum of experiences of the enslaved, we'll understand slavery itself itself better, how it benefited the owners, how those benefits have continued to trickle down through time, and far more importantly, what slavery did to its victims. Be sure to go and listen to episode two of Past Lives, where we'll be spending a little time making sense of slavery over the big picture and the long term. It's already available right now, and so is our first look at our first real person, Nanai Elai, in Ancient Assyria. Foreign. Make sure you subscribe to this feed and click the link in the episode description to head over to the Past Lives Patreon. It's only seven bucks a month. We already have tons of bonus content like interviews with great historians about their favorite historical people, and we're adding more every week. Our Patreon is also where you'll find our Past Lives chat, where you can talk about history with other interested folks. I'll even drop in from time to time. We'll have a weekly discussion thread. The first one is about the best history books you've ever read, and if you're a patron, you'll get to vote on what we read for our monthly Past Lives book club. Past lives is a 100% independent production, and your support is what allows us to make this show. So. Thank you. Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. Sound design and music by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kamburi. Thanks so much for joining me. Until next time, this has been Past Lives.