Mount Fuji is at once instantly familiar and seemingly immutable, yet it always remains strange and changeable. Its postcard-perfect peak is known around the world as a wonder of nature and a symbol of Japan. But behind that outline lies a far more complicated history.

Over the centuries, Fuji’s eruptions devastated farmland and terrified villagers. Revered as a sacred presence, its divine inhabitants changed with shifts in belief and power. Once locally known, Fuji later became claimed as a national emblem, its slopes inspiring poetry, painting, and pilgrimage—and serving as the stage for political and economic disputes.

In Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (Princeton, 2025), Andrew Bernstein traces this layered story from the mountain’s surprisingly recent geological beginnings to its recognition as a World Heritage Site. The result is a portrait of a place both familiar and unsettled: a mountain still in the making, continually remade by the humans who live with it, use it, revere it, and visit it.

For show notes and more, go to the Historically Thinking Substack page for this episode.

We reach for the Cold War as if it were a really good pocket tool: compact, familiar, ready to deal with any problem in today’s world. U.S.–China rivalry? “Cold War 2.0.” Russia and the West? “Cold War redux.” The appeal is obvious: the Cold War offers a story we already know how to tell—great-power tension, nuclear standoff, ideological blocs, and finally, a tidy ending.

But as Francis J. Gavin argues, analogies always smuggle in assumptions. To label something a “new Cold War” is to commit to a whole strategic script: decades of rivalry, fixed blocs, and an expectation of how the story ends. But what if the conditions that defined the 20th-century Cold War—its nuclear stability, its institutions, even its duration—don’t apply now? And what if these words “Cold War”that you use do not mean what I mean by the words “Cold War”?

Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and Director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is the author of Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age and Thinking Historically: A Guide for Policymakers.

For notes, links, and a vast archive, go to www.historicallythinking.org

Each year millions of tourists visit the Czech capital, awed by its blend of architectural styles and dramatic landscape. St. Vitus’s Gothic cathedral towers above the Charles Bridge and the Vltava River, while winding alleys lead to elegant squares lined with Renaissance palaces, Baroque statues, and modern glass structures. Yet this beauty obscures centuries of conflict — ethnic, religious, political, and more typically mundane conflicts— beginning when Prague was just a fort on a hill above a river. Presumably it wasn’t built there for the view.

In her new book, Prague: The Heart of Europe, Cynthia Paces traces the city’s history from the late ninth century, when Slavic dukes built the first fortifications and church, through eleven centuries of triumph and tragedy. Prague has been both an imperial center of a great empire and a city on the periphery of empires—several of them. It became a European capital of art, politics, and pilgrimage, endured religious wars and defenestrations, and was nearly destroyed in the Thirty Years’ War. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was celebrated as a beacon of democracy, only for its citizens to endure violent antisemitism, Nazi occupation, and communist repression — before once again becoming a beacon of democracy.

Through her story of Prague we come to understand the truth of Franz Kafka’s observation: “Prague does not let go; this little mother has claws.” Our conversation moves across centuries of wars, saints, emperors, rebellions, and revolutions to show why Prague still grips the imagination.

Cynthia Paces is Professor of History at The College of New Jersey. She is the author of Prague Panoramas: National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century and co-editor of 1989: The End of the Twentieth Century.

• Cynthia Paces, Prague: The Heart of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025)
• —Prague Panoramas: National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009)
• Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Harvard University Press, 2007)
• Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton University Press, 2013)
• Related Episodes
• “Edges are Interesting: A History of Eastern Europe”
• “City of Light, City of Darkness”
• “Madrid”

How does Prague’s geography help explain its importance across European history?What does the Prague Spring reveal about the continuing interplay in Prague’s history of freedom, repression, and resilience? Share the podcast with someone who has visited Prague, or who has always meant to.