John Cochrane: recommendation

Transcript context

…It’s a great book, by the way. Everybody else who’s ever heard of my father, heard of Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, which is the one I’ll recommend online. If you’ve read the historiography book, it says . . . I don’t know how you do it — you’ve read everything that there is, which is a big thing. He was a major influence in my life. One, the historical perspective — I think that a lot. The writing in Forgotten Centuries was wonderful. My best-read paper of any is “Writing Tips for PhD Students,” which passes along a lot of Eric Cochrane’s writing tips for his history graduate students. He’s an unusual man. He took us to Florence, where I spent a lot of time as a kid, and forced us into the local culture. He was also very connected to the community of the Southside of Chicago, sent me to public schools there, which was another culture, so I certainly learned to navigate other cultures. We had a fantastic dinner table where I cut my teeth on many things intellectually. I don’t agree with everything he did. He was a converted Catholic who was also a historian and read the minutes of the Council of Trent in the original Latin. That was a challenge [laughs] for a 16-year-old atheist, but there’s a lot of that left in me. Now, I also knew your mother’s work before I knew your work, in particular, her translations of Paolo Rossi, especially Rossi on Vico. What is it intellectually that you learned from your mother? I didn’t know any of this about you until preparing for this podcast I might add.…

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