We get a lot of requests around here about how to make time for the gym, how to get started, and what to do when you are there. So I asked Dr. Vanessa Miller and Dr. Pat Wyman to join me to talk about their varied experiences in weight training, still being academics, and what the gym means to them in their lives. 
About our guests:
Vanessa Miller (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Education Law at Indiana University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work is centered on exploring critical aspects of policing, surveillance, race, and crime situated within the education system. She uses legal and empirical methodologies to address systemic biases fixed at the intersection of criminal law, criminal procedure, and education. She is particularly interested in the experiences of Latina students impacted by the school-prison nexus and the broader criminal legal system.

Pat Wyman holds a PhD in history from the University of Southern California. He previously worked as a sports journalist, covering mixed martial arts and boxing from 2013 to 2018. His work has been featured in Deadspin, The Washington Post, Bleacher Report, and others. He is currently host of the podcast, Tides of History, and previously the host of Fall of Rome.

This week we return to one of the first HATM Podcasts about one of the first films we ever did on the Historians At The Movies watch party: Lincoln. Joining us are two of the most dynamic historians working today: Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Dr. Megan Kate Nelson. We get into Lincoln's presidency, the role of his cabinet, as well as somehow ranking the hottest presidents. This one is a ride.

About our guests:
Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a presidential historian and the Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, co-editor of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture, and Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic. She regularly writes for public audiences in the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Bulwark, Time Magazine, USA Today, CNN, and the Washington Post.

Dr. Megan Kate Nelson is a writer, historian, road cyclist, and cocktail enthusiast. She is also the 2024-2025 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th-Century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. While she is there, she will be finishing her new book, “The Westerners: The Creation of America’s Most Iconic Region.” She is the author of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which was a Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History. Her most recent book, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America was published by Scribner on March 1, 2022, the 150th anniversary of the Yellowstone Act, which created the first national park in the world. Saving Yellowstone has won the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Nonfiction, and is one of Smithsonian Magazine‘s Top Ten Books in History for 2022.

This week author and bridal shop owner Jillian Forsberg drops in to talk about the stories behind helping people tie the knot, why Bridezillas don't exist, and her favorite memories from 17 years in the business. Plus, she reveals the process behind writing her latest historical fiction, The Rhino Keeper. This is a really fun conversation.

About our guest:Kansas author Jillian holds a master’s degree in public history from Wichita State University and a bachelor’s degree in communication and history from McPherson College. Her research on little-known historical events led her to discover the true story behind her first novel, The Rhino Keeper. 

​Jillian is a regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and leads the Manuscript Matchup beta reader program through History Through Fiction. You can find Jillian gardening, browsing the closest antique mall, or reading every label at a museum. She'll most likely be wearing vintage dresses, except when she's at the zoo.

 Jillian owns a bridal store and has worked in bridal since 2007. She lives in Wichita, Kansas, with her husband, child, and pets. Jillian’s second novel is written and she's working on a third. She will always write animal stories.

This week we return to the Vault and have only one question: IS THERE A CAVE?
Two scholars ready to get medieval on us all: Thomas Lecaque and John Wyatt Greenlee.  We're celebrating the great epic that wasn't: The 13th Warrior. This movie is so good and so bad at the same time that it's hard to quantify. But we're gonna do it anyway. We're talking Vikings, the Abassid Empire, man-bears, and maybe the greatest language scene in film history. Grab some mead, because it's made from honey, just like this podcast.

About our guests:
Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence. He has written for the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Foreign Policy and The Bulwark, among others.

John Wyatt Greenlee is  a medievalist and a cartographic historian.His academic research is primarily driven by questions of how people perceive and reproduce their spaces:  how movement through the world — both experiential and imagined — becomes codified in visual and written maps. 

This week astrophysicist Dr. Kelsey Johnson and I talk about how we know what we know, the Big Bang, black holes, and turtles all the way down, all of which can be found in her new book Into the Unknown: The Quest to Understand the Mysteries of the Cosmos. This is a mind blowing conversation with a brilliant and wonderful human.

About our guest:
Dr. Kelsey Johnson teaches students both inside and outside of the classroom, using astronomy as a gateway science to nurture curiosity and support science literacy. As a child, Johnson spent countless nights outside under the stars, where she developed a love for "big picture" questions about the nature of reality and the universe.  Johnson's curiosity about the cosmos - and everything in it - has been the primary driver of her career, leading her to devote her life to learning, exploration, and teaching. 

She is a professor at the University of Virginia and founding director of the award-winning Dark Skies Bright Kids program. She has won numerous awards for her research, teaching, and promotion of science literacy. Her TED talk on the importance of dark skies has more than 2 million views, and her writing has appeared in nationwide publications, including the New York Times, Scientific American, and Washington Post. Her children’s book Constellations for Kids in consistently in the top 10 children’s astronomy books. Johnson is the past-president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and president-elect of the American Astronomical Society.

She earned her BA in physics from Carleton College, and her MS and PhD in astrophysics from the University of Colorado. She lives in rural Virginia with her family, including three cats and two very large dogs.

Her website: https://www.kelseyjohnson.com/
Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/profkelsey.bsky.social
Her book: https://amzn.to/3Z503zh

This week we reach back into the archive for our first visit from Dr. Mary Hicks to talk about the brilliance of Master and Commander and to talk with Mary about her research into African Mariners in the South Atlantic.

About our guest:
Mary Hicks is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.

This week we venture back to one of our earliest podcast episodes to talk about Die Hard with Annette Gordon-Reed and Craig Bruce Smith. We know Die Hard is a Christmas movie, but is it the quintessential 80s film? Find out when you listen in. 

A Charlie Brown Christmas is undoubtedly in the pantheon of holiday tv shows. This week pop culture historian Blake Scott Ball drops in to talk about how that almost didn’t happen, as well as the politics of Peanuts in the 20th century.

First the first time ever, HATM has a guest host! This week John Wyatt Greenlee steps on the other side of the mic to talk with David Perry and Matthew Gabriele about Sean Connery, Medieval detectives, and their new book, Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe.

This week Pulitzer Prize winner Emily Nussbaum joins to talk about the 90s, Generation X, and the rise of reality television during our discussion of Reality Bites.

About our guest:
Emily Nussbaum is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and previously, was the magazine's television critic. She worked as an editor and a writer at New York Magazine, where she created The Approval Matrix. She's also written for Slate, The New York Times, Lingua Franca and Nerve, among other publications. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

​She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Clive Thompson and her two children. She doesn't have a favorite television show, but under pressure, she'll choose "Slings and Arrows."

Find her new book, Cue the Sun: The Invention of Reality TV right here: https://amzn.to/3CSw6tB

HOO BOY this week Roman historians Dr. Sarah Bond and Dr. Bret Deveraux drop in to talk about Ridley Scott's ode to his first film, uh, ancient Rome, Gladiator II. We talk about the legacy of the first film, our impressions of the new release, and the actual history behind Gladiator II. This discussion is pretty epic. Stay tuned and subscribe.

About our guests:
Dr. Sarah E. Bond is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa. She is interested in late Roman history, epigraphy, late antique law, Roman topography and GIS, Digital Humanities, and the socio-legal experience of ancient marginal peoples. She earned a PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2011) and obtained a BA in Classics and History with a minor in Classical Archaeology from the University of Virginia (2005). Her book, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professionals in the Roman Mediterranean, was published with the University of Michigan Press in 2016. Follow her blog: History From Below.

Additionally, Bond is a regular contributor at Hyperallergic, a columnist at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and a section editor at Public Books. She has written for The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Washington Post.  Bond's latest book, Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire will be out on February 4, 2025. It is available for preorder here: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300273144/strike/

Dr. Bret C. Devereaux is an ancient and military historian who currently teaches as a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. He has his PhD in ancient history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his MA in classical civilizations from Florida State University.

Bret is a historian of the broader ancient Mediterranean in general and of ancient Rome in particular. His primary research interests sit at the intersections of the Roman economy and the Roman military, examining the ways that the lives of ordinary people in the ancient world were shaped by the structures of power, violence and wealth under which they lived and the ways in which they in turn shaped the military capacity of the states in which they lived (which is simply a fancy way of saying he is interested in how the big picture of wars, economic shifts and politics impacted the ‘little’ folks and vice versa). More broadly he is interested in many of the nuts-and-bolts of everyday life in the ancient world, things like the production of textiles, the economics of small farming households, and the burden of military service.

He is also a lifetime fan of fantasy, science fiction and speculative fiction more generally. Bret enjoys good music, bad jokes and writing about himself in the third person. He is also required, by law and ancient custom, to inform absolutely everyone that he has, in fact, beaten Dark Souls (and now also Elden Ring).

This week Dr. Robert Colby joins us as we talk about one of the most powerful—and one of the most challenging—films in recent memory: 12 Years A Slave. We also talk about Rob’s new book which examines the trade of enslaved people during the American Civil War. 


About our guest:
Robert Colby is an Assistant Professor of American history, focusing on the era of the American Civil War.

Dr. Colby’s research explores the social, military, and political experience of the Civil War era with a special emphasis on slavery and the process of emancipation. His current book project examines the survival of the domestic slave trade during the War, demonstrating the ways in which Confederates used slave commerce to survive the conflict and the ways in which it shaped the onset of African American freedom. His is the winner of the Society of Americans’ Allan Nevins Prize and the Society of Civil War Historians’ Anne J. Bailey Prize and Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award. His research on the wartime slave trade was also a finalist for the Southern Historical Association’s C. Vann Woodward Award. Colby’s writing has appeared in the Journal of the Civil War Era, theJournal of the Early Republic, and Slavery & Abolition. He has also published on Civil War monuments and written on disease in the domestic slave trade.

Dr. Colby earned is B.A. in history from the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to coming to the University of Mississippi, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University.

Find Rob’s book here: https://amzn.to/3YZwgXM

This week Kevin Rusnak and Emily Carney drop in to talk about the movie that made us all dream of going to Space...or at least Cape Canaveral. This episode gets into an era of nostalgia around the Space Shuttle program, the changing role of women inside NASA, and how the Challenger disaster affects how we remember this movie.

About our guests:

Kevin M. Rusnak is the Chief Historian of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center History Office, located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio.  He is responsible for leading the professional research, collection, preservation, analysis, writing, and dissemination of AFLCMC's history and heritage to the organization’s leadership and workforce, as well as to a public audience. Disclaimer: Kevin's thoughts and opinions do not reflect those of his employer or the federal government.

Emily Carney is a spaceflight professional with over a decade of industry experience. She is a space historian and podcaster, and the original Space Hipster. In 2018, the National Space Society named her one of the Top Ten Space Influencers. She is also the co-host of the Space and Things podcast and a Celestis Ambassador at Celestis Memorial Spaceflights. 

This week Craig Bruce Smith and Robert Greene II drop in to debate whether The Terminator was the most important film made in the 1980s, plus ranking the biggest action stars from 1980 to 2000.

About our guests:
 Craig Bruce Smith is an associate professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norfolk, VA. He authored American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era and co-authored George Washington’s Lessons in Ethical Leadership.

Smith earned his PhD in American history from Brandeis University. Previously, he was an associate professor of military history at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), an assistant professor of history, and the director of the history program at William Woods University, and he has taught at additional colleges, including Tufts University. He specializes in American Revolutionary and early American history, specifically focusing on George Washington, honor, ethics, war, the founders, transnational ideas, and national identity. In addition, he has broader interests in colonial America, the early republic, leadership, and early American cultural, intellectual, and political history.

Robert Greene II IS  Assistant Professor of History at Claflin University. Dr. Greene received his Bachelor of Arts in Writing and Linguistics with a concentration in Creative Writing from Georgia Southern University; his Master of Arts in History from Georgia Southern University; and earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of South Carolina, Columbia. Dr. Greene recently completed his dissertation at the University of South Carolina, about the ways in which Democratic Party leaders in the South from 1964 to 1994 vied for the African American vote via appeals to Southern identity and memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Mr. Greene has published a book chapter in the collection Navigating Souths, and has published a scholarly article in Patterns of Prejudice. He has also published at several popular magazines and websites, including The Nation, Jacobin, Dissent, Scalawag, Current Affairs, and Jacobin.His research interests include African American history, American intellectual history since 1945, and Southern history since 1945. Dr. Greene is also a blogger and book review editor for the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians, and has just begun a six-post stint for the Teaching American History blog. 

This week, resident HATM horror experts Rachel Gunter and Nicole Donawho drop in to talk about Scream, its legacy, and our favorite scream queens. 

This week we dive into the history and science behind Antarctica and question who made it out: Childs or MacReady? The Thing is a 100% PERFECT film. Grab your flamethrower and join in.

About our guests:
Peter Neff is a glaciologist and climate scientist working primarily to develop glacier ice core records of past climate, environmental conditions, and atmospheric chemistry. Peter’s current research focuses on better understanding recent climate of changing coastal regions in West Antarctica, areas which play a large role in uncertainty for future projections of sea level rise. Peter is also working to capture the last 200-500 years of hydroclimate variability in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, through recovering and developing the southernmost annually-resolved ice core record in North America, from Mount Waddington in the Coast Mountains. Peter is also the Director of Field Research and Data for the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center that seeks to find the oldest possible ice core records of past climate preserved in Antarctica. Peter shares widely about ice core climate science via Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.

Matthew Siegfried is a glaciologist who uses satellite remote sensing techniques in combination with field-based and airborne geophysical methods to understand physical processes of Earth’s glaciers and ice sheets. He runs the Mines Glaciology Laboratory, where the team collects and synthesizes ground-, air-, and space-based datasets in an effort to span the spatial (centimeters to 100s of km) and temporal (minutes to centuries) on which these processes occur. He is particularly interested in processes at the ice-bed interface, which lies hidden beneath 10s to 1000s of meters of ice at the intersection between glaciology, hydrology, geology, microbiology, and oceanography. He strives to work with a diverse set of researchers to create a unique perspective on the role of subglacial processes within the larger global Earth system. As a polar scientist, Matt is also committed to maintaining an open discussion of the changing cryosphere, having collaborated with institutions ranging from local elementary schools to the U.S. State Department in an effort to facilitate our conversation about the local, regional, and global impacts of changes at the Earth’s poles. Matt is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Geophysics at Colorado School of Mines and is affiliated faculty with the Hydrologic Science and Engineering Program and the Humanitarian Engineering Program.

Daniella McCahey's primary research attempts to connect Antarctic geographies to greater world history. Her current book project examines the United Kingdom’s 1955-1958 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, arguing that the way this project unfolded demonstrated a scientific community unable to cope with the twin pressures of decolonization and the Cold War. Dr. McCahey has broad interests and has authored/co-authored articles and scholarly book chapters on topics ranging from the media-savvy of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, to paleontology and popular culture in the 1990s, to pornography in Antarctic research stations. She is also conducting ongoing international collaborative research projects on the history of permafrost science and on the history of the British Empire’s use of science in its Southern Ocean empire. 

Wait, the pyramids weren’t built by aliens???This week HATM celebrates our 100th episode by talking Egyptology with Julia Troche and Stargate’s historical consultant, Stuart Tyson Smith. 

It's spooky season around here and that means it's time to visit Dawn of the Dead. Kelly Baker and Thomas Lecaque drop into to talk about the history of zombies in western culture, our favorite zombie kills, and exactly what we'd do in the zombie apocalypse.

About our guests:
Award-winning and Amazon bestselling author Kelly J. Baker is a freelance writer with a religious studies PhD who covers religion, racism, higher education, gender, labor, motherhood, and popular culture. She’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Rumpus, Chronicle Vitae, Religion & Politics, Killing the Buddha, and The Washington Post among others.


Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence. He has written for the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Foreign Policy and The Bulwark, among others. Follow him on Twitter: @tlecaque.

This week we talk about the life and legacy of Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 mission. Joining us is Jim Hansen, who wrote the book First Man and served as a consultant on the film, along with HATM space expert Kevin Rusnak. We talk about the Armstrong's inward journey into outer space, his relationships with his fellow astronauts, and the role his wife Janet played in Armstrong's journey. We also get some inside details on the making of the film, including Ryan Gosling and Damien Chazelle's work to get this movie made. This is a podcast on NASA, Neil Armstrong, and an absolutely brilliant film unlike any you've heard before.

About our guests:
James R. Hansen is a professor emeritus of history at Auburn University. A former historian for NASA, Hansen is the author of twelve books on the history of aerospace and a two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in History. His 1995 book Spaceflight Revolution was nominated for the Pulitzer by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the only time NASA ever nominated a book for the prize. He serves as coproducer for the motion picture First Man, which is based on his New York Times bestselling biography of Neil Armstrong.

Kevin J. Rusnak is the Chief Historian of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center History Office, located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio.  He is responsible for leading the professional research, collection, preservation, analysis, writing, and dissemination of AFLCMC's history and heritage to the organization’s leadership and workforce, as well as to a public audience.

Mr. Rusnak graduated with a degree in History from the University of Dayton, Ohio, in 1995, and subsequently entered the History of Technology graduate program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia.  His thesis focused on the production of B-29 bombers in Marietta, Georgia, during World War II, while his dissertation explored the development of Air Force and NASA pressure suits and space suits from the 1930s through the 1960s.  He spent over four years as a historian at the NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where he researched and interviewed dozens of pioneering engineers, managers, and astronauts from the early years of human spaceflight.

Mr. Rusnak joined the Air Force History and Museums program in 2002 as the Senior Historian for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson AFB.  Over the next 18 years, he researched and wrote numerous annual histories, biographies, reports, heritage products, and special studies.  In 2017, he was the primary author for AFRL’s award-winning 100-year history compendium, Aiming Higher: A Century of Research in Science and Technology by the Air Force Research Laboratory and its Predecessors, as well as for its companion photo essay volume.  He also pioneered AFRL’s leveraging of history on modern platforms, such as social media, to provide a broader audience with access to AFRL’s significant legacy. 

Any Given Sunday turns 25 this year and it may have predicted the modern football era whether the NFL liked it or not. Sports historian Lou Moore stops in to talk about the rise of Black quarterbacks, CTE, social media in sports, malevolent owners, and his new book The Great Black Hope: Doug Williams, Vince Evans, and the Making of the Black Quarterback.

About our guest:
Louis Moore is a Professor of History at Grand Valley State University. He teaches African American History, Civil Rights, Sports History, and US History. His research and writing examines the interconnections between race and sports.  He is the author of two other books, I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915 and We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality, and has an audible lecture, African American Athletes Who Made History. In addition, he has two audible lectures, African American Athletes Who Made History and A Pastime of Their Own: The Story of Negro League Baseball. He has also written for various online outlets including The New York Daily News, Vox, The Global Sports Institute, First and Pen, and the African American Intellectual Historical Society, and he has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, and BBC Sports. He is als the co-host of the Black Athlete Podcast.

Support the podcast:
$7 gets you HATM swag, early access to podcasts, and our gratitude
https://www.patreon.com/historiansatthemovies 

Colin Farrell is back as the boss of Gotham City. This week Blake Scott Ball, author of the forthcoming book Batman: The Making of an American Myth joins in to talk about Batman, the Penguin, and whether or not you should check out the show.

It's Talk Like A Pirate Day and that makes it the perfect time to invite pirate historians Jamie Goodall and Rebecca Simon to talk about pirate mythology, superstitions at sea, and our favorite books and movies about swashbucklers.

About our guests:
Jamie Goodall is  a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C.  She also teaches part-time at Southern New Hampshire University in their College of Online & Continuing Education. She is the author of Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2020), National Geographic’s Pirates: Shipwrecks, Conquests, and their Lasting Legacy (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2021), Pirates and Privateers from Long Island Sound to Delaware Bay (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2022), and The Daring Exploits of Black Sam Bellamy: From Cape Cod to the Caribbean (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2023).

Rebecca Simon is a historian of early modern piracy, Colonial America, the Atlantic World, and maritime history. She earned her PhD from King’s College London in 2017. My dissertation, entitled: “The Crimes of Piracy and its Punishment: The Performance of Maritime Supremacy in the British Atlantic World, 1670 – 1830,” examines British maritime and legal supremacy in its early American colonies in regards to maritime piracy. She uses the public executions of pirates in London and the Americas as my narrative to see how the colonists reacted to increased legal restrictions by British authorities, which ultimately led to new ideas of autonomy.

This week Zach Schonfeld drops in to talk about his new book detailing Nicolas Cage's origin story. We dive into how Nicolas Coppola grew up in the shadow of his famous uncle, his struggles to break into Hollywood, and the highs and lows of Nicolas Cage's filmography. This pod is the first of its kind and I think you're gonna dig it.

We lost James Earl Jones today. Thomas Lecaque joins me to remember the man and what he meant to all of us.

This week Kellie Carter Jackson drops in to talk about The Help. We get into Black representations in film, white savior tropes, and what more nuanced discussions of the lived experiences of Black workers in the Civil Rights era look like. Kellie is a freaking powerhouse. Expect her to be back.

About our guest:
Kellie Carter Jackson is the Michael and Denise Kellen 68’ Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. She studies the lived experiences of Black people with a focus on slavery, abolitionism, the Civil War, political violence, Black women’s history, and film. She is the author of the award-winning book, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, which won the SHEAR James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize. Force and Freedom was also a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, a finalist for the Museum of African American History Stone Book Prize, and listed among 13 books to read on African American History by the Washington Post. Carter Jackson is also co-editor of Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, & Memory. Her essays have been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, and other outlets. She has also been interviewed for her expertise on Netflix, Apple TV, Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, MSNBC, PBS, Vox, CNN, the BBC, the History Channel, Al Jazeera, Slate, and a host of documentaries. 

Carter Jackson is also a Historian-in-Residence for the Museum of African American History in Boston. She also serves as a commissioner for the Massachusetts Historical Commission, where she represents the Museum of African American History in Boston.

Carter Jackson's latest book, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press), examines a radical reframing of the past and present of Black resistance—both nonviolent and violent—to white supremacy. She is also working on the story of the only Black passenger on the Titanic which examines the unexplored aspect of race, migration, and our obsession with one ship thought to be supreme.

Lastly, Carter Jackson loves a good podcast! She is the co-host of the podcast, “This Day in Esoteric Political History” with Jody Avirgan and Niki Hemmer and serves as the Executive Producer and host of "You Get a Podcast" formerly known as "Oprahdemics: The Study of the Queen of Talk" by Radiotopia with Leah Wright Rigeuer. You can follow her on Twitter @kcarterjackson. She currently resides in the suburbs of Boston with her husband and three children. 

This week Nancy MacDonell makes her debut on HATM Podcast to talk about Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Anna Wintour, and her book, Empresses of Seventh Avenue, which tells the history of the women who built New York into a fashion powerhouse in the years after World War II. This is a blast, and for me, and eye opening conversation. Hope you enjoy.

About our guest:
Nancy MacDonell is a fashion journalist and fashion historian. She writes the Wall Street Journal column "Fashion with a Past," in which she explores the historic roots of current fashion trends. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Elle, Vogue, and many other publications. She is the author of five books, including The Classic Ten: The True Story of the Little Black Dress and Nine Other Fashion Favorites. Nancy is an adjunct lecturer in fashion history at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She was born in Montréal and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

This week Kate Sheppard, John Wyatt Greenlee take a look at the newest edition of the Alien franchise to see what it has to say about capitalism, colonialism, and whether or not the series still has legs after 45 years. Jump in with us on this one.

About our guests:
 Dr. Kathleen Sheppard earned her PhD in History of Science from the University of Oklahoma in 2010. After a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at the American University in Cairo, she arrived at Missouri S&T in the fall of 2011. She teaches mainly survey courses on modern Western Civilizations, which is arguably one of the most important courses students in 21st century America can take. Her main focus is on the history of science from the ancient Near East to present day Europe, United States, and Latin America. She has taught courses on the history of European science and Latin American science, as well as a seminar on women in the history of science.

Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee is a medievalist and a cartographic historian, as well as a historian of roads and pathways and pilgrimage. But he is best well known for his work on the role of eels in pre-modern England from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. He is heavily engaged in outreach and public engagement to make the eel history more widely known, and to raise awareness for the role of eels as an endangered species. His work with eels and eel history has been profiled in TIME, The Guardian, Atlas Obscura, Hakai Magazine, and The New Yorker  (click here for a full list of earned media)

This week sociologist Jessica Calarco drops in to talk about the magificent 9 to 5, the changing and sometimes unchanging roles of women in the workplace, her work examining the role of women as America's social safety net, and the one and only Dolly Parton. Let's go.

About our guest:
 A Sociologist and Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jessica is an award-winning teacher, a leading expert on inequalities in family life and education, and the author of Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net (Portfolio/Penguin, 2024). Her previous books include Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research (with Mario Small; University of California Press, 2022), Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (Oxford University Press, 2018), and A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum (Princeton University Press, 2020). 

This week we are joined by three historians of archaeology: Kate Sheppard, Julia Troche, and Leah Packard-Grams to talk about one of the most perfect films ever made: Raiders of the Lost Ark. We jump into the history of archaeology, Egypt, Hitler's fascination with the occult, and the perfect pair of Marion Ravenwood and Indiana Jones. Oh, and we drank the whole time. Get ready because this episode goes places.

About our guests:
Dr. Kathleen Sheppard earned her PhD in History of Science from the University of Oklahoma in 2010. After a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at the American University in Cairo, she arrived at Missouri S&T in the fall of 2011. She teaches mainly survey courses on modern Western Civilizations, which is arguably one of the most important courses students in 21st century America can take. Her main focus is on the history of science from the ancient Near East to present day Europe, United States, and Latin America. She has taught courses on the history of European science and Latin American science, as well as a seminar on women in the history of science.

Dr. Julia Troche (she/her) is an Egyptologist, public historian, and educator who is passionate about making history accessible across barriers. She holds a Ph.D. in Egyptology from Brown University and a B.A. in History from UCLA. Julia is currently Associate Professor at Missouri State University in Springfield, MO. She serves as a Governor for the Board of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) and is President, Past Two-Term Vice President, and co-founder of ARCE-Missouri. She is co-chair (since 2024) of the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR)’s diversity, equity, and inclusion committee as well as the Session Chair (2023-2025) for the Archaeology of Egypt sessions at the ASOR annual meeting. Julia’s first book, "Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt: The Old and Middle Kingdoms" was published in 2021 with Cornell University Press. She is currently working on a book about the god Ptah for Bloomsbury, a textbook (with B. Brinkman) for Routledge, and a series of articles on Egyptomania and Imhotep that she hopes to turn into a public-facing book.

Leah Packard-Grams is a doctoral candidate at the University of California-Berkeley whose primary interests include Greek, Demotic, and Coptic papyrology, the archaeology of Greco-Roman Egypt, the archaeology of papyrology, and the physicality of ancient texts. She is passionate about diversifying the fields of Archaeology and Greco-Roman Classics to include those accounts of the people who have been historically oppressed and underrepresented. She has worked on translating unpublished papyri in Coptic and Greek for Bryn Mawr College and her recent work has been focused on lexicographical papyrology and the usage of lexical papyri.

This week media archaeologist Brian Michael Murphy drops in to talk about the cult classic, Sneakers starring Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, and roughly every actor in Hollywood. We talk about just how prescient this film was in predicting data mining as well as Brian's own work exploring data storage, record keeping, and the American obsession with preserving information. I hope you dig it.

About our guest:
Brian Michael Murphy is Associate Professor of American Studies at Williams College and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. His book We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World (University of North Carolina Press, 2022) received the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association, and his writing has appeared in the The Wall Street Journal, The Kenyon Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, Narrative, and in Italian translation in Ácoma, among other places. A Fulbright Scholar, his work has also received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Vermont Arts Council. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Studies from The Ohio State University, where he was a Presidential Fellow.

This week Kate Carpenter drops in to talk about the new film Twisters along with her research on the history of modern-day storm chasing. We get into what they got right, what liberties they took, the role of climate change in the spread of tornado alley, and exactly how crazy are tornado chasers anyway. If you feel it, ride it. 

About our guest:
Kate Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science at Princeton University. Before that, she earned a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Master of Arts in History (with an emphasis in public history) from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In between, she has been a writer, copy editor, designer, screenprinter, farmers’ market volunteer and communications officer, and occasional history consultant. When she’s not hosting and producing Drafting the Past, she is working on a dissertation about the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the second half of the twentieth century.

This week Kate Sheppard drops in to talk about the movie that made everyone bisexual: 1999's The Mummy starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. We get into why this is such a perfect summer movie and dive deep into the history of archaeology itself. Kate also shares with us the findings from her new book Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, available now. This is an awesome conversation with one of my favorite people in the profession. I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Dr. Kathleen Sheppard earned her PhD in History of Science from the University of Oklahoma in 2010. After a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at the American University in Cairo, she arrived at Missouri S&T in the fall of 2011. She teaches mainly survey courses on modern Western Civilizations, which is arguably one of the most important courses students in 21st century America can take. Her main focus is on the history of science from the ancient Near East to present day Europe, United States, and Latin America. She has taught courses on the history of European science and Latin American science, as well as a seminar on women in the history of science.

Sheppard’s research focuses on 19th and 20th century Egyptology and women in the field. Her first book was a scientific biography of Margaret Alice Murray, the first woman to become a university-trained Egyptologist in Britain (Lexington, 2013). Murray’s career spanned 70 years and over 40 publications. Sheppard is also the editor of a collection of letters between Caroline Ransom Williams, the first university-trained American Egyptologist, and James Breasted from the University of Chicago (Archaeopress, 2018). Sheppard’s most recent monograph, Tea on the Terrace, is about hotels in Egypt as sites of knowledge creation in Egyptology during the discipline’s “Golden Age,” around 1880 to 1930.

Happy 6th birthday to HATM! This week we have something special for you: the film that started it all! And as a bonus, we asked the screenwriters of National Treasure, Cormac and Marianne Wibberley to join me and Joanne Freeman to talk about the creation of the film, what it has to say about history, and the movie's legacy. This is a fun time.

About our guests:
Cormac and Marianne Wibberley are a screenwriting team with multiple credits to their name including National Treasure, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and Bad Boyz II.

Joanne Freeman is is Professor of History at Yale University and specializes in the politics and political culture of the revolutionary and early national periods of American History.  She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia.  Her most recent book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press), won the Best Book award from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and her edited volume, Alexander Hamilton: Writings (Library of America) was one of the Atlantic Monthly’s “best books” of 2001.  Her current project, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America, explores physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830 and the Civil War, and what it suggests about the institution of Congress, the nature of American sectionalism, the challenges of a young nation’s developing democracy, and the longstanding roots of the Civil War.

This week Megan Kate Nelson and Kate Carpenter drop in to talk about Kevin Costner's new American epic, Horizon. Our reviews (and our drinks) are mixed but this is such a fun episode as we talk not only about where Horizon succeeds and fails but also about what Costner's career has to say about The West in general. This one is fun.

About our guests:
Megan Kate Nelson is a writer, historian, road cyclist, and cocktail enthusiast.And starting in September, she will be the 2024-2025 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th-Century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. While she is there, she will be finishing her new book, “The Westerners: The Creation of America’s Most Iconic Region.” She is the author of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which was a Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Her most recent book, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America was published by Scribner on March 1, 2022, the 150th anniversary of the Yellowstone Act, which created the first national park in the world. Saving Yellowstone has won the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Nonfiction, and is one of Smithsonian Magazine‘s Top Ten Books in History for 2022. She is an expert in the history of the American Civil War, the U.S. West, and popular culture, and have written articles about these topics for The New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, Slate, and Smithsonian Magazine.

Kate Carpenter is a PhD candidate in History of Science at Princeton University whose research focuses on the intersection of environmental history and history of science. Her dissertation is a social and scientific history of storm chasing in the United States since the 1950s. It draws on archival sources, scientific publications, photographs and videos created by storm chasers, popular culture, and oral histories to examine how both professional meteorologists and weather enthusiasts created a community that became central both to our understanding of severe storms and to the cultural identity of the Great Plains.

Kate holds a 2023-2024 Charlotte Elizabeth Proctor Honorific Fellowship from Princeton University. From 2022-2023, her work was supported by the Graduate Fellowship in the History of Science from the American Meteorological Society, and in 2021-2022 she held the Taylor-Wei Dissertation Research Fellowship in the History of Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma History of Science. She has also been awarded travel fellowships including the Andrew W. Mellon Travel Fellowship from the University of Oklahoma, the Summer Dissertation Grant from the Princeton American Studies program, and two awards with outstanding merit from the University of Missouri-Kansas City Women’s Council Graduate Assistance Fund.

The trailer for Gladiator II is out and we are here for it. Craig Bruce Smith joins in to talk about what we are expecting, the first film's legacy, and Denzel Washington. Let's go.

This week Kevin Levine, Waitman Beorn, and Rich Condon drop in to talk about the most famous battle of the Civil War. We jump into Ted Turner's 1993 production, asking if it is an apologist film, talk about the events surrounding the battle, and talk about our favorite Civil War books and films.

About our guests:
Waitman Beorn is an assistant professor in History at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK.  Dr. Beorn was previously the Director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, VA and the inaugural Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.  His first book, Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Harvard University Press) Dr. Beorn is also the author of The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) and has recently finished a book on the Janowska concentration camp outside of Lviv, Ukraine. That book Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv will be released in August 2024 from Nebraska University Press.

Kevin Levin is an experienced and award-winning educator, author, and historian with expertise in high school and college classroom instruction, historic site tours, collaborations with museums, and history teacher training. His research and writing are focused primarily on the history and legacy of the Civil War era. He is the author and editor of three books, including most recently, Searching For Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (2019), Remembering The Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (2012) and Interpreting the Civil War at Museums and Historic Sites (2017). He is currently at work on A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, which is under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press as well as editing the collected wartime and postwar correspondence of Captain John Christopher Winsmith.

Rich Condon is a public historian from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of Shepherd University. For over a decade, he has worked with a multitude of sites and organizations, including The Battle of Franklin Trust, Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum, and the National Park Service. Rich has written for Civil War Times Magazine, The Civil War Monitor, American Battlefield Trust, as well as Emerging Civil War, and operates the Civil War Pittsburgh blog. He currently lives in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

This week Kevin Rusnak, Tyler Peterson, and Michael Bazemore drop into talk about the Cold War, daredevils, and the birth of the Space Program.  We have a lot of fun talking about the men and women who made NASA and maybe the coolest movie poster of all time. 

This week poet and screenwriter Jimmy Santiago Baca joins Jimmy Patiño and me to talk about his 1993 epic Blood In Blood Out. We talk about Jimmy's life story, the challenges facing Chicanos in the 70s & 80s and the film's legacy today. This is a special pod. Hope you like it.

About our guests:
Jimmy Santiago Baca is a poet and activist of Chicano and Apache descent and author of Martin and Meditations on the South Valley (1987), which received the 1988 Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 1989. In addition to over a dozen books of poetry, he has published memoirs, essays, stories, and a screenplay, Blood In Blood Out (aka Bound by Honor) (1993), which was  directed by Taylor Hackford.

Jimmy Patiño seeks to critically excavate alternative imaginings of democratic practice among aggrieved communities in the midst of global capitalism. Concentrating on Mexican-origin and broader Latino/a/x communities at the U.S. Mexico Border and in major U.S. urban settings, his work attempts to dialog about the ways that concepts of race, gender and nation create hegemonic class disparities AND formulate an array of identities that mobilize social movements and initiate class struggles on multiple fronts. His first book, Raza Sí, Migra No: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego asserts that important contingents of Mexican-origin activists in the U.S. engaged, across generations, the crisis over the “illegal alien“ through attempts at organizing the Mexican-origin community across differences of national affiliation and citizenship status. Focusing on San Diego due to its vital positioning as both urban and border space where consistent migration and race-based border policing has occurred, the project illuminates a serious challenge to deportation-oriented immigration policies between 1968 and 1986 through the ideological prism of Chicano self-determination. He is now working on a number of other projects, including a study that investigates the conceptualization and historical practice of solidarity primarily through the lens of African American, Chicana/o/x, and Puerto Rican sites of struggle in the twentieth century. Important to this investigation are the ways regional differences and geo-historical contexts facilitated articulations of Black-Brown/Afro-Latinx diasporic solidarities and how these articulations led to counter hegemonic activities and theories of revolution across local, national and transnational boundaries. Through a relational and comparative framework, the study will ground these analyses in historical activities in the Midwest, Texas, California and New York in the burgeoning Black and Brown Power movements at the mid to late 20th century. His broader research and teaching interests include Comparative Ethnic Studies, Chicano/a-Latino/a History, diaspora/transnationalism/borderlands, social movements and political mobilizations, and Cultural Studies.

This week Greg Eghigian drops in to talk about Steven Spielberg's first extraterrestrial film and his new book charting the global history of UFO sightings. We get into the histories behind the sightings, how the Cold War affected how we think about space aliens, and whether or not one should put gravy on Devil's Tower.

About our guest:
Greg is a professor of history and bioethics at Penn State University. A historian of both the human sciences and modern Europe, he is particularly interested in how societies grapple with the questions and problems associated with modernity through the vehicles of science, technology, and medicine. His research has largely focused on the nature of power and the relationship between the state, science, and medicine in understanding and managing things such as disability, deviance, criminality, mental illness, and security. He regularly writes articles and present papers on the general history of madness and psychiatry. In recent years, however, his interests have moved into studying the history of supernatural and paranormal phenomena. 

This week Jamie Goodall joins #HATM regulars John Wyatt Greenlee and Leah Lagrone to get to the bottom of a serious question: to which generation does The Goonies belong. We are up to no good in this episode and even through in some pirate history to boot. HATM never says die.

About our guests:
Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee is  a medievalist and a cartographic historian. His academic research is primarily driven by questions of how people perceive and reproduce their spaces:  how movement through the world — both experiential and imagined — becomes codified in visual and written maps. You can find him on twitter at @greenleejw

 Dr. Leah LaGrone is an assistant professor of history and public history director. She graduated from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, with a PhD in history focused on borderlands, labor, and gender studies in early 20th century. Her research examines state legislation and the discourse on minimum wages for women, specifically the connections of sex work with low wages. Her current book project, “A Woman’s Worth: How Race and Respectability Politics Influenced Minimum Wage Policies,” demonstrates that the politics around race and the minimum wage for women drove conversations among labor, politicians, and progressive reformers about the future of white supremacy in Texas.


Dr. Jamie L.H. Goodall is a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C. All views expressed on my website are my own and are not reflective of my employer, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense. She also teaches part-time at Southern New Hampshire University in their College of Online & Continuing Education. She is the author of Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2020), National Geographic’s Pirates: Shipwrecks, Conquests, and their Lasting Legacy (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2021), Pirates and Privateers from Long Island Sound to Delaware Bay (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2022), and The Daring Exploits of Black Sam Bellamy: From Cape Cod to the Caribbean (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2023).

This week Julio Capó, Jr. drops in to talk about The Birdcage. We get into Robin Williams' queer performances, what this film meant then, and what it means now. We also talk about Julio's scholarship of Miami's immigration and LGBTQ+ history, along with our mutual love of Florida. One of the best pods we've ever done. I hope you enjoy.

About our guest:
Professor Capó is a transnational historian whose research and teaching interests include modern U.S. history, especially the United States’s relationship to the Caribbean and Latin America. He addresses how gender and sexuality have historically intersected with constructions of ethnicity, race, class, nation, age, and ability. His first book, Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (UNC Press, 2017), highlights how transnational forces—including (im)migration, trade, and tourism—to and from the Caribbean shaped Miami’s queer past. The book has received six awards and honors, including the Charles S. Sydnor Award from the Southern Historical Association for the best book written on Southern history. His work has appeared in the Journal of American History, Radical History Review, Diplomatic History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Modern American History, GLQ, H-Net, American Studies, and several volumes.

Capó’s research extends to his commitment to public history and civic engagement. He curated “Queer Miami: A History of LGBTQ Communities” for History Miami Museum (open from March-September 2019) and participated in a National Park Service initiative to promote and identify historic LGBTQ sites and contributed a piece on Miami’s queer past for its theme study. Prior to entering graduate school, he worked as a broadcast news writer and producer, and his work has appeared in several outlets such as The Washington Post, Time, The Miami Herald, and El Nuveo Día (Puerto Rico).

Capó is the recipient of several awards including the Audre Lorde Prize from the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History and the Carlton C. Qualey Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. He currently serves as the co-chair of the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History and on the Editorial Board for the Journal of American History.

This week Max Felker-Kantor and I talk about what may be the world's most unlikely history movie: 21 Jump Street. We talk about the real-life attempts to embed police officers undercover in schools, the rise and fall of D.A.R.E., and the role DARE played in creating the carceral state. This is such a surprising episode with some real revelations and Max is an awesome guest. I hope you dig it.

About our guest:
Max Felker-Kantor is an associate professor of history at Ball State University. He teaches courses in twentieth-century American and African American history. His research explores policing, race, policing, politics, and cities since World War II. His first book, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) explores policing and antipolice activism in Los Angeles from the Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion. His second book, DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools, is a history of the DARE Program and will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2024. He is currently working on a new project on the history of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Scandal and the origins of twenty-first century policing. His work has been published in the Journal of Urban History, Modern American History, Journal of Civil and Human Rights, Boom California, and the Pacific Historical Review, as well as a range of other academic and popular outlets.

This week Liz Covart drops in to talk with Kelsa and I about the final episode of Franklin, along with her thoughts on the show as it was. We get into the diplomatic manuevering at Paris, Liz's Codfish moment, the brigand that was William Augustus Bowles and ask if the French lost the American Revolution.

About our guest:
Liz Covart is a historian of early America who practices scholarly history, public history, and digital humanities, primarily as the Founding Director of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. She is the creator and host of the incredible history podcast, Ben Franklin's World.

This week marine biologist and world reknowned shark expert Melissa Cristina Márquez dives in to talk all things Jaws. We talk about her career as a scientist, the role of sharks in the ecosystem, and the impact the book and film had on global shark populations. This is a different look for HATM and a lot of fun talking to an inspiring scholar. We're gonna need a bigger pod.

About our guest:
Known as the "Mother of Sharks," Melissa Cristina Márquez is a Latina marine biologist and conservationist who studies sharks and their relatives (the skates, rays, and chimaeras- collectively, this groups of animals are known as 'Chondrichthyans'). Márquezspecifically studies their habitat use (why they are where they are) and how their portrayal in the media influences attitudes towards marine predators and conservation initiatives. She founded The Fins United Initiative (TFUI; www.finsunited.co.nz) a program that introduces audiences worldwide to the diverse sharks and scientists who study them. You may have seen her on Shark Week or watched her TEDx talk on Youtube, "Sharks & Female Scientists: More Alike Than You Think." She is also a freelance wildlife writer and regularly covers marine science in regards to sharks as a Forbes contributor. You can follow Melissa's worldwide science communication efforts on her Twitter (@mcmsharksxx) or Instagram (@melissacristinamarquez) and learn more about her research and outreach there.  

Listen. You don't need to have watched the Franklin series at this point. Listen to THIS POD. This one. Everything you need is here. We've got Kelsa Pellettiere. We have Michael Hattem. We have JOANNE FREEMAN. We have colonial ideologies and diatribes on where an American Revolution series should go. We have disappointment in Michael Douglas. We have fart jokes. We have codfish (you'll see). Easily one of the most fun conversations of my life. Enjoy.

About our guests:
Kelsa Pelletiere is the guest host for the duration of the Franklin podcast miniseries. I sought out someone who is an absolute expert on the man and his life and seemingly everyone came back with Kelsa. She is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Mississippi. Her research focuses on early diplomatic history in the United States, specifically Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution. Her teaching interests include eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century American history; Revolutionary America; U.S. diplomacy; and the Atlantic world.

Michael Hattem is an American historian, with interests in early America, the American Revolution, and historical memory. He received his PhD in History at Yale University and am the author of Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2020) and The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History (Yale University Press, 2024). He has taught History and American Studies courses at The New School and Knox College.

Joanne Freeman specializes in the politics and political culture of the revolutionary and early national periods of American History.  She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia.  Her most recent book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press), won the Best Book award from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and her edited volume, Alexander Hamilton: Writings (Library of America) was one of the Atlantic Monthly’s “best books” of 2001.  Her current project, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America, explores physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830 and the Civil War, and what it suggests about the institution of Congress, the nature of American sectionalism, the challenges of a young nation’s developing democracy, and the longstanding roots of the Civil War.

This week Kelsa and I ask the tough questions about the series: Are they spending too much time on Temple? Is Lafayette the best character? How will they resolve the series? Which Founding Father would have had an OnlyFans account? Stick around for the wildest discussion on the American Revolution you've ever heard.

This week we are joined Bathsheba Demuth to talk about the Chris Hemsworth-led In The Heart of the Sea. Bathsheba is the author of one of my favorite books,  Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait and we talk about the history of whaling, her work with Indigenous communities in the Yukon, and of course, Moby Dick. This is one of the most fun conversations I've had on this podcast and I hope you enjoy.

About our guest:
Bathsheba Demuth is writer and environmental historian specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern places and cultures began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon, where she trained huskies for several years. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, and ecologies intersect. In addition to her prize-winning book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, her writing has appeared in publications from The American Historical Review to The New Yorker and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is currently the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. 

This week my good friend and native Coloradan Kathleen Belew drops in to talk about the movie that etched the word "wolverines" into our lives forever: Red Dawn. We talk about how Red Dawn depicts Cold War fears on the big screen, and how it has been perceived in the *checks notes* forty years since its release. As usual, Kathleen and I talk about where to get the best food in Colorado, skiing, and god knows what else. This is a pod you've been asking for. I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Kathleen Belew is a historian, author, and teacher. She specializes in the history of the present. She spent ten years researching and writing her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2018, paperback 2019). In it, she explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common story about betrayal by the government, war, and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement mobilized and carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City. This movement was never adequately confronted, and remains a threat to American democracy. Her next book, Home at the End of the World, illuminates our era of apocalypse through a history focused on her native Colorado where, in the 1990s, high-profile kidnappings and murders, right-wing religious ideology, and a mass shooting exposed rents in America’s social fabric, and dramatically changed our relationship with place, violence, and politics (Random House).

Belew has spoken about Bring the War Home in a wide variety of places, including The Rachel Maddow Show, The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell, AC 360 with Anderson Cooper, Frontline, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered. Her work has featured prominently in documentaries such as Homegrown Hate: The War Among Us (ABC) and Documenting Hate: New American Nazis (Frontline). Belew is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. She earned tenure at the University of Chicago in 2021, where she spent seven years. Her research has received the support of the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Jacob K. Javits Foundation. Belew earned her BA in the Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, where she was named Dean’s Medalist in the Humanities. She earned a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University.

This week the legendary Seth Cotlar joins in with Kelsa and me to talk about Episode 5 of Franklin. We get into the dynamics between John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, talk about the need for more meat some of these storylines, and address the needs of the colonies to those of Ukraine in the present day. It's another great trip to the 18th century.

This week Agnes Arnold-Forster jumps in to talk about the emotional roller coaster that is Pixar's Inside Out. We talk about how historians have conceptualized emotions, their role in the human experience, and Agnes' new book which charts the history of nostalgia. This is such a cool pod because we go places we rarely get to visit. I hope you dig it.

About our guest:
Agnes Arnold-Forster is a writer; researcher; and historian. She has written, researched, and presented on everything from women's health in today's Britain to the history of cancer; from the 1918 flu pandemic to the well-being of surgeons in twenty-first-century America. She is an expert in the history of Europe, the USA, and Canada, and my research spans the eighteenth century to the present day. She explores societies, cultures, medicine, science, technology, emotions, and the world of work. She is currently writing a book about the history of nostalgia, due to be published by Picador in April 2024.

This week HATM friend Lindsay Chervinsky drops in to talk about Episode 4 of Franklin. We talk about the very real possibility all of this could fail, spies galore, a young Louis XVI (with a head!) and a villainous John Adams? Join in with us now!

About our guest:
 Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a presidential historian. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, co-editor of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture, and the forthcoming book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic. She regularly writes for public audiences in the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Bulwark, Time Magazine, USA Today, CNN, and the Washington Post. 

This week Elsa Devienne drops in to talk about Gidget and the history and transformation of the California beach. We get into the fascination with the US and the environment, as well as the influence of Hawaii on California beach culture. We also jump into issues of body image, gender dynamics, and queer representation in beach movies and the global trasnformation of surf culture post Gidget. This is a fun talk.

About our guest:
 Elsa Devienne joined Northumbria University in 2019, having previously taught at Princeton University, Université Paris Nanterre, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her research lies at the intersection of urban history, environmental history, and the history of gender, body, and sexuality, with a focus on the 20th century. She is particularly interested in the history of Americans’ intense engagement with their coastlines, from the 19th-century beach-bathing boom until today’s climate crisis and its catastrophic consequences for coastal communities.

Her first book, La ruée vers le sable: une histoire environnementale des plages de Los Angeles (Sorbonne Editions, 2020), won the 2021 Willi Paul Adams Award awarded by the Organization of American Historians for the best book on American history published in a language other than English. A translated and updated version with a new epilogue is coming out with Oxford University Press in 2024 under the title Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles. She is also the author of several articles published in academic journals in the US and Europe, including in The Journal of Urban History, The European Journal of American Studies, California History, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire and Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales.   

This week begins our first episode covering the new series on Apple TV, FRANKLIN, starring Michael Douglas. Each week we'll recap the episode, fill in with historical backstory, and offer plenty of snark. We have a permanent cohost for the series in Kelsa Pelletiere, one of the foremost Franklin scholars in the world. And we'll rotate in new guests each week to provide fresh thoughts and perspective on what we are seeing onscreen. This is gonna be fun.

About our guests:
Kelsa Pelletiere is the guest host for the duration of the Franklin podcast miniseries. I sought out someone who is an absolute expert on the man and his life and seemingly everyone came back with Kelsa. She is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Mississippi. Her research focuses on early diplomatic history in the United States, specifically Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution. Her teaching interests include eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century American history; Revolutionary America; U.S. diplomacy; and the Atlantic world.

Craig Bruce Smith is an associate professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norfolk, VA. He authored American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era and co-authored George Washington’s Lessons in Ethical Leadership. He specializes in American Revolutionary and early American history, specifically focusing on George Washington, honor, ethics, war, the founders, transnational ideas, and national identity. In addition, he has broader interests in colonial America, the early republic, leadership, and early American cultural, intellectual, and political history.

This week Drew McKevitt returns to talk about Robocop (1987). We get into depictions of Detroit as a failed city and of Robocop as both the commercial answer to the Terminator and maybe the antithesis of Dirty Harry. And we dive deep into Drew’s new book to talk about the rise of the gun culture in the United States. Hanging with Drew is always a blast- he’s one of the smartest and funniest historians you’re gonna meet.

About our guest:
Drew McKevitt is an associate professor of history at Louisiana Tech University. He recently published a book called Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America. His new book is Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America. His next project examines U.S. workers in foreign-owned manufacturing facilities in the United States since the 1970s. You can find him on twitter at @drewmckevitt or his website, https://andrewcmckevitt.com/

This week the pod welcomes back Thomas Lecaque and John Wyatt Greenlee along with #HATM newcomer Anna Waymack to talk about maybe the best medieval movie ever made: A Knight's Tale. We talk Chaucer, romance, Heath Ledger, the Black Prince, and that fucking soundtrack. Let's go.

About our guests:
Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence. He has written for the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Foreign Policy and The Bulwark, among others. Follow him on Twitter: @tlecaque.

John Wyatt Greenlee is  a medievalist and a cartographic historian.His academic research is primarily driven by questions of how people perceive and reproduce their spaces:  how movement through the world — both experiential and imagined — becomes codified in visual and written maps. You can find him on twitter at @greenleejw 

Anna Waymack, is a Ph.D. candidate in Cornell's Medieval Studies Program, and was selected as a fellow in Olin Library's Summer Graduate Fellowship for Digital Humanities in 2016. As part of that fellowship, Anna developed digital humanities expertise and produced a public website focused on an aspect of her research, Geoffrey Chaucer and the charge of raptus brought forth by Cecily Chaumpaigne.

This week Jeff Melnick and Erik Baker jump in to talk about Steven Spielberg's Munich. We talk about the history behind the attacks in 1972, why they were relevant in 2005, and why they remain relevant today. And yes, we absolutely discuss the warfare and attempted genocide in Palestine today. This is a really important conversation and I hope that it helps to illustrate how movies can be part of historical dialogue. I learned a lot from these guys and I hope you will too.

About our guests:
Jeffrey Melnick is a professor at University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of 9/11 Culture: America Under Construction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Black-Jewish Relations on Trial (University Press of Mississippi, 2000), and A Right to Sing the Blues (Harvard University Press, 1999). You can find him on twitter at @melnickjeffrey1

Erik Baker is currently a Lecturer in the History of Science at Harvard University and oversee the senior thesis program for undergraduates. As an associate editor at The Drift, I've been involved since its inception. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in May 2022, and my dissertation won the 2023 Leo P. Ribuffo Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

His research delves into the modern U.S. work culture and the impact of scientific expertise on workers' self-perception. In his forthcoming book, Make Your Own Job: The Entrepreneurial Work Ethic in Modern America, he explores how social scientists and management intellectuals reshaped the American work ethic during the turbulence of twentieth-century U.S. capitalism. He has contributed articles on labor, politics, and American history to publications such as Harper’s, n+1, The Baffler, Jewish Currents, Jacobin, and The Drift, where he has been an editor since its inception.

This week Christina Abreu drops in to discuss Cuban-American history, Cuban music, and the representation of Cubans in film. We explore the origins and characteristics of Cuban music, as well as the migration of Cubans to the United States in the 1950s. We also discuss the relationship between Cuban-Americans and other Latino groups, as well as the integration and segregation within Cuban-American communities. This is a fun podcast and deep dive into Cuban American history. I hope you dig it.

About our guest:
Christina Abreu is associate professor of history and director of the Center for Latino/Latin American Studies at Northern Illinois University. Her research focuses on the role of race, nationalism, and migration in the Cuban and Spanish Caribbean diasporic communities of the United States with a particular emphasis on popular culture.  Her first book, Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Cuban New York City and Miami, 1940-1960, examined the relationship between black and white Cuban musicians and the Cuban and broader Latinx communities of New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s. In her second book, Patria over Profits: The Story of Afro-Cuban Boxing Champion Teófilo Stevenson, she offers a cultural history of the life and times of Afro-Cuban boxing champion Teófilo Stevenson, winner of three heavyweight boxing Olympic gold medals in 1972, 1976, and 1980. In detailing Stevenson’s triumphs in the ring, another more complex and interconnected story emerges about revolutionary Cuba and the island’s Afro-Caribbean connections, race and black athletic activism, Cuban exile culture and politics, and international sports celebrity. Patria over Profits is under contract with the Sport and Society series at the University of Illinois Press.

We've reached the end of the mission here at Historians At The Movies. This week Sarah, Colin, Luke and I talk about the final thrust of the air war in Germany, POW camps and escape attempts, Rosie's legacy, and the melancholy of leaving the war behind. We also give our final thoughts about the series, where to place it alongside Band of Brothers and The Pacific and what series we'd like to see next. Hope you've enjoyed this ride as much as we did.

This week Karen L. Cox swings by to talk about the South, the 70s, and why Burt Reynolds was so damn cool. This is probably the first time you’ve heard Smokey and the Bandit on a history podcast, but that’s what we are here for. This one is fun. 

About our guest:
Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.  She is the author of four books, the editor or co-editor of two volumes on southern history and has written numerous essays and articles, including an essay for the New York Times best seller Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Her books include Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, and most recently, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, which was published in April 2021 and won the Michael V.R. Thomason book prize from the Gulf South Historical Association.

This week Sarah, Colin, and Luke drop in to talk about the penultimate episode of Masters of the Air. We've a lot to talk about in this episode- inlcuding the air war in Italy and Romania, which highlighs the strategic and tactical operations of the 15th Air Force and the role of the Tuskegee Airmen. We also revist the prison camp storyline, to talk about the tensions and fraying relationships among the POWs. This leads to discussions on the themes of racism and prejudice in World War II, the importance of training and race relations, the need for prioritizing storylines and themes, the ineffectiveness of the spy plot, the need for a comprehensive air war series, unresolved plotlines and character arcs, the problem of multiple plots and poor character development, and our speculations on the final episode of the series. This is easily the best episode we've done on this series. Hope you like it.

This week Mary Hicks and Margari Hill drop in to talk all things DUNE. We focus on Dune Part 2 but also talk about the historical influences on Frank Herbert as he wrote Dune, along with how Dune influenced the science fiction and fantasy that came afterward.  We talk about the parallels between the fictional universe and historical events, such as the Ottoman Empire and the interactions between European powers and Indigenous communities. We also get into the portrayal of whiteness in the film and the complexities of women's roles and agency within the narrative. We dive into the egalitarianism in the Fremen world and the infiltration of outside values. The depiction of female spirituality and the complexity of women characters are discussed. The casting and representation in the film, particularly in relation to Middle Eastern culture, are examined. Mary and Margari also touch on the historical resonances and sensitivity in the film. The difference between a cautionary tale and a hopeful vision is explored. This conversation is one of the best we've ever had on this podcast and I hope you like it.

About our guests:
Mary Hicks is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.

Margari Hill  is the co-founder and Executive Director of Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative (MuslimARC), a human rights education organization. She is also a freelance writer published in How We Fight White Supremacy (2018) Time, Huffington Post, and Al Jazeera English. She earned her master’s degree in History of the Middle East and Islamic Africa from Stanford University in 2006.  Her research includes transformations in Islamic education, colonial surveillance in Northern Nigeria, anti-colonial resistance among West Africans in Sudan during the early 20th century, interethnic relations in Muslim communities, anti-bias K-12 education, and the criminalization of Black Muslims. She is on the Advisory Council of Islam, Social Justice & Interreligious Engagement Program at the Union Theological Seminary. For her work, she has received numerous awards including the Council of American Islamic Relation’s (CAIR) 2020 Muslim of the Year award,  Khadija bint Khuwaylid Relief Foundation Lifetime Humanitarian award in 2019,  the Big Heart Award in 2017, and MPAC’s 2015 Change Maker Award. She has given talks and lectures in various universities and community centers throughout the country.

This week Sarah, Luke, Colin, and I continue to follow the Bloody Hundredth in what amounted to a tonal shift for the series. We talk about life inside German POW camps, the Great Escape, the Battle of Berlin, and Black Monday. We dive into the Red Cross and also compare the experiences of American prisoners in Europe and the Pacific, along with those of German prisoners in the United States. We also talk about Crosby's affair with Landra, as well as the arrival of the P-51 Mustang over the skies of Europe in 1944. And maybe you hear my Bill Clinton impression for the very first time. This is our best pod on this series yet.

This week Matt Guariglia drops in to talk about Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruises's Minority Report. We also discuss the history of policing in New York City and its impact on other cities. We jump into as eugenics, race and ethnicity in policing, gender dynamics, and the influence of World War I on the evolution of criminality in New York City and the rest of the United States as well as the Italian-American experience and the assassination of Joseph Petrosino. This is a fun talk about a somewhat overlooked Spielberg/Cruise collaboration. I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Matthew Guariglia is a historian and inter-disciplinary scholar serving as senior policy analyst for surveillance and technology policy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) where he focuses on policy and advocacy related to how local & federal law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and private corporations use technology. He currently holds academic affiliations in the Emory University Department of History and at Indiana University and the Institute of American Thought in support of research into the long history of how the U.S. government collects information on individuals and the relationship between information technologies and punitive state power and activism.

His first book Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York is out now from Duke University Press. He is also the co-editor of the Essential Kerner Commission Report (Liveright, 2021). He has a PhD in History from the University of Connecticut where my dissertation was awarded the 2020 Outstanding Dissertation Award by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. 

 He is also a researcher with years of experience with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requesting. His writing can also be found in the Washington Post, NBC News, TIME, Slate, VICE, MuckRock, and the Urban History Association's blog, The Metropole.

This week Sarah, Luke, Colin, and I dive into the latest episode of Masters of the Air, talking specifically about the experiences of Americans in German POW camps, heterosexual and homosexual relationships of American servicemen, a perceived anti-British bias on the show, and our first glimpses of the Holocaust on the series. This is our deepest dive yet. Hope you like it.

This week Edda Fields-Black joins in to talk about her book on Harriet Tubman and the film Harriet. We talk about the importance of accurate terminology in black history, the role of religion in enslaved people's lives, the challenges of escaping from South Carolina, and the emotional impact of historical research. We also get into the need for more biopics on historical figures and recommend books and scholars for further reading. Edda's new book is gonna CHANGE THINGS, y'all. I hope you like the pod.

About our guest:
Edda Fields-Black is a specialist in the trans-national history of West African rice farmers, peasant farmers in pre-colonial Upper Guinea Coast and enslaved laborers on rice plantations in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry during the antebellum period.

Fields-Black’s new book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War (Oxford University Press, trade list, February 2024) offers the fullest account to date of Tubman’s Civil War service. This narrative history tells the untold story of the Combahee River Raid from the perspective of Tubman and the enslaved people she helped to free based on new sources not previously used by historians, as well as new interpretations of sources familiar to Tubman’s biographers. It is the story of Harriet Tubman’s Civil War service during which she worked as a cook and nurse in Beaufort, SC, and gathered intelligence among freed people and enslaved Blacks. It is the story of enslaved people who labored against their wills on seven rice plantations, ran for their lives, boarded the US gunboats, and sailed to freedom.

This week we hit the halfway point in Masters of the Air. Dr. Sarah Myers had to drop out of formation this week so we welcome back Dr. Luke Truxal and Dr. Colin Colbourn to talk about Black Week for the Bloody Hundreth as well as how air crews dealt with the loss of Buck Cleven, Crosby's role as group navigator, the disaster at Munster, and Colin's work recovering fallen service members as part of Project Recover. 

This week  Brian DeLay drops in to share a milkshake about There Will Be Blood and the performance of Daniel Day-Lewis. We explore the complexity of the protagonist, Daniel Plainview, and his lack of change throughout the film as well as the historical context of oil barons and the era of titans in American history. The conversation delves into the relationship between Plainview and capitalism, highlighting his refusal to let the big guys win, even at the cost of his own success.  The conversation touches on the violent ending, the absence of Native peoples in the narrative, and Brian DeLay's work on the West including the differences between writing for trade presses and academic presses. Brian is a titan in the field so I hope you enjoy this conversation

About our guest:
Brian DeLay is a scholar of 18th- and 19th-century North America, specializing in transnational, borderlands, and Native American histories. Most of his writing explores connections between U.S., Latin American, and Indigenous histories in order to better understand power and inequality in the Western Hemisphere.

His first book, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War
recovers the forgotten, transnational story of how Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, Navajos and other Indigenous peoples shaped the transformative era of the U.S.-Mexican War. He is now working on three interconnected projects about the history of the international arms trade. The first is a book called Aim at Empire: American Revolutions through the Barrel of a Gun, 1750-1825. The book explains how the international arms trade made anticolonial rebellion a practical possibility in British North America; how arms dealers from the newly-independent United States equipped the Haitian Revolution and the Spanish American Wars for Independence; and how privileged control over war material empowered U.S. empire in the trans-Appalachian West. Aim at Empire will be published by W.W. Norton in 2024. The second project is another book under contract with W.W. Norton: Means of Destruction: Guns, Freedom, and Domination in the Americas before World War II. 

This week marks a first in HATM Podcast history as Dr. Sarah Myers takes control, joined by mainstays Luke Truxal and Colin Colbourn. This week we e focus on ground crews and the tension of waiting for missions. The conversation then delves into the significance of the number of missions and the experiences of aircrews reaching their 25th mission. The gang also explores the portrayal of resistance movements and the complexities of their actions. Finally, they discuss the role of the Red Cross and USO in providing support and entertainment to the troops. This episode delves into the experiences of women serving with the USO and Red Cross, highlighting the complexities of romantic and sexual relations during wartime. The impact of Buck's death and the reactions of the characters are explored, shedding light on the psychological toll of losing a leader and friend. The role of pets in boosting morale is also touched upon, showcasing the importance of companionship during challenging times. Additionally, the episode raises questions about the deterioration of Chick Harding as a commander and the challenges faced by ground crews in maintaining aircraft and morale.

Hope you dig it.

This week @ColinColbourn buckles in to talk about Formula 1 racing, the Mille Miglia, how Ferrari recovered from WWII, and Colin’s work to find and repatriate American missing in action with Project Recover. 

About our guest:
Colin Colbourn, Ph.D., is Project Recover’s Lead Historian and a Postdoctoral Researcher with the University of Delaware. Since 2016, he has managed historical operations including archival research, data management, case analysis, and field investigations. Through these efforts, Project Recover has developed a massive internal archive comprised of thousands of historical reports, maps, and images. 

As a Postdoctoral Researcher, Colin Colbourn works closely with Mark Moline, Ph.D., co-founder of Project Recover. In this capacity, he develops MIA cases with the team of oceanographers and AUV/ROV experts at the University of Delaware. It is a collaboration that, like Project Recover, relies on mutli-disciplinary expertise to approach the MIA mission from different angles.

That...was intense. Sarah Myers and Luke Truxal are back for Episode 3 in what could be called A Very Bad Day over Germany. We'll set the tone of the episode, give you the backstory, then get into the nitty gritty with a detailed analysis of what we saw and what we didn't in Episode 3. We talk about the challenges of flying, such as the concept of 'max effort' and the impact of cloud cover. We also highlight the bloody and chaotic nature of the battle, as well as the difficult choices faced by the pilots and commanders involved. The Luftwaffe's situation in 1943 is discussed, highlighting the heavy losses they are facing. The decision of pilots and crews to abandon their planes and parachute out is explored, along with the various outcomes they may face. The condition of the planes after the raid is a concern, with some being damaged beyond repair. We finish by talking about how dark the series is about to get.

If you're like me, Carl Weathers was everywhere in your life from the late 70s until today, when we learned of his passing. I asked two friends, Craig Bruce Smith and Robert Greene II, to join in and talk about what he meant to Generation X and the Millenials, his role as THE Black action star of the 1980s, and how he changed his performances over time to new audiences. We refuse to be sad today because Carl Weathers was amazing. We hope you enjoy.

About our guests:
Craig Bruce Smith is an associate professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norfolk, VA. He authored American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era and co-authored George Washington’s Lessons in Ethical Leadership.

Robert Greene II Robert Greene II is an assistant professor of history at Claflin University and publications chair for the Society of US Intellectual Historians and lead associate editor for Black Perspectives.

This week we wanted to do something special. We talking about Edward Zwick's Civil War masterpiece, Glory, starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes, Morgan Freeman, and a host of other amazing performers. We talk about how the role of slavery in antebellum America, the specific experiences and dangers of the 54th Massachusetts, Glory compares to other films about the war, and why these conversations still matter today. This is easily the most important conversation we've had and I hope you like it.

About our guests:
Hilary Green is James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Her first book, Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016), explored how African Americans and their white allies created, developed, and sustained a system of African American education schools during the transition from slavery to freedom in Richmond, Virginia and Mobile, Alabama. Her in-progress second book focuses on how African Americans remembered and commemorated the American Civil War and its legacy.

Chris Barr is a Park Ranger at Reconstruction Era National Park in Becufort, South Carolina, where he has spent a career in the National Park Service teaching about the Civil War, Reconstruction and their legacies.

Holly Pinheiro is an Assistant Professor of African American History in the Department of History at Furman University. His research focuses on the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in the military from 1850 through the 1930s. Counter to the national narrative which championed the patriotic manhood of soldiering from the Civil War through the 1930s, his research reveals that African American veterans and their families’ military experience were much more fraught. Economic and social instability introduced by military service resonated for years and even generations after soldiers left the battlefield. He has published articles in edited volumes and academic journals, in and outside of the United States. My manuscript, The Families’ Civil War, is under contract with The University of Georgia Press in the UnCivil Wars Series. The study highlights how racism, within and outside of military service, impacted the bodies, economies, family structures, and social spaces of African Americans long after the war ended.

Adam Domby is a historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction. His first book, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020), examines the role of lies and exaggeration, in the creation of Lost Cause narratives of the war, as well as their connections to white supremacy. Looking at pension fraud, Confederate monument dedications, and other myths reveals that much of our understanding of the Civil War remains influenced by falsehoods and racism. Domby has written on a variety of topics including prisoners of war, guerrilla warfare, and genealogy. His current book project At War with Itself, focuses on southerners fighting their neighbors during the American Civil War and examines the legacy of those local fights that civil wars inevitably create. His research centers on the role these conflicts played in three divided southern communities during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Close examination of the social dynamics of these southern communities reveals new insights into why the Confederacy lost, why Reconstruction ended the way it did, and the distinctiveness of southern society, culture, and politics.

It's here! After years in development, we finally have Masters of the Air as a follow-up to Band of Brothers and the Pacific. Guests Dr. Sarah Myers and Dr. Luke Truxal join in to talk about the first two episodes, where the United States is in 1943, our first impressions, how what we see onscreen compares to historical reality, and where we think the show is going. This episode starts with a spoiler-free introduction and then moves into a recap with spoilers. We note this in the episode so you can stop if you haven't seen the episode yet. This series has a lot of promise, and we are excited to bring it to you.

About our guests:
Dr. Sarah Myers is a historian of public history, gender history, and war and society. As a public historian, she has conducted numerous oral history interviews for her own research on female pilots in World War II and with Pennsylvanian veterans of various wars and conflicts. In her previous role as director of The Keirn Family World War II Museum, a museum she created and opened, she hosted living history events and museum exhibition openings. She has also conducted interviews with documentaries and local and national media outlets on women in aviation, the U.S. military, and the anniversary of historic events. She recently received a National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) grant to generate dialogue with female veterans at five institutions around the U.S. You can find her new book here: https://a.co/d/hbdy3uV

Dr. Luke Truxal is an American military historian who focuses on the application of American air power during the Second World War. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Texas in 2011 and 2018.  His teaching fields include Europe in the twentieth century, United States history, United States military history, and United States political history in the twentieth century. Truxal’s main research interest is the air war in Europe from 1942 to 1945. He is the author of the forthcoming book Uniting against the Reich: The American Air War in Europe, which comes out in fall 2023. He is also an assistant editor for the scholarly web journal Balloons to Drones. He previously published “Bombing the Romanian Rail Network,” in the Spring 2018 issue of Air Power History.  He is currently researching the air war over Romania from 1942 to 1944 with a particular emphasis on American and Soviet coordination and joint operations.

This week Sarah Keyes and Josh Garrett-Davis drop in to talk about settlers, Native Americans, the Overland Trail, and yes, dysentery via Taylor Sheridan's 1883. We also talk about the West on film, how the West has been portrayed in movies, books, tv, and video games, as well as question why the West is in a pop culture revival in current moment. This is a really fun conversation. Hope you dig it.

About our guests:
Sarah Keyes is a historian of the United States. She specializes in the 19th century and the history of the U.S. West with a focus on the environment and intercultural interactions between Indigenous peoples and Euro-Americans. Her current work explores these topics along the overland trails to Oregon and California in the mid-19th century. Her first book, American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in October 2023. Keyes has also begun work on her second project, a regional and transnational study of suffrage in the U.S. West, for which she was recently awarded a Mellon-Schlesinger Summer Research Grant from the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.

Josh Garrett-Davis is a writer, historian, and curator. His work focuses on the American West, Indigenous histories, and art/media history. He is the author of two books: What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), which won the Outstanding Western Book award from the Center for the Study of the American West; and Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains (Little, Brown, 2012), a personal geography of his home region. His article “The Intertribal Drum of Radio: The Indians for Indians Hour and Native American Media, 1941–1951” appeared in Western Historical Quarterly in 2018 and won the Oscar O. Winther Award. He has written for numerous other publications.

This week George Dehner drops in to talk about 12 Monkeys (1995) and the history of epidemic diseases. We talk not only about the possibilities of a dystopian world caused by global contagion, but about how the fields of both environmental history and disease history evolved in the latter half of the 20th century. George is one of my former professors and it was awesome to sit down and talk to him. This is a cool conversation with one of the most influential scholars in my life. Hope you like it.

About our guest:
George Dehner is a world environmental historian who examines the intersection of humans and disease in the modern era. His first book Influenza: A Century of Science and Public Health was published in April 2012 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His second book Global Flu and You: A History of Influenza was published in December 2012 by Reaktion Press. His article “WHO Knows Best? National and International Responses to Pandemic Threats and the ‘Lessons’ of 1976” published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences received the 2011 Margaret T. Lane/Virginia F. Saunders Memorial Research Award by the American Library Association Government Documents Roundtable. He is currently beginning a research project on Legionnaires’ Disease.

This week environmental historian Sara Dant drops in to talk about a new history of the West, wolf reintroduction in Colorado, public land management, and Seth MacFarlane's homage to classic western films. This is a fun conversation about a silly movie that actually has a lot to say. I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Sara Dant is Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor and Chair of History at Weber State University whose work focuses on environmental politics in the United States with a particular emphasis on the creation and development of consensus and bipartisanism. Dr. Dant’s latest book is a new, completely revised and updated edition of Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (2023, University of Nebraska Press) with a foreword by Tom S. Udall. Dr. Dant is also an advisor and interviewee for Ken Burns' The American Buffalo documentary film (October 2023), the author of several prize-winning articles on western environmental politics, a precedent-setting Expert Witness Report and Testimony on Stream Navigability upheld by the Utah Supreme Court (2017), co-author of the two-volume Encyclopedia of American National Parks (2004) with Hal Rothman, and she has written chapters for three books on Utah: “Selling and Saving Utah, 1945-Present” in Utah History (forthcoming), “The ‘Lion of the Lord’ and the Land: Brigham Young's Environmental Ethic,” in The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays in Mormon Environmental History, ed. by Jedidiah Rogers and Matthew C. Godfrey (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019), 29-46, and “Going with the Flow: Navigating to Stream Access Consensus,” in Desert Water: The Future of Utah’s Water Resources (2014). Dr. Dant was the 2019-2020 John S. Hinckley Fellow at Weber State for excellence in scholarship, teaching, and service and was recognized as a Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor in 2020. She serves on PhD dissertation committees, regularly presents at scholarly conferences, works on cutting-edge conservation programs, and gives numerous public presentations. Dr. Dant teaches lower-division courses in American history and upper-division courses on the American West and US environmental history, as well as historical methods and the senior seminar.

This week we invite Scott Laderman to talk about Point Break (1991) and his book Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing. We talk about depictions of surfing in this film and others along with the origins of the pursuit, its commodification and commercialization, how surfers responded to genocide and apartheid in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the greatest surfing movies of all time, and greatest surfers of all time. This is a really fun and deep dive into surf and film history. I think you're gonna dig it.

About our guest:
Scott Laderman  broadly explores the various ways that Americans have encountered and ascribed meaning to the rest of the world. His first book, Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory (Duke University Press, 2009), examines issues of tourism and memory in postcolonial Vietnam. His second monograph, Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing (University of California Press, 2014), combines the passion for wave-riding he developed while growing up in California with his professional interest in the history of U.S. foreign relations. His most recent book, The “Silent Majority” Speech: Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and the Origins of the New Right (Routledge, 2019), uses Nixon’s most famous presidential address to probe the last years of the war in Vietnam and the rise of the modern right-wing political movement.

With Edwin Martini, he co-edits the Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond book series for the University of Massachusetts Press, and he has written for numerous popular publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, South China Morning Post, and Star Tribune.

This week, I invited I invited on two absolute luminaries in the gaming world in Emily Friedman and Trevor Valle to talk not only about the film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, but about the world around D&D complete with the history of the game and the politics surrounding table top gaming. And folks, this is such a cool deep dive into D&D. This is an appropriately dragon-sized episode; my gift to you for the final HATM Podcast of 2023.

About our guests:
Emily C. Friedman is an Associate Professor of English at Auburn University and teaches courses on British literature, book history, and game narratives. Trained as a book historian, narratologist, and digital humanist, her work examines the history of cultural production outside of commercial mass media from the eighteenth century to today, from never-published manuscript fiction to emerging media. Now one of the senior scholars and public intellectuals in the field of "Actual Play," a new media form where roleplaying games are performed for audiences, her research on the topic has appeared in multiple academic books and journals, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and she is a regular contributor to Polygon. She is at work on two book projects on Actual Play: a field-defining history of the form online, as well as a multiauthored critical companion to major Actual Play Dimension 20.

Trevor Valle  an American paleontologist and wildlife biologist. In addition to his extensive career in paleontology he has also served as personality on several notable paleontology and wildlife television programs and documentaries. He is also a professional TTRPG Dungeon Master. He has been a guest on numerous podcasts including Breaking Bio, the Science Enthusiast Podcast, and the Joe Rogan Experience. 

It's Christmas time and that means visiting an old classic. This week doctoral student Vaughn Joy joins in to talk about A Christmas Story and her work looking at how the American government exerted control over Christmas films as a way of influencing  the national narrative. We talk about all we love and hate with this movie, the history of Christmas films, and yes, continue to debate whether on not Die Hard is a Christmas movie. 

About our guest:
Vaughn’s research interests lie in entertainment and social histories, particularly in the post-war period in the United States. For her PhD research project, Vaughn is exploring the extent of Hollywood’s reflection of and influence on the political and cultural climates of the early Cold War period through the propagandising of Christmas films from 1946 to 1961. By exploring the cinematic representations of Americans and their traditions during the Christmas season, the thesis argues that these sentimental films, and other innocuous media of the like, are not simply feel-good media, but rather provide commentary on the world around them. 

Before pursuing a research degree at UCL, Vaughn completed an MA in History at UCL and an MPhil in Classics at Trinity College Dublin with dissertation titles “Venus in Manhattan: A Study of Gender Relations in Post-WWII New York” and “Reproductive Demonesses: Mental Escapism from Reproductive Failures in the Ancient World,” respectively.

Alongside bylines in The Washington Post and Red Pepper Magazine, Vaughn is an active public scholar with appearances on numerous podcasts and radio shows including NPR. Vaughn is also a researcher and co-host on the Impressions of America podcast which explores American politics, culture, and media in the latter 20th century, as well as creator, researcher, and host of the Joy of Star Wars podcast melding themes in American history with those in the Star Wars franchise.

This week guest Kate Jewell stops by to talk about one of the more interesting John Cusack performances in the film High Fidelity. This movie features some phenomenal performances by Cusack, Jack Black, Todd Louiso, and one very weird Tim Robbins. We also talk about Kate's new book Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio. This might be in your Top 5 favorite episodes ever.

About our guest:
Katherine Rye Jewell is Professor of History at Fitchburg State University, where she teaches modern U.S. history. She is a historian of the business and politics of culture in the twentieth-century United States. Her book, Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge Studies on the American South) (Cambridge University Press, 2017), explored the intersection of southern culture and politics through industrialists’ responses to the New Deal

She turns attention to another kind of business in her new book, Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio,  from the University of North Carolina Press. Taking aim at the informal spaces that shaped the music industry since the 1970s, Jewell uncovers how college DJs confronted the politics of culture, higher education, and identity.

With Godzilla Minus One tearing up the American and global box office, it's time for another EMERGENCY PODCAST. This week we are joined by two amazing scholars of Japanese social and cultural history in Bill Tsutsui and Akiki Takenaka. We talk about our first impressions of the film, where it fits into Godzilla and WWII lore, and the history of Godzilla himself. This is such a cool conversation and I'm so excited to bring it to you.

About our guests:
Bill Tsutsui is an award-winning scholar and teacher, an experienced academic leader,
and an outspoken supporter of the public humanities, international education,
and more inclusive, accessible colleges and universities.  He researches, writes, and speaks widely on Japanese economic and environmental history, Japanese popular culture (especially the Godzilla movies), Japanese-American identity, and issues in higher education.  He is highly opinionated about BBQ, proud to have once driven the Zamboni at an NHL game, and slightly embarrassed to be Level 40 in Pokemon Go. Find him at https://www.billtsutsui.com/

Akiko Takenaka specializes in social and cultural history of modern Japan. Her research involves memory and historiography of the Asia-Pacific War, gender and peace activism, and history museums. Her teaching interests include gender, war and society, nationalism, memory studies, and visual culture. Prior to coming to UK, she has taught as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan.

Professor Takenaka's first book, entitled Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan's Unending Postwar (University of Hawai'i Press, Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University), explores Yasukuni Shrine as a physical space, object of visual and spatial representation, and site of spatial practice in order to highlight the complexity of Yasukuni’s past and critique the official narratives that postwar debates have responded to. Her second book project Mothers Against War: Gender, Motherhood, and Peace Activism in Postwar Japan is under advance contract with the University of Hawai'i Press. Her research has been funded by long-term research fellowships by Fulbright and the Japan Foundation. Find her on twitter at @ata225

Ready for a deep dive on the Middle Ages? This week Patrick Wyman, host of Tides of History and The Pursuit of Dadliness and author of The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World stops by to talk about Ridley Scott's The Last Duel, the 2021 epic that closely follows one of the last judicial duels of the Middle Ages. The film, starring Matt Damon, Adam Driver, and Jodie Comer has picked up a following since its release. Our conversation talks about why Patrick thinks is one of the most accurate films he has seen, along with questions over social status, chivalry, warfare, religion, the Plague, and even the Ottoman Empire. 

About our guest:
Patrick Wyman holds a PhD in history from the University of Southern California. He previously worked as a sports journalist, covering mixed martial arts and boxing from 2013 to 2018. His work has been featured in Deadspin, The Washington Post, Bleacher Report, and others. He is currently host of the podcast, Tides of History, and previously the host of Fall of Rome. You can find him on twitter at @Patrick_Wyman 

This week we welcome Lindsay Chervinsky back to the pod to talk about 1995's The American President. We talk about just how revolutionary was the idea of a president, the history of presidential relationships, scandals in the White House, and even presidential pets. This was a lot of fun. I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a presidential historian. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, co-editor of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture, and the forthcoming book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic. She regularly writes for public audiences in the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Bulwark, Time Magazine, USA Today, CNN, and the Washington Post. 

With Napoleon hitting the big screen this past week, we decided it was time for our first emergency podcast. This week we recruited French history scholars Corinne Gressang and Laura O'Brien onboard to talk about what the film did right, what it did wrong, and why exactly can't we seem to get Bonaparte right onscreen.

About our guests:
Dr. Corinne Gressang began as an Assistant Professor of History at Slippery Rock University in the Fall of 2023. She specializes in the history of the French Revolution, but she teaches various courses on Early Modern and Modern European History. She grew up in Western Pennsylvania and received her undergraduate degree in History with a minor in Legal Studies from Grove City College in 2013. From there, she received her MA and Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 2015 and 2020, respectively. She spent three years teaching at Erskine College in Due West, SC as an Assistant Professor before moving back home to Western Pennsylvania to teach at Slippery Rock.

Her dissertation topic developed after reading an editorial in a short-lived Catholic newspaper called L’Ange Gabriel (1799). The editor argued that the French nuns had suffered expulsion from their convents, and they were the most unfortunate victims of the Revolutionary decade. Dr. Gressang’s curiosity about what became of these women became the focus of her dissertation which she is currently revising for publication.

She is a member of the American Historical Association, the Western Society for French History, the Society for French Historical Studies, Phi Alpha Theta, and the American Catholic Historical Association. Dr. Gressang currently serves as an Assistant Digital Coordinator for the Society for French Historical Studies and is a member of the executive council for the Western Society for French History. She has won numerous teaching awards including the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the University of Kentucky in 2018-2019 and the Younts Excellence in Teaching Award in 2021-2022 from Erskine College.

Dr. Laura O'Brien joined Northumbria University  in September 2015, having previously taught at University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and the University of Sunderland. She completed her PhD at University College Dublin, where she held an Irish Research Council ‘Government of Ireland’ Postgraduate Scholarship, and was a doctoral fellow at the UCD Humanities Institute. Between 2010 and 2013 Laura was an Irish Research Council/Marie Curie Actions COFUND Fellow, based at Trinity College Dublin and the Centre de recherches en histoire du XIXe siècle, Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne).

In honor of Thanksgiving and Season 2 of High on the Hog, we thought it might be fun to bring back another older episode of the Historians At The Movies Podcast during our two week break. Leftovers, if you will. This episode features two of my food history scholars in Adrian E. Miller and Mark Johnson, talking about African American culinary traditions, gender roles in the kitchen, and some of their favorite recipes. I hope you're coming back for seconds on this.

About our guests:
Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner, attorney, and certified barbecue judge who lives in Denver, Colorado. Adrian received an A.B in International Relations from Stanford University in 1991, and a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1995.  From 1999 to 2001, Miller served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton with his Initiative for One America – the first free-standing office in the White House to address issues of racial, religious and ethnic reconciliation. Miller went on to serve as a senior policy analyst for Colorado Governor Bill Ritter Jr. From 2004 to 2010, he served on the board for the Southern Foodways Alliance. In June 2019, Adrian lectured in the Masters of Gastronomy program at the Università di Scienze Gastronomiche (nicknamed the “Slow Food University”) in Pollenzo, Italy. He is currently the executive director of the Colorado Council of Churches and, as such, is the first African American, and the first layperson, to hold that position.

Mark Johnson is an assistant professor in history at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. He specializes in the history of the United States and, specifically, the U.S. South and African American History. In 2017, he published An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue: From Wood Pit to White Sauce. In 2021, he published Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932 came out with University Press of Mississippi. He previously published articles in Southern Cultures and Louisiana History. Currently, he’s working on a cultural history of bacon in the United States tentatively titled American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon with University of Georgia Press.

This week HATM Podcast is on hiatus so we thought we'd rerelease an older episode for those of you who maybe haven't had the opportunity to explore the back catalog yet. This week's guest is my great friend Brett Rushforth and we are talking about both his favorite film- Up in the Air - and his work in 17th century New France. Looking back, this is one of the more interesting conversations I've ever been part of.  This episode is also one of the first we ever recorded (a testament to Brett's belief in this pod) so you'll hear some differences between how we did the show when we started and where we are now, so kind of a cool little archive. We'll also be livetweeting this film on Sunday, November 19th, so listen in before and see how that affects what you see. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the show. Again.

About our guest:
Brett Rushforth is a scholar of the early modern Atlantic world whose research focuses on comparative slavery, Native North America, and French colonialism and empire.

His first book, Colonial North America and the Atlantic World: A History in Documents (co-edited with Paul W. Mapp), uses primary documents to trace the history of North America in its Atlantic context from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries.

His second book, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, examined the enslavement of American Indians by French colonists and their Native allies, tracing the dynamic interplay between Native systems of captivity and slavery and French plantation-based racial slavery. In 2013, Bonds of Alliance was named the best book on American social history by the Organization of American Historians (Curti Award), the best book on French colonialism before 1848 by the French Colonial Historical Society (Boucher Prize), the best book on the history of European expansion by the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI Biennial Book Prize), and the best book on French history and culture by the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University (Wylie Prize). It was also one of three nominated finalists for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the best book on the history of slavery.

He recently completed, with Christopher Hodson, a book titled Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution, which explores the relationships between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans across four centuries, from roughly 1400 through Haitian independence in 1804. It will be published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

Professor Rushforth works with graduate students in the fields of comparative slavery, early America, early modern Atlantic world, African diaspora, legal history, and Native American history. Before joining the faculty at the University of Oregon, he taught for a decade at the College of William and Mary and was senior academic staff at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. From 2013 to 2017 he was the book review editor of the William and Mary Quarterly.

This is HATM's 50th episode and I wanted to do something special. This week we are joined by military historian Wayne E. Lee from the University of North Carolina to talk about The Last of the Mohicans and his new book, The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800. We talk about historical misconceptions of Indigenous warfare, how warfare in the Americas compares to conflict in other parts of the globe, the beauty of North Carolina, and that waterfall scene.

About our guest:
Wayne Lee specializes in early modern military history, with a particular focus on North America and the Atlantic World, but he teaches military history from a full global perspective at the undergraduate and graduate level. He also teaches courses on violence as well as on the early English exploration of the Atlantic. As a kind of additional career, he works with archaeology projects in the Balkans and has numerous publications in that field. You can find him on twitter at @MilHist_Lee

It's spooky season and that means I have something a little different planned for you. This week HATM is joined by emergency physician Dr. N.J. Gallegos to talk about Flatliners (1990). We also talk about her new book The Broken Heart, med school, her work as a physician, and because we are both nerds, Star Wars. It's a rolling and fun episode with one of my favorite people on the planet.

About our guest:
N.J. Gallegos is an Emergency Medicine Physician who enjoys horror, medicine, and wicked women looking for revenge. Put all three together? Now we're talking! She lives in Illinois with her wife and two cats. In her spare time, she enjoys binging reality trash tv, brewing beer, and running while listening to EDM so she can drink said brewed beer.
You can find her on twitter at @DrSpooky_ER
Her debut novel, The Broken Heart, is available here: https://a.co/d/1CzVX4T 

This week Thomas Lecaque and John Wyatt Greenlee drop in to talk about the most historically accurate film of all-time: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Ok, it's nowhere near accurate but that doesn't mean we can't love it all the same. We talk about when and where the myth of Robin Hood emerges, our favorite portrayals of the character, the score and the soundtrack, and yes, the accent. This one is fun. Jump in.

About our guests:
Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence. He has written for the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Foreign Policy and The Bulwark, among others. Follow him on Twitter: @tlecaque.

John Wyatt Greenlee is  a medievalist and a cartographic historian.His academic research is primarily driven by questions of how people perceive and reproduce their spaces:  how movement through the world — both experiential and imagined — becomes codified in visual and written maps. You can find him on twitter at @greenleejw 

This week Historians At The Movies dives into one of the sharpest historical films of the 1980s- Dirty Dancing. No, we're not kidding either. Guests Leah Lagrone, Lauren MacIvor Thompson, and Lauren Lassabe Shepherd tackle the memory of the 60s from the 80s, young love, issues of labor and class, dancing, AIDS, the Reagan era, abortion, whether or not Baby and Johnny are still together, and of course, that soundtrack. Prepare for the time of your lives.

About our guests:
Dr. Leah LaGrone is an assistant professor of history and public history director. She graduated from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, with a PhD in history focused on borderlands, labor, and gender studies in early 20th century. Her research examines state legislation and the discourse on minimum wages for women, specifically the connections of sex work with low wages. Her current book project, “A Woman’s Worth: How Race and Respectability Politics Influenced Minimum Wage Policies,” demonstrates that the politics around race and the minimum wage for women drove conversations among labor, politicians, and progressive reformers about the future of white supremacy in Texas. 

She has contributed an essay to the anthology "Impeached: The Removal of Texas Governor James E. Ferguson" as well as articles to The Washington Post and NursingClio. She has worked on several public history projects, including "The Civil War Documentary," "Civil Rights in Black and Brown," and the Texas State Historical Association's "Handbook of Texas Women." Dr. LaGrone will teach the public history classes and supervise the public history internships.

Lauren MacIvor Thompson (Ph.D. '16) is a historian of early-twentieth-century women’s rights and public health. She serves as the faculty research fellow at the Georgia State University College of Law’s Center for Law, Health & Society. She is also part of the faculty at Kennesaw State University as a jointly-appointed Assistant Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies. Thompson’s current research focuses on the intersections of medical authority and expertise, women’s health, and public health policy in the birth control and reproductive health movements. She is working on a book manuscript, Battle for Birth Control: Mary Dennett, Margaret Sanger, and the Rivalry That Shaped a Movement, forthcoming with Rutgers University Press. She has published numerous articles and op-eds including work in Law and History Review, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Society for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, among others. Thompson is also a frequent public speaker including presentations at the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the American Society for Legal History, and the American Association for the History of Medicine, as well as national and international symposiums on suffrage and legal rights, reproduction, health, and medicine. She is a member of the national Scholars Strategy Network.

Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd’s expertise is in the history of United States higher education from the 20th century to present, especially on the topic of conservatism in the academy. She is an instructor in the Department of Education and Human Development at the University of New Orleans and an IUPUI-Society for US Intellectual History Community Scholar.

Shepherd’s first book, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars, is out now from the University of North Carolina Press. Her second book manuscript is a historical survey of colleges and universities in the United States since the 1960s.

Did you know where the largest collection of Sherlock Holmes ephemera is located? This answer is elementary, my dear listeners--or maybe not. It's actually the University of Minnesota Special Collections. And this week's guest is one of the foremost experts in all things Sherlock Holmes, my good friend Tim Johnson. We jump in on Guy Ritchie's 2009 adaption as well as talk about other film adapations (including the Great Mouse Detective, natch) as well as talk about the process of collecting and archiving such a magnificent collection. This is a really cool conversation.

About our guest:
Tim is one of the curators in the Archives and Special Collections Department and responsible for the University of Minnesota Libraries' main rare book collection and dozens of special collections. Half of his time is spent as curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collections, the largest gathering of such material in the world. Tim began his career as an instructional services librarian and has also served as a library director, director of archives, medical librarian, assistant and associate professor. In addition to his curatorial responsibilities, he served for ten years as an adjunct faculty member in the MLIS program at St. Catherine University, where he taught a graduate level course in preservation management. Tim is happy to answer questions and help out with matters related to "old books" or any other question people might have about special collections or rare materials. He also writes a blog that often highlights new acquisitions or other matters related to special and rare items--"Special & Rare On A Stick." You can also follow Tim on Twitter. His "handle" is @UMNBookworm.

When Charlie Pierce messages and asks to do a pod, you say yes. And that's exactly what happened. This week, one of the best and funniest political commentators in America drops by to talk about Deadline USA- the 1952 classic starring Humphrey Bogart as the editor of a newspaper trying to get out one last story before their lights are turned out for good.  This is such a revealing film and Charlie is such a cool hang. I hope you like this pod.

About our Guest:
Charles P. Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He's been the main political commentator for Esquire since 2011. He lives near Boston and has three children. He's awesome.

I don't usually shy away from asking guests to be on the podcast, but this week's guest is an exception. You know Alexis Coe from her two books, Alice+Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis and You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George of Washington. Or you've seen her on tv or on twitter or tiktok talking about presidential history. But today you get to hear her talk about Dave (1993) as we discuss the 90s, American presidencies, and a slew of other things. Alexis is awesome. So is this episode. Enjoy. 

About our guest:

Alexis Coe is an American presidential historian and fellow at New America, where she studies the presidency in anticipation of America's 250th. She is the New York Times bestselling author of You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George of Washington, now out in paperback. Alexis is the first woman historian to write a biography of Washington in over a hundred years and the only woman in over four decades. She served as a consulting producer on and appeared in Doris Kearns Goodwin's Washington series the History Channel. Her first book, the award-winning Alice+Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis, has been optioned. She is working on a third book on young John F. Kennedy for Crown. She frequently appears on live television and in documentaries on CNN, MSNBC,  CBS, History, BBC, and PBS. She hosted the podcast "No Man's Land"  and co-hosted "Presidents Are People, Too!" 

​Alexis has contributed to the New Yorker, the New York Times' opinion section, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, the Paris Review, Glamour, and many others. Her work has been featured in The Best American Essays  and The Best American Travel Essays, and her essay on marriage and academia was one of the Atlantic's Great Debates of the Year. Thanks to a grant from Substack, launched Study Marry Kill, a newsletter. 

​She is active on the lecture circuit and has appeared at West Point, Georgetown, the New York Historical Society, the National Constitution Center, the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, and many more. Alexis curated the ACLU'S 100 exhibitions. While in grad school, she was a project-based oral historian at the Brooklyn Historical Society. She went on to be a Research Curator in the Exhibitions Department at the New York Public Library in Bryant Park, where she co-curated the centennial exhibition. 

​Alexis lives outside of New York City with her young daughter. 

We talk a lot on the podcast about film as historical artifacts- depictions of moments in time that can tell us as much about the audience as the topics themselves. This week is no exception as we dive into 1982's Tootsie, starring Dustin Hoffman. However, what makes this episode unique is that we are joined by Justin Rawlins to talk about the craft of filmmaking, particularly method acting. We get into Hoffman's performance (as well as his legendary battles with director Sydney Pollack) as well as talk about other famous method actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert DeNiro, Natalie Portman, Jared Leto, and Christian Bale. We also get into the controversy surrounding Bradley Cooper's upcoming performance as Leonard Bernstein, and question if Tootsie could even be made in 2023.

About our guest:
Justin Rawlins is Associate Professor of Media Studies and Film Studies at the University of Tulsa. He has an upcoming book from the University of Texas Press called Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance, which you can find on preorder for 40% here: https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477328507/imagining-the-method/

You can find his website at https://justinowenrawlins.com/ and on twitter at @j_o_rawlins 

I think a lot of us are familiar with stories of bomber pilots and fighter pilots during World War II. And we're probably familiar with the lives of many of the women who actually built those planes, made famous by Rosie the Riveter. But how many of us know about the Women's Air Service Pilots or about their fight for veteran recognition after the war was over? Sarah Myers joins in to talk about the film Memphis Belle and her new book, Earning Their Wings: The WASPs of World War II and the Fight for Veteran Recognition. I had never learned of the WASPs before knowing Sarah and this is such a cool talk. We get into Memphis Belle, her process of discovery, and what it was like to interview these intrepid women. Amazing stuff.

About our guest:
Sarah Myers is a historian of public history, gender history, and war and society. As a public historian, she has conducted numerous oral history interviews for her own research on female pilots in World War II and with Pennsylvanian veterans of various wars and conflicts. In her previous role as director of The Keirn Family World War II Museum, a museum she created and opened, she hosted living history events and museum exhibition openings. She has also conducted interviews with documentaries and local and national media outlets on women in aviation, the U.S. military, and the anniversary of historic events. She recently received a National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) grant to generate dialogue with female veterans at five institutions around the U.S.

You can find her new book here: https://a.co/d/hbdy3uV

This week historian Leah Lagrone drops by the HATM studios to talk about 1990's Pretty Woman. We get into a ton of topics including the history of prostitution, sexual norms regarding its policing, the tropes behind books and films about the world's oldest profession, and whether or not Vivian and Richard are still together after all these years. We had a blast with this talk and I hope you dig the episode.

About our guest:
Dr. Leah LaGrone is an assistant professor of history and public history director.

She graduated from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, with a PhD in history focused on borderlands, labor, and gender studies in early 20th century. Her research examines state legislation and the discourse on minimum wages for women, specifically the connections of sex work with low wages. Her current book project, “A Woman’s Worth: How Race and Respectability Politics Influenced Minimum Wage Policies,” demonstrates that the politics around race and the minimum wage for women drove conversations among labor, politicians, and progressive reformers about the future of white supremacy in Texas. 

She has contributed an essay to the anthology "Impeached: The Removal of Texas Governor James E. Ferguson" as well as articles to The Washington Post and NursingClio. She has worked on several public history projects, including "The Civil War Documentary," "Civil Rights in Black and Brown," and the Texas State Historical Association's "Handbook of Texas Women." Dr. LaGrone will teach the public history classes and supervise the public history internships.

1991's Black Robe is probably a movie you've never heard of, but maybe you should. It's one of the rare films that travel back to 17th Century New France to allow us to witness interactions between Indigenous communities and Jesuit missionaries. I watched this film in college and it made an impression on me. So I asked Michael Oberg to come on the pod to talk not only about this film but about how to teach this film as well as point out the complicated relationships between people during the era. This is maybe a bit more cerebral episode than some of the others, and I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Michael Leroy Oberg, the author of Native America, is Distinguished Professor of History at SUNY-Geneseo and founder of the Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History, which he directed from 2019 until 2022.  In addition to this textbook, he has written the following works:   Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585-1685 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Uncas: First of the Mohegans, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record: The Official Account of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005); The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians,  (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); the first edition of Native America; Professional Indian: Eleazer Williams’s American Odyssey, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); and Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).  He has published, as well, articles and reviews, and has worked as a historical consultant for native communities in New York and North Carolina, as well as for the Indian Resources Section of the United States Department of Justice.  He has won awards for his teaching and research in Montana and in New York, including the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

A lot of you love Legally Blonde. I mean really love Legally Blonde. So it was probably inevitable that two of my closest friends in the profession, Kristalyn Shefveland and Jennifer McCutchen, requested to do a pod on this film if only to torment me. This movie is so much more than I ever gave it credit for. We get into this film as a historical artifact, perhaps the last film of the 90s, it has so much to say about shattering glass ceilings, East Coast vs West Coast, fashion, performative perceptions, whether or not it's ok to be a fan of pop culture, and yes, why I seem to be drawn to attorneys. This pod is a blast and I hope you dig it.

About our guests:
Kristalyn Shefveland is an Associate Professor of American History at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville where she teaches classes on the American South, Indigenous and Settler relationships from the colonial era to the present, the American Revolution, and the Atlantic World. Her current research project is a book on historical memory of indigenous peoples in Florida, particularly the town of Vero Beach, on the Indian River. She is also working with students and communities on a local history project- River Cities Oral History- that seeks to capture stories and popular memory of the Ohio and Wabash River Valley settlements.

Jennifer McCutchen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of St. Thomas. She specializes in Early American History and Native History, with a focus on the themes of gender, power, exchange, and diplomacy. Her current project is an ethnohistorical study of gunpowder in the late eighteenth-century Creek Confederacy.

Every now and then we get the chance to talk to a scholar with a little extra knowledge on a particular subject. In this case, Dr. Waitman Beorn drops in to talk about Brad Pitt's tank film, Fury. Waitman knows the film well, especially since he commanded a tank prior to becoming a historian. Listen in now to hear him talk not only about WWII, but his experiences serving in the Tank Corps and how the lessons learned transcended his time there.  It's a fun and fascinating talk.

About our guest:
Dr. Waitman Wade Beorn is an assistant professor in History at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK.  Dr. Beorn was previously the Director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, VA and the inaugural Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.  His first book, Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Harvard University Press) Dr. Beorn is also the author of The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) and has recently finished a book on the Janowska concentration camp outside of Lviv, Ukraine, tentatively entitled Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv.  His next research project is The Revenants: The Postwar Lives of Nazi Perpetrators.

 Dr. Beorn has published work in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Central European History, German Studies Review, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Politics and Governance, and the Geographical Review in addition to chapters in several edited volumes.  He has been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and Claims Conference fellowships. He is also active in the digital humanities.  

As a public-facing scholar, Dr. Beorn has published pieces in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Forward.  He has also appeared on MSNBC, CNN, Richard French Live on WRNN, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and TRT. He is an active contributor to public history and engagement on Twitter as well. Dr. Beorn teaches courses in Holocaust History, Comparative Genocide, German history, Eastern European history, Antisemitism, Modern European history, Public history, and Digital history. 

1994’s Legends of the Fall was one of a string of new age American western epics, featuring an ascendant Brad Pitt alongside Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn, Henry Thomas, and a stunning Julia Ormond. It’s not a perfect film, but like a lot helmed by Edward Zwick, gives us a ton to talk about: American wars Indigenous people, the Gilded Age & Progressive Era, WWI, PTSD, Prohibition, and the West. There’s a lot to unpack and that’s why I invited Edward O’Donnell onboard to talk it all out. 

About our guest:

Frequently appearing in historical documentaries on the History Channel, PBS, and Curiosity Stream. O’Donnell is also a podcaster and professor at Holy Cross College in Worcester, MA.

It is hard to find someone with a greater impact on American music and whose life demonstrates the complexities of the human experience than Ray Charles. This week we are joined by Michael Hattem to talk about one of the best biopics and performances I've ever seen with Ray (2004). This episode features candid discussions about the ups and downs of Ray Charles' life, how both his life and that of the United States have been shaped in memory, and a fascinating conversation about the history of African American musical traditions. I don't talk a lot in this episode, mostly because I was absolutely blown away by Michael's thoughts. I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Michael Hattem is a historian of early America, with a focus broadly on culture and politics in the long eighteenth century. He is especially interested in cultural memory in (and of) the American Revolution and early America generally, the origins and causes of the American Revolution, print culture, and colonial New York City. He is the author of Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution, which explores the role of changing historical memories in revolutionary American culture and politics.

He is an Associate Director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Previously, he served as a Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and Visiting Faculty at The New School in 2017-2018 and as Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Knox College from 2018 to 2020.

He is both a contributor to and Producer of The JuntoCast, the first podcast devoted to early American history and History Talks, a YouTube channel producing historical content by historians for a general audience. He also served as the Managing Editor and a co-founder of The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History and have contributed to numerous other websites. He has served as a historical consultant or contributor for a number of projects and organizations, including Hamilton: The Exhibition, American Yawp, Founders Online, as well as television documentaries and auctions.

You can find him on social media at @michaelhattem

This week we have a guest with a keen understanding of a film: Dr. Tyler Anbinder joins us to talk about Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese's 2002 epic that about the rise of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Tyler is not only an expert on the histories of New York City and of immigration, but served as an advisor for the film. He was, in this case, an actual historian at the movies. We talk about a range of topics: 19th century politics, immigration, nativism, race, the Civil War, New York, and of course, his experiences with the film itself. We also got a chance to touch on his upcoming book, and I hope to have him back on next year to talk about that. Really thrilled to have him on the podcast and I hope you dig the talk.

About our guest:
Tyler Anbinder is a specialist in nineteenth-century American politics and the history of immigration and ethnicity in American life. His most recent book, City of Dreams (2016), is a history of immigrant life in New York City from the early 1600s to the present.  Before that, in 2001, he published Five Points, a history of nineteenth-century America's most infamous immigrant slum, focusing in particular on tenement life, inter-ethnic relations, and ethnic politics.  His first book, Nativism and Slavery (1992), analyzed the role of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know Nothing party on the political crisis that led to the Civil War. Professor Anbinder has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and held the Fulbright Thomas Jefferson Chair in American History at the University of Utrecht. He has won awards for his scholarship from the Organization of American Historians, the Columbia University School of Journalism, and the journal Civil War History. He also served as a historical consultant to Martin Scorsese for the making of The Gangs of New York. His forthcoming book, to be published in March 2024 by Little, Brown, is entitled Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York. That project's digital history component, created with research assistance from more than two dozen GW students, has already been completed and can be found at http://beyondragstoriches.org.

2015's The Witch is in my mind about as scary as they come. It's also an incredible foray into the world of 17th century New England colonists and the chance to see how their fears manifested themselves in the world around them. Our guest, Mikki Brock, is no stranger to fear. She researches and teaches on the supernatural, plagues, and worst of all, the British (WOO HOO AMERICA). We talk all about this terrifying film and how Puritans conceptualized the worlds beyond, as well as exactly how one goes about talking about demon sex in class. This pod is a romp. I hope you enjoy it.

About our guest:
Mikki Brock a historian of early modern Scotland and an associate professor of history at W&L University. Her research centers on questions of religious belief and identity, and she is especially interested in the intersections of protestantism and the supernatural. She teaches and speaks widely on subjects including demonology, witchcraft, the British reformations, and Scotland in the popular imagination.
You can find her on twitter at @mikkibrock

2016's Live By Night was a rare miss by star and director Ben Affleck. On paper, it had everything you'd think it needed to be successful: great cast (Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, Chris Messina, Elle Fanning, Sienna Miller), a cool premise (mob sets up new scene during Prohibition), and a director in Affleck who has emerged as one of Hollywood's best. But it didn't quite hit.

But that doesn't mean it's not great for us. Live By Night offers the opportunity to talk about Ybor City,  the "Harlem of Tampa," and a town many of you have never heard of. But you should know Ybor City. As guest Sarah McNamara shows in her new book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, the comunidad features a vibrant Cuban American culture and history all to its own, and understanding it is key to knowing both Florida and the United States. We talk about the history of Ybor City, the role of race in Cuban American communities during Jim Crow, the changing nature of womanhood in Ybor families during the early 20th century, and the differences between Tampa and Miami's Cuban communities. This is maybe the best episode we've ever done.

About our guest:
Sarah McNamara is Assistant Professor of History and core faculty in the Latina/o/x & Mexican American Studies Program at Texas A&M University. McNamara’s research centers on Latinx, women and gender, immigration, and labor histories in the modern United States.

Her first book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, examines the U.S. South as a transnational, multi-racial borderland and argues that in this space gender and sexuality played a central role in the (re)making of race, community, region, and nation. Ybor City is the history of three generations of migrant, immigrant, and U.S. born Latinas and Latinos— predominantly from Cuba, the Caribbean, and the Americas—who collided in Tampa, Florida from the late nineteenth through the mid twentieth centuries. While popular narratives of the origins of Latina/o/x Florida focus on Cuban immigrants who fled the rise of Fidel Castro in the 1950s and 1960s, McNamara centers on earlier generations whose migration, labor, activism, and leftist politics established the foundation of latinidad in the sunshine state. This portrait of political shifts that defined Ybor City highlights the underexplored role of women’s leadership within movements for social and economic justice as it illustrates how people, places, and politics become who and what they are.

You can find her on twitter at @Dr_SarahMac

You've been asking for this film ever since I announced there would be a Historians At The Movies Podcast. Today we jump in head first to the Director's Cut of Ridley Scott's 2005 epic, Kingdom of Heaven. This is a beautiful and seriously flawed film, but it is fun to watch. I decided that a film this big needed an army of historians, so I invited back HATM Podcast alums David Perry, Matthew Gabriele, John Wyatt Greenlee to talk all things Crusades. We talk about the film's strengths and its flaws, and dive deep to discuss things that matter, such as how to see this film as a response to 9/11 and exactly how many orcas would it take to fight Liam Neeson.

About our guests:
Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies and the chair of the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. His research and teaching generally explore religion, violence, nostalgia, and apocalypse, whether manifested in the Middle Ages or the modern world. This includes events and ideas such as the Crusades, the so-called “Terrors of the Year 1000,” and medieval religious and political life. He has also presented and published on modern medievalism, such as recent white supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages and pop culture phenomena like Game of Thrones and the video game Dragon Age. His book, co-authored with David M. Perry, is out now: The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (Harper Books, 2021). His new book will also be with David M. Perry and is entitled Oathbreakers: The Carolingian Civil War and the Collapse of an Empire in the Middle Ages (Harper Books, 2024).

David M. Perry is a journalist and historian. He is the co-author of The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, out now from Harper Collins. The Boston Globe called it “incandescent and ultimately intoxicating.” Perry was a professor of Medieval History at Dominican University from 2006-2017. His scholarly work focuses on Venice, the Crusades, and the Mediterranean World. He’s the author of Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (Penn State University Press, 2015). Now he works for the University of Minnesota, convincing students that studying history is good for them and good for their careers (it is!).

John Wyatt Greenlee is a life-long map enthusiast. I love how maps can make fantasy worlds come alive, and how they can give context to histories. He holds a PhD in medieval history, with a focus on the history of maps and map making. He has written articles on cartographic analysis, setting maps within their historical and cultural contexts. He has built multiple digital projects annotating medieval map. In addition to maps, he spends time working on his other major academic interest: the role of eels in human history. He is The Surprised Eel Historian on Twitter — perhaps the world’s only eel historian!

Thomas Lecaque is an Associate Professor of History at Grand View University. He was born in France, lived in Bulgaria for the first two years of his life, and grew up in Kirksville, Missouri. He holds a Ph.D. in Pre-Modern European History from the University of Tennessee, an M.A. in English with a focus on Old English and

It's summertime and that means busting out those beach bodies! This week Natalia Mehlman Petrzela drops in to talk about the creation of the modern fitness world beginning in the early 1980s and seen onscreen with the John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis film, Perfect (1985). Natalia and I talk about her new book FIT NATION: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession along with how social media continues to transform the way we look at bodies (and ourselves) and even how academics present their sexuality through fitness online. This is such a great conversation. I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is a historian of contemporary American politics and culture. She is the author of CLASSROOM WARS: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015), and FIT NATION: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2023). She is co-producer and host of the acclaimed podcast WELCOME TO YOUR FANTASY, from Pineapple Street Studios/Gimlet and the co-host of PAST PRESENT podcast. She is a frequent media guest expert, public speaker, and contributor to outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the Atlantic.

Natalia is Associate Professor of History at The New School, co-founder of the wellness education program Healthclass 2.0, and a Premiere Leader of the mind-body practice intenSati. Her work has been supported by the Spencer, Whiting, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations. She holds a B.A. from Columbia and a Ph.D. from Stanford and lives with her husband and two children in New York City.

You can find her website at https://nataliapetrzela.com/ or find her on twitter at @nataliapetrzela. 

This week Lindsay Marshall jumps in to talk about the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman epic-that-wasn't: Far and Away (1992). This is an awesome talk. We talk about the process of interviewing and getting hired at a university, the myth of Irish slavery, the West on film. Lindsay is a former high school teacher so we get into the difficulties of teaching at that level and why AP US History is an absolute dumpster fire. This is a great episode.

About our guest:
Lindsay Marshall is a historian of Native North America and of popular memory. She earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Oklahoma and is the incoming Assistant Professor of History at Illinois State University. You can find her on twitter at @lindstorian.

This week marks the return of Michael Keaton to the big screen as Batman in The Flash. So I thought it was an opportune time to revisit Batman (1989) with Blake Scott Ball. This is a large episode--the longest we've released yet, and for good measure. We get into why Batman is a necessary addition to the superhero pantheon, what happens if Gotham is in Mississippi, and finally, we rank all of the Batmen. This episode is so much fun.

About our guest:
Dr. Blake Scott Ball joined the Huntingdon faculty in the fall of 2017 after completing his doctoral degree. He has previously taught as an assistant professor at Miles College, as an adjunct professor at the University of North Alabama, and as an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama. He served as assistant director for the New Summersell Center Public History Initiative at the University of Alabama, and as a graduate assistant for the Alabama Historical Association. An avid writer, he served as editor for the Southern Historian graduate history journal and as a contributor and assistant editor for The Historian behind the History, a collection of oral stories documenting historians’ graduate training and insights into the historical profession, published by the University of Alabama Press in 2014. His book, “Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts,” was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. You can find him on twitter at @bsb1945

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Jurassic Park, a movie that both plays with history and made history. Like Jaws and Star Wars before it, Jurassic Park changed what we thought was possible in movie theaters while commenting on our fascination with the pre-human past. I asked Dr. Elizabeth Jones, author of Ancient DNA: The Making of a Celebrity Science (on sale from Amazon right now) to come on the show to talk about how Jurassic Park changed the science of paleontology and just why that velociraptor scene in the kitchen is so damn good.

About our guest:
Dr. Elizabeth Jones holds a PhD in Science & Technology Studies from University College London, a MA in History & Philosophy of Science from Florida State University, and a BA in History & Philosophy from North Carolina State University. Currently, she works at the North Carolina Museum and Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University as the Coordinator for Cretaceous Creatures, a public science project that engages 8th grade science teachers and students across the state in making their own microfossil discoveries.

Show notes:
https://www.newsweek.com/new-dinosaur-utah-moros-intrepidus-tyrannosaurus-rex-1338776

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/back-brontosaurus-dinosaur-just-might-deserve-its-own-genus-species-science-180954892/

www.cretaceouscreatures.org

https://colossal.com/george-church-the-future-without-limit/

This episode may be the very epitome of why I started this podcast. This week I'm joined by my friend Jeff Melnick to talk about an absolutely batshit film called Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Jeff is the perfect guy to talk about this movie; he wrote a terrific book about the Manson murders called Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl: Inside the Lives of America's Most Infamous Family. But that only hints at what's inside this episode. Using this movie, Jeff and I get into all sorts of dialogue about pop culture, the conflicts in Florida, hip hop, course design, anti-fandom, and yes, Hootie and the Blowfish.  I think you're gonna love this episode.

About our guest:
Jeffrey Melnick has been thinking about the Manson Family since first encountering the book and miniseries Helter Skelter in the 1970s. Melnick is a professor at University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of 9/11 Culture: America Under Construction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Black-Jewish Relations on Trial (University Press of Mississippi, 2000), and A Right to Sing the Blues (Harvard University Press, 1999). You can find him on twitter at @melnickjeffrey1

This week Kathleen Belew joins us to talk about maybe the most '90s action movie ever made, Con Air. We get into everything on this film, including Kathleen's work on white power and paramilitary movements in the United States, the cultural production of the South, Nicolas Cage as an action star, and yes, maybe the worst Southern accent in history. This movie has it all.

About our guest:
Kathleen Belew specializes in the history of the present. She spent ten years researching and writing her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2018, paperback 2019). In it, she explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common story about betrayal by the government, war, and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement mobilized and carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City. This movement was never adequately confronted, and remains a threat to American democracy.

Her next book, Home at the End of the World, illuminates our era of apocalypse through a history focused on her native Colorado where, in the 1990s, high-profile kidnappings and murders, right-wing religious ideology, and a mass shooting exposed rents in America’s social fabric, and dramatically changed our relationship with place, violence, and politics (Random House).

For our 25th episode, we have only one question: IS THERE A CAVE?
This week we are joined by two scholars ready to get medieval on us all: Thomas Lecaque and John Wyatt Greenlee.  We're celebrating the great epic that wasn't: The 13th Warrior. This movie is so good and so bad at the same time that it's hard to quantify. But we're gonna do it anyway. We're talking Vikings, the Abassid Empire, man-bears, and maybe the greatest language scene in film history. Grab some mead, because it's made from honey, just like this podcast.

About our guests:
Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence. He has written for the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Foreign Policy and The Bulwark, among others. Follow him on Twitter: @tlecaque.

John Wyatt Greenlee is  a medievalist and a cartographic historian.His academic research is primarily driven by questions of how people perceive and reproduce their spaces:  how movement through the world — both experiential and imagined — becomes codified in visual and written maps. You can find him on twitter at @greenleejw 

This week Lauren Lassabe Shepherd swings by to talk about why we love college and why some of us just can't seem to grow up. We get into the production of her forthcoming book, the process of creating oral histories, and perhaps surprising roles that Greek life now perform in the lives of college students.

She's got a new book coming out this summer about the campus wars in the United States and you can check it out here: https://www.amazon.com/Resistance-Right-Conservatives-America-Politics/dp/1469674491/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2TV97KWZ9WPPU&keywords=lauren+lassabe+shepherd&qid=1683559714&s=books&sprefix=LAUREN+LASSABE%2Cstripbooks%2C259&sr=1-1

About our guest:
Shepherd’s expertise is in the history of United States higher education from the 20th century to present, especially on the topic of backlash against progressivism in the academy. She teaches in the Department of Education and Human Development at the University of New Orleans. Shepherd’s first book, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars is forthcoming in 2023 from the University of North Carolina Press. Her second book is a historical survey of American colleges and universities since the 1960s. In addition to research and writing, she enjoys teaching Pilates and practicing yoga. She lives with her husband and their dogs in South Mississippi.

You can find her at @llassabe on twitter.

This week Historians At The Movies Podcasts welcomes Dr. Rob Thompson to the show to talk about Oliver Stone's Platoon, the legacy of the Vietnam War in the United States, and the best movies about the conflict. Rob's a cool dude and we had a great discussion.

About our guest:
Rob has  a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Southern Mississippi. He specializes in the study of the Vietnam War, with a focus on the confluence of conventional warfare and pacification at the province level. His research placed American strategy in the context of a single province—Phú Yên. He is also familiar with the history of American diplomacy and the history of Modern Europe. Before studying history in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, he completed an MA at Wilfrid Laurier University in lovely Waterloo, Ontario and my BA near the ocean at Virginia Wesleyan College, now University. He is presently a historian with the Films Team at Army University Press at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

This week we are joined by Robert Greene II and Eric Leonard to do a deep dive into Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. We'll get into what the film has to say about the end of the Cold War, the process of aging, and the rivalry between the OG and Next Generation crews. Plus, we rank the best and worst of all things Star Trek. Rob and Eric are two of the historians who know Star Trek better than almost anyone alive and this is an awesome podcast for anyone who is a fan of the series.

About our guests:
Robert Greene II is an assistant professor of history at Claflin University and publications chair for the Society of US Intellectual Historians and lead associate editor for Black Perspectives. You can find him at @robgreeneII on twitter.

Eric Leonard Leonard has more than 25 years of National Park Service experience. You can find him at @frebodar on twitter.

This week guests Rachel Gunter and Nicole Gunter join me to talk about whether or not Carrie is a high school film, what Stephen King has to say about women, and whether or not the remake stands up to the original.

About our guests:
Rachel Michelle Gunter received her Ph.D. in history from Texas A&M University in 2017 and is a Professor of History at a community college in North Texas. Her research focuses on the woman suffrage movement and its effects on the voting rights of other groups including immigrants, servicemen, WWI veterans, Mexican Americans and African Americans. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Suffragists, Soldiers, and Immigrants: Drastic Changes to Voting Rights in the Progressive Era.

 Nicole Donawho is a Professor of History at a community college in North Texas. She specializes in dual credit and history pedagogy. Her main non-academic interests are Star Trek, tattoos, and dogs.

This week Drew McKevitt and I talk about Clint Eastwood's vigilante cop, Dirty Harry Callahan. We get into the rise of gun culture in the United States, Dirty Harry as a response to the counter culture revolution of the 1960s, and ultimately recast Dirty Harry for our current age. I haven't laughed this hard in a long time.

About our guest:
Drew McKevitt is an associate professor of history at Louisiana Tech University. He recently published a book called Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America. Currently he is working on two new book projects. The first explores the role of gun violence in U.S. foreign relations in the postwar era. The second examines U.S. workers in foreign-owned manufacturing facilities in the United States since the 1970s. You can find him on twitter at @drewmckevitt or his website, https://andrewcmckevitt.com/

Tons of news coming out of Star Wars Celebration in London today and I'm going to attempt to give some quick thoughts on where I see the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises going. We're talking Ahsohka, Dawn of the Jedi, the new film starring Daisy Ridley, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Did Rocky Balboa end the Cold War? More importantly, who won the war for 1980s hearts and minds between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone? We get into all of that with HATM Podcast veterans Craig Bruce Smith and Robert Greene II.

About our guests:
Craig Bruce Smith is an associate professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norfolk, VA. He authored American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era and co-authored George Washington’s Lessons in Ethical Leadership.

Robert Greene II Robert Greene II is an assistant professor of history at Claflin University and publications chair for the Society of US Intellectual Historians and lead associate editor for Black Perspectives.

This week, HATM Podcast tackles the Acadian Diaspora, the Great Depression, the Odyssey, the Old South, the West, and the greatest Coen Brothers films of all time. Seriously, is there anything we don't cover in this episode?

About our guest:
Christopher Hodson (PhD., Northwestern University, 2004) is a historian of early America and the early modern Atlantic world. He is the author of The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History (Oxford, 2012) and essays in the William and Mary Quarterly, French Historical Studies, Early American Studies, and numerous edited volumes. With Brett Rushforth of the University of Oregon, he has recently completed a book manuscript, also to be published by Oxford, on the intertwined histories of France, West Africa, and the Americas from the medieval period through the age of revolutions. With Manuel Covo of the University of California, Santa Barbara, he is currently producing a translated critical edition of a long-lost first-person account of the Haitian Revolution to be published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press. He has received fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society, and has taught as a visiting lecturer at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He has served on numerous editorial boards, conference planning committees, and awards committees, and has recently accepted a position on the College Board’s AP U.S. History Exam Development Committee. He is also a volunteer instructor at the Utah State Prison via the Utah Prison Education Project, and serves as an appointed member of Utah’s Higher Education and Corrections Council.

This is our first film review here at Historians At The Movies Podcast. I just got back from seeing John Wick Chapter 4 and give you my first impressions. Spoilers within the pod, so be warned. If you guys like this we’ll do more of them.

This week Historians At The Movies Podcast takes on 1955's Guys and Dolls. Special guest Sara Georgini jumps in to talk about the film at the pinnacle of the American musical scene, the tension between Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, and yes, gets me to list my favorite musicals of all time.

About our guest:
Sara Georgini earned her Ph.D. in History from Boston University in 2016. She is the Series Editor for The Papers of John Adams, part of The Adams Papers project at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2018). Committed to the preservation of and access to rare primary sources, she has worked on the selection, annotation, indexing, and book production of a dozen scholarly editions drawn from the Adams Papers (Harvard University Press, 2009— ), covering the history of American political life in the era ranging from the Declaration to disunion. Her research focuses on early American thought, culture, and religion. She is a co-founder and contributor to The Junto and the Society for U.S. Intellectual History blogs. She writes about American history, thought, and culture for Smithsonian and CNN.

This week Mary Hicks and I dig into life at sea with Master and Commander (2003). This is one of my favorite films and a movie I love to teach with. Mary is a scholar of the Black Atlantic and knows far more about the slave trade and life onboard these ships than I could ever hope to learn. We're talking about the Napoleonic Wars, Crowe and Bettany, and Mary's work focusing in on the experiences of enslaved and freed Africans in the Portuguese part of the transatlantic slave trade.

About our guest:
Mary Hicks is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.

More broadly, she seeks to interrogate the multiplicity of connections between West Africa and Brazil through the lens of mutual cultural, technological, commercial, intellectual and environmental influences and redefine how historians understand experiences of enslavement and the middle passage. In addition to investigating the lives of African sailors, she also explores the cultural and religious sensibilities of enslaved and freed African women in living in 19th century Salvador da Bahia. Along these lines, her second book will detail the emergence and elaboration of new gendered and racialized subjectivities in the wake of Portugal’s initiation of trade with West Africa in the fifteenth century.

This week Jacob Lee joins Historians At The Movies to talk about the myth of the mountain man on film via 1972's Jeremiah Johnson and 2015's The Revenant. Basically, these films are beautifully shot and largely full of shit. But that doesn't mean we can't enjoy them. Jacob and I talk a lot about the borderlands, sexual representation on film, and the role movies like these have in shaping the ways people think about American history. And of course, THE GIF.

About our guest:
Dr. Jacob Lee is  historian of early America and the American West, focusing on colonialism and borderlands and assistant professor of history at Penn State University.  His first book, Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi embedded intertwined Native and imperial histories in the physical landscape of Middle America, a vast region encompassing much of the central Mississippi River valley. His second project returns to the region, which is a history of the Louisiana Purchase, tentatively titled An Empire Without Bounds: How the United States Conquered the Louisiana Purchase. In 1803, when the U.S. purchased claim to more than 800,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River, it possessed only the most tenuous hold on the region. This project explores the decades of negotiation and compromise, conquest and violence that followed, the processes by which the U.S. established and maintained authority over its western claims, and the ways that Native peoples and colonists limited imperial power in the American West.

Here it is folks, the one that started them all: 1987's Predator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Sonny Landham, Jesse Ventura, and more catchphrases than any other film in history. This is actually the very first podcast we ever taped and it's still my favorite. In it, Craig, Rob, and I dig into this movie, talking about what Predator has to say about masculinity, geopolitics, and ultimately, which version of Arnold is the most powerful of them all.

About our guests:
Craig Bruce Smith  is an associate professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norfolk, VA. He authored American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era and co-authored George Washington’s Lessons in Ethical Leadership.

Robert Greene II is an assistant professor of history at Claflin University and publications chair for the Society of US Intellectual Historians and lead associate editor for Black Perspectives.

This week Historians At The Movies goes Down Under to talk about 1986's Crocodile Dundee and we are doing it with the founders of Historians At The Movies: Australia: Chelsea Barnett and Joel Barnes. This movie is everything HATM was designed for: taking something fun and then pointing out everything we can take from it. This was a blast to record.

About our guests:
Dr Chelsea Barnett is a gender and cultural historian whose work explores the representation of masculinities in Australian popular culture, in order to understand the complex and varied ways in which masculinity has made sense in particular historical contexts. Under this broad research aim she engages with feminist and queer theory, the history of sex and sexuality, twentieth-century Australian history, and the history in and of popular culture.

Chelsea is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UTS, and is located in the Australian Centre for Public History. In her current project, she is exploring the cultural history of single men, focusing on how Australian film and magazines in the postwar world have represented and made sense of the relationship between men and the expectation of marriage. She is also the author of "Reel Men: Australian Masculinity at the Movies, 1949-1962" (Melbourne University Press, 2019). She has authored academic articles in leading journals including History Australia, Australian Historical Studies, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Chelsea is currently the ECR co-representative for the Australian Historical Association, and is the co-convenor of Historians at the Movies Australia (#HATMAus).

Dr. Joel Barnes is a historian of the humanities, science, religion and universities. His present research examines the history of relations between evolutionary science and religious belief within Australian higher education, as part of the Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum project run by the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society. Before joining the University of Queensland, Joel was a Research Associate in the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney. His work at UTS was on an Australian Research Council-funded project on the history of humanities institutions in Australia since 1945, for which he is finalising a monograph on the humanities disciplines and the idea of the national interest.

This week Historians At The Movies revisits what is obviously the most historically accurate film ever made: Mel Gibson's The Patriot (2000). Ok, so maybe the movie plays fast and loose with history, but does that mean we can't have fun with it? Craig Bruce Smith and Robert Greene II jump in to jump on The Patriot.

About our guests:
Craig Bruce Smith is an associate professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norfolk, VA. He authored American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era and co-authored George Washington’s Lessons in Ethical Leadership.

Robert Greene II  is an assistant professor of history at Claflin University and publications chair for the Society of US Intellectual Historians and lead associate editor for Black Perspectives.

This week Historians At The Movies gets into Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. And I've got two of the best damn historians working today to talk about it. And yes, we're ranking the hottest presidents of all time.

About our guests:
Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and currently is a fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. She received her B.A. with honors in history and political science from George Washington University, her masters and Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, and her postdoctoral fellowship from Southern Methodist University. Previously Dr. Chervinsky worked as a historian at the White House Historical Association. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Bulwark, Time Magazine, USA Today, CNN, NBC Think, and the Washington Post. Dr. Chervinsky is the author of the award-winning book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, recently out in paperback, and the forthcoming book An Honest Man: The Inimitable Presidency of John Adams.

Dr. Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of four books: Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner 2022); The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020; finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History); Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia, 2012); and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (Georgia, 2005). Megan writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, and TIME. For several years, she also wrote movie and TV series reviews for the Civil War Monitor. Before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014, Megan taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She grew up in Colorado but now lives outside Boston with her husband and two cats. 

This week HATM  revisits 1997's Soul Food to talk about food history, the African diaspora in the United States, and gendered spaces in the house. To do so, I got two of the best damn scholars of food history in the United States: Adrian Miller and Mark Johnson. If you don't know their work, you soon will because they drop some absolute knowledge bombs in this podcast. And yes, we're gonna settle the best bbq debate once and for all. I hope you like the episode.

About our guests:
Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner, attorney, and certified barbecue judge who lives in Denver, Colorado. Miller’s first book, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time won the James Beard Foundation Award for Scholarship and Reference in 2014. His second book, The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, From the Washingtons to the Obamas was published on President’s Day 2017. It was a finalist for a 2018 NAACP Image Award for “Outstanding Literary Work – Non-Fiction,” and the 2018 Colorado Book Award for History. Adrian’s third book, Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue, was published in Spring 2021.

Mark A. Johnson, from Milwaukee, works at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He graduated in 2016 with a Ph.D. in History from the University of Alabama. Previously, he earned an M.A. from the University of Maryland and B.A. from Purdue University. Before joining the UTC faculty, he worked as a Visiting Lecturer at Georgia State University.

He specializes in the history of the United States and, specifically, the U.S. South and African American History. In 2017, he published An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue: From Wood Pit to White Sauce. In 2021, his new book, Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932 came out with University Press of Mississippi. He previously published articles in Southern Cultures and Louisiana History. Currently, he’s working on a cultural history of bacon in the United States.

This episode is two of my favorite people talking about Star Wars and how it fits in discussing archival research and the North American borderlands. And yes, we rank the films, definitively.

About our guests:
Alejandra Dubcovsky is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She is also the inaugural fellow in the Program for the Advancement of the Humanities, a partnership of The Huntington and UC Riverside that aims to support the future of the humanities. She received her BA and PhD from UC Berkeley. She also has a Masters in Library and Information Science from San Jose State.

Her first book, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (HUP 2016), won the 2016 Michael V. R. Thomason Book Award from the Gulf South Historical Association. Her forthcoming book, Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South will be released by Oxford University Press in May 2023.

Alan Malfavon is assistant professor of history at washington state university. He is a historian of late-colonial and early independent Latin America.  His first book, Men of the Leeward Port: Veracruz’s Afro-Descendants in the Making of Mexico, under contract with the University of Alabama Press, focuses on the understudied Afro-Mexican population of Veracruz and its hinterland of Sotavento (Leeward) and uses it to reframe the historical and historiographical transition between the colonial and national period.

This week we're dipping into Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise (1991). This is such a powerhouse film and we can use it to talk about a ton of issues related to the early '90s and all the way to today. And this movie is just awesome. So watch it as soon as you can. Currently available on Amazon Prime.

About our guests:
Dr. Lauren MacIvor Thompson is a historian of early-twentieth-century women’s rights, medicine, law, and public health. She is an Assistant Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies at Kennesaw State University and serves as the faculty fellow at the Georgia State University College of Law’s Center for Law, Health & Society. Her book, Rivals and Rights: Mary Dennett, Margaret Sanger, and the Making of the American Birth Control Movement is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press.

Jacqueline Antonovich is a historian of health, medicine, and politics in the United States. She is an Assistant Professor in History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, where she also directs the Shankweiler Scholars Medical Humanities Honors Program. She is currently working on a book with Rutgers University Press on women physicians and medical imperialism in the turn-of-the-century American West.

Don't forget to like and subscribe and share the pod with your friends!

We're joined this week by my good friend and fellow University of Minnesota alum Dr. Adam Blackler to talk about Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. Folks, I'd never seen this film before watching it for the pod so listening to Adam dissect it is a thing of beauty. But stay on, because he'll talk about his work in German colonial Africa as well as German cinema and how it informs the present. It's good stuff.

About Adam: Adam A. Blackler is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wyoming. He is a historian of modern Germany and southern Africa, whose research emphasizes the transnational dimensions of imperial occupation and settler-colonial violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His scholarly and teaching interests also include the political and social dynamics of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the interdisciplinary fields of holocaust & genocide Studies and international human rights. Dr. Blackler’s  book, entitled An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa, is in the Pennsylvania State University Press’s series “Germans Beyond Europe” sponsored by the Max Kade Research Institute. His most recent publications include a co-edited anthology, entitled After the Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies, and a chapter in the multi-volume collection, A Cultural History of Genocide. Dr. Blackler is presently researching a book project that explores the vibrant topography of Berlin’s parks, market squares, streets, and municipal districts before and during the Weimar Republic.

What is it about time travel movies that entices us all? I guarantee if you start thinking about your favorite films there's a time travel movie in there somewhere. Besides, isn't history a way of traveling to the past and thinking about what we would've done in those circumstances? This week, we're getting medieval on the HATM Podcast with two historians who are rethinking the Middle Ages. They've got a new book, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, and they picked one crazy movie to talk about: Time Bandits. Buckle up.

About our guests:
David M. Perry is a journalist and historian. He is the co-author of The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, out now from Harper Collins. Perry was a professor of Medieval History at Dominican University from 2006-2017. His scholarly work focuses on Venice, the Crusades, and the Mediterranean World. He’s the author of Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (Penn State University Press, 2015). Now he works for the University of Minnesota, convincing students that studying history is good for them and good for their careers (it is!).

Matthew Gabriele's research and teaching focus on religion, violence, nostalgia, and  apocalypse (in various combinations), whether manifested in the Middle  Ages or modern world. This includes events and ideas such as the  Crusades, the so-called “Terrors of the Year 1000,” and  medieval religious and political life more generally. He also has  presented and published on modern medievalism, such as recent white  supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages and pop culture phenomena  like Game of Thrones or video games.

And these guys have a new book on the way next year: Oathbreakers: The Carolingian Civil War and the Collapse of an Empire in the Middle Ages. These dudes are awesome. Give it a listen.

There are few films that can be considered as perfect movies. But 1974's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three may be on that list. We're joined this week by Eric Rauchway, a professor at UC Davis and specialist of The New Deal. We break down what this movie has to say about American politics coming out of  World War II, the meaning of the subway to the people of New York City, and whether or not Walter Matthau is the first American action hero. You're going to like where this takes us.

About Eric Rauchway:
The author most recently of Why the New Deal Matters (Yale University Press, 2021), he writes about U.S. history with a focus on the period from 1933-1945. He is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and has written seven books of history, as well as a novel. I’ve been on National Public Radio, BBC Radio 4, C-SPAN, and the Black News Channel, among other media, and has written for the Times Literary Supplement, as well as Dissent, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and a variety of other publications.

You can find him on twitter at @rauchway

We all know Die Hard is a Christmas movie, but is it a history movie? This week we're talking to two of the most prominent historians of the Early American Republic to get to the bottom of the debates. You're gonna love where this goes.

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. Gordon-Reed won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008). In addition to articles and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (UVA Press, 1997), Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, a collaboration with Vernon Jordan (PublicAffairs, 2001), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002), a volume of essays that she edited, Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010) and, with Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016). Her most recent book is On Juneteenth (Liveright Publishing, 2021). Gordon-Reed was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queens College) 2014-2015. Between 2010 and 2015, she was the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  She was the 2018-2019 President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She is the current President of the Ames Foundation.  A selected list of her honors includes a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Gordon-Reed served as a member of the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College from 2010 to 2018.  She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and was a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019, she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Craig Bruce Smith is an associate professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norfolk, VA. He authored American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era and co-authored George Washington’s Lessons in Ethical Leadership. Smith earned his PhD in American history from Brandeis University. Previously, he was an associate professor of military history at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), an assistant professor of history and the director of the history program at William Woods University, and he has taught at additional colleges, including Tufts University. He specializes in American Revolutionary and early American history, with a specific focus on George Washington, honor, ethics, war, the founders, transnational ideas, and national identity. In addition, he has broader interests in colonial America, the early republic, leadership, and early American cultural, intellectual, and political history.

When I was a graduate student studying slavery in the Americas, there were a host of books you had to read. Among them was and is this dude, Brett Rushforth. Brett has since become a friend of mine and what you'll find when listening is that this guy is not only one of the smartest people working the field, he's a giving human being and I'm so flattered that he chose to sit down and talk about one of our mutual favorite films: Up in the Air. This episode is gonna surprise you when you see where it goes.

About Brett:
Brett Rushforth is a scholar of the early modern Atlantic world whose research focuses on comparative slavery, Native North America, and French colonialism and empire. His first book, Colonial North America and the Atlantic World: A History in Documents (co-edited with Paul W. Mapp), uses primary documents to trace the history of North America in its Atlantic context from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. His second book, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, examined the enslavement of American Indians by French colonists and their Native allies, tracing the dynamic interplay between Native systems of captivity and slavery and French plantation-based racial slavery. In 2013, Bonds of Alliance was named the best book on American social history by the Organization of American Historians (Curti Award), the best book on French colonialism before 1848 by the French Colonial Historical Society (Boucher Prize), the best book on the history of European expansion by the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI Biennial Book Prize), and the best book on French history and culture by the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University (Wylie Prize). It was also one of three nominated finalists for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the best book on the history of slavery. He is currently completing, with Christopher Hodson, a book titled Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Age of Discovery to the Age of Revolutions, which explores the relationships between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans across four centuries, from roughly 1400 through Haitian independence in 1804.

This episode is for all of you who can't stop taking pictures of your food. I'm joined by Emily Contois (@emilycontois) and Zenia Kish (@zeniakish) to talk about Jon Favreau's Chef. This is an awesome episode and you're gonna love it.

About our guests:
Dr. Emily Contois is a scholar and teacher of media, food, health, and identity. Her book, Diners, Dudes & Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media & Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) demonstrates how the food, marketing, and media industries manipulated the concept of "the dude" in order to sell feminized food phenomena to men post-2000. She considers examples such as cookbooks, food TV, yogurts, and weight loss programs. She is also co-editor with Dr. Zenia Kish of Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (University of Illinois Press, 2022).

Dr. Zenia Kish is an assistant professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa and the assistant director of The Oklahoma Center for the Humanities. With Emily Contois she is co-editor of Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (University of Illinois Press, 2022).

So here it  is. The very first Historians At The Movies Podcast. If you're new to #HATM, we're (allegedly) the longest running watch party on the internet. Every week for over four and a half years, scholars and lovers of movies and history have joined together every Sunday night to watch and livetweet a movie together. It's been an amazing experience and one that has built a community around the globe.

This podcast is the next evolutionary step in Historians At The Movies. Each week we'll bring you top scholars to talk about the films that interest them and the work that they do. Sure, there's some myth busting and maybe a few times where we'll be poking holes in a film for accuracy, but it is more than that.

The HATM podcast uses a larger love of  film to talk about history and the ways in which our perceptions of the past are shaped by popular culture and how we in turn are shaped by those perceptions. It's a new way of thinking about both film and history, and I hope you'll dig it.

Our first guest isn't by accident. Walter Greason is a longtime supporter of Historians At The Movies and a guy who I consider a trusted friend. I've learned a ton from him over the last few years and when I thought about who should be on the podcast first, he was the only choice there was.

Walter  is among the most prominent historians, educators, and urbanists in the United States. He has spent the past 30 years speaking to audiences in dozens of states, on over 100 college and high school campuses, at dozens of professional and academic conferences, and to community groups across the country. His work is available every day on Twitter, @walterdgreason.

He has also lectured internationally, in the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, and has trained corporate, government, entertainment, media, law enforcement, military, and medical industry professionals on strategies for dismantling racism in their institutions. Dr. Greason has provided anti-racism training to educators and administrators nationwide. Dr. Greason is the author of six books, including his two latest, Industrial Segregation and Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (both Kendall-Hunt Publishers).

Walter's digital humanities projects, “The Wakanda Syllabus” and “The Racial Violence Syllabus”, produced global responses in the last three years. In the wake of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, “The Racial Violence Syllabus” attracted over 4 million individual uses, was translated into seven languages, and inspired projects like the Oscar-winning film “BlackKklansman.” The 2016 “Wakanda Syllabus” defined Afrofuturism as one of the core themes of media convergence and was a crucial element in the public acclaim that supported Marvel Studios’ Oscar-winning feature film, “Black Panther.”

So that's it! Check it out. This podcast will grow and change as we move along, but I hope you dig it. Like it, subscribe to it, and please do give us your feedback.