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Civilization On Trial: An Interview with Thomas Cahill

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Thomas Cahill

I first encountered Thomas Cahill in the reading requirements for ninth grade history, where Mr. Dachille’s designation of Cahill’s book The Gifts of the Jews as a substitute for the dry textbooks to which I was accustomed instantly granted him canonical stature in my mind. And for good reason: Cahill’s accessible and fascinating takes on the histories of the Irish, the Jews, Jesus Christ, the Greeks, and the Middle Ages (Volumes I-V of his Hinges of History series) have, besides reaching bestseller lists in the U.S. and beyond, reconditioned us as to how we ought to be learning and thinking about the history of the Western world.

When I speak with Thomas Cahill about his most recent book, A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green, he elucidates the continuity between his approaches to both ancient history and contemporary issues. “I have to admit that when I was in high school, I didn’t have very many really good history courses, nor did I have very many in college,” says Cahill.

“What I really loved was literature, in English and in other languages, and I realized subsequently that I got much of my history through literature. So when I began to write [the Hinges of History books], I really did write them through the prism of the literature of the time. I think if you want to know what warfare was like in 8th-century B.C. Greece, you should read Homer rather than some historian, and I think you could go through everything that way. If there is literature on the subject, it will give you a much fuller picture than will common historians. . . . Literature may be very ancient and it may be very different from our sensibility in certain ways, but the human body has never changed; we still laugh and we still cry the same way that people did many, many centuries ago. And because of that we can still connect with them. So that’s what I feel I’m doing in the Hinges of History series, or what I hope to be doing. I’m never trying to come up with some new theory on some particular period. I base myself on the sort of middle-of-the-road academic historians, and at the same time, what I really want to do is answer the question, ‘What would it have been like to have been there? How would it have felt to be part of this period?’ I think that can be done much better through literature than through what we commonly think of as history.”

Born one of six children in an Irish-American family, Cahill was raised in the Bronx and educated by Jesuits, studying ancient Greek and Latin, skills that allow him to create his own translations for his research and to consider ancient authors’ original intentions. He graduated from Fordham University, where he explored medieval philosophy, scripture and theology and continued studying Greek and Latin literature, earning a BA in classical literature and philosophy as well as a pontifical degree in philosophy. He earned an MFA in film and dramatic literature from Columbia University and studied scripture at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, rounding out an education whose breadth and depth reflects both his focus on the importance of narratives and his Irish Catholic background.

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