Historians At The Movies

This week Jelani Cobb drops in to talk about Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, what we don't see onscreen, the promise of Barack Obama, and the rise of Donald Trump. Plus, we preview his new book, Three or More is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here, 2012-Present. This is a powerhouse episode.About our guest:Jelani Cobb joined the Columbia Journalism School faculty in 2016 and became Dean in 2022. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He received a Peabody Award for his 2020 PBS Frontline film Whose Vote Counts? and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 2018. He has also been a political analyst for MSNBC since 2019.He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He is the editor or co-editor of several volumes including The Matter of Black Lives, a collection of The New Yorker's writings on race and The Essential Kerner Commission Report. He is producer or co-producer on a number of documentaries including Lincoln's Dilemma, Obama: A More Perfect Union, Policing the Police and THE RIOT REPORT.Dr. Cobb was educated at Jamaica High School in Queens, NY, Howard University, where he earned a B.A. in English, and Rutgers University, where he completed his MA and doctorate in American History in 2003. He is also a recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Journalism Project and the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library. He received an Honorary Doctorate for the Advancement of Science and Art from Cooper Union in 2022, and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Rutgers University in 2024. York College / CUNY and Teachers College have honored Dr. Cobb with medals.Dr. Cobb was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2023.

Today Dr. Julia Brock joins in to talk about how hunting transformed and was transformed by the Modern South. We talk about dimensions of race, class, and sex and how they informed land stewarship and environmental conservation in the early twentieth century and how those changes affect us today.About our guest:Dr. Julia Brock is Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama.

This week Dr. John McManus joins in to talk about how WWII films have evolved over time, including our picks for best and worst movies ever made about the war.About our guest:John C. McManus is Curators' Distinguished Professor of U.S. military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T). This professorship is bestowed by the University of Missouri Board of Curators on the most outstanding scholars in the University of Missouri system. McManus is the first ever Missouri S&T faculty member in the humanities to be named Curators' Distinguished Professor. As one of the nation's leading military historians, and the author of fifteen well received books on the topic, he is in frequent demand as a speaker and expert commentator. In addition to dozens of local and national radio programs, he has appeared on Cnn.com, Fox News, C-Span, the Military Channel, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, Netflix, the Smithsonian Network, the History Channel and PBS, among others. He also served as historical advisor for the bestselling book and documentary Salinger, the latter of which appeared nationwide in theaters and on PBS's American Masters Series. During the 2018-2019 academic year, he was in residence at the U.S. Naval Academy as the Leo A. Shifrin Chair of Naval and Military History, a distinguished visiting professorship. His current project is a major three volume history of the U.S. Army in the Pacific/Asia theater during World War II. He is the host of two podcasts, Someone Talked! in tandem with the National D-Day Memorial, and We Have Ways of Making You Talk in the USA alongside Al Murray and James Holland. John C. McManus is a native of St. Louis. He attended the University of Missouri and earned a degree in sports journalism. After a brief stint in advertising and sports broadcasting, he embarked on a literary and academic career. He earned an M.A. in American history from the University of Missouri and a Ph.D in American history and military history from the University of Tennessee. He participated in the University of Tennessee's Normandy Scholars program and, in the process, had an opportunity to study the battle first hand at the Normandy battlefields. At Tennessee he served as Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of War and Society, where he helped oversee a major effort to collect the first hand stories of American veterans of World War II. Making extensive use of this material, as well as sources from many other archives, he published two important books, The Deadly Brotherhood: The American Combat Soldier in World War II in 1998, and Deadly Sky: The American Combat Airman in World War II in 2000. Shortly after the publication of Deadly Sky he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of U.S. Military History at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (at the time known as University of Missouri-Rolla) where he now teaches courses on the Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, American Military History, and the American Combat Experience in the 20th Century. He is on the editorial advisory board for World War II magazine and Global War Studies. In 2004 he published a two volume series on the American role in the Battle of Normandy. The first book, The Americans at D-Day: The American Experience at the Normandy Invasion was released in June 2004. The second book, The Americans at Normandy: The Summer of 1944, the American War from the Beaches to Falaise was published in November 2004. In 2007-2008 he published four new books. 

This week my friend Kevin Gannon drops in to talk about his career in history education, how education has changed, what to do about A.I., and the role of social media as a scholar. This is a cool conversation with one of the coolest dudes I know.About our guest: Dr. Kevin Gannon is the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence (CAFE) and Professor of History at Queens University of Charlotte.From 2014-22, he served as Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) and Professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, where he also taught from 2004-2022. In addition to directing GV's faculty development operations, he was also a department chair (2011-2014) and co-directed the New Student Seminar program (2005-2011).His teaching, research, and public work (including writing) centers on critical and inclusive pedagogy; race, history, and justice; and technology and teaching. He writes at least semi-regularly for The Chronicle of Higher Education), and his essays on higher education have also been published in Vox and other media outlets. His book Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, was published by West Virginia University press in Spring, 2020, as part of their Teaching and Learning in Higher Education series, edited by James M. Lang. He is currently writing a textbook for the US Civil War and Reconstruction eras that's grounded in settler-colonial theory for Routledge. In 2016, he appeared in the Oscar-nominated documentary 13th, which was directed by Ava DuVernay. He is a speaker and consultant about a range of topics on campuses across North America; in this work, he endeavors to bring passion, humor, and interactivity to my audiences. He is also delighted to work with smaller groups of students, individual classes, or selected groups of faculty and staff on these campus visits. You can find him on Twitter: @TheTattooedProf.Kevin's scholarly work centers on Race and Racisms, Critical and Inclusive Pedagogy, nineteenth-century history (particularly the United States and the Americas), and historiography and theory. His teaching ranges widely: Civil War and Reconstruction; Colonial America and the Atlantic World; Latin American history; Research Methods and Historiography; and the History of Capitalism are in my regular rotation, along with survey-level offerings in Ancient and Medieval World History. He teaches regularly in both in-person and online learning spaces, and he also has extensive experience working with first-year and at-risk students.As an educational developer, Kevin works closely with his colleagues in the faculty, staff, and administration to promote excellence and innovation in teaching, and to support faculty work across the areas of teaching, scholarship, and university service. He is a fierce advocate for professional development in all its manifestations, active learning, scholarly teaching, good technology, social justice, movable furniture, and humor in any environment.

For 13 days beginning on October 16, 1962 the world teetered on total nuclear destruction. Today, Dr. Renata Keller joins in to talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis, how it is depicted in the film 13 Days, and how the events played out in Latin America. This is a deep dive into arguably the most consequential two weeks in world history.About our guest:Dr. Renata Keller specializes in Latin American and Cold War history. Her second book, The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War (UNC Press, 2025), uncovers how people and governments across the Americas caused, participated in, and were affected by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Her first book, Mexico's Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge, 2015), explored how the Cuban Revolution transformed Mexico's domestic politics and international relations. It was awarded SECOLAS's Alfred B. Thomas Book Prize and honorable mentions for RMCLAS's Thomas McGann and Michael C. Meyer Prizes.She received her B.A. in History and Spanish from Arizona State University and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She taught international relations at Boston University for five years before joining the History Department at the University of Nevada in 2017. She has published journal articles in The Journal of Latin American Studies, The Journal of Cold War Studies, The Journal of Cold War History, The Latin American Research Review, Diplomatic History, Contexto Internacional, and Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, as well as popular articles in History Today and The Washington Post. Her research has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Philanthropic Educational Organization, the Kluge Center at the U.S. Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, and other institutions. She is co-editor of InterConnections: The Global Twentieth Century, a new book series at UNC Press that is home to innovative global, international, and transregional histories of the long twentieth century.She is also a dedicated educator. She teaches classes on modern Latin American history, Cuban history, the global Cold War, and drugs and security in the Americas. She also enjoys training the next generation of thinkers, historians, and history teachers in my classes on historical research and writing, historiography, historiography of the Americas, and her graduate research seminar on twentieth-century history.

Comanche Chairman Forrest Tahdooahnippah joins in to talk about Comanche history, culture, and so much more. We had a chance to talk about the legal relationships between Tribal nations and the United States, the importance of language preservation, what it's like to lead a Tribe, thoughts on how Comanche people have been portrayed on film, and how historians and others can conduct ethical scholarship in Indian Country. This was a really wonderful conversation and I'm so thankful to the Chairman for the time to talk with us.About our guest:Forrest Tahdooahnippah is Chairman of the Comanche Nation. He earned a Bachelor's Degree in Public Policy from Stanford University and his Juris Doctorate from the University of Minnesota Law School. Prior to his service as Chairman, he was legal counsel at Dorsey & Whitney, LLP and was an assistant professor of law at Mitchell Hamline School of Law.

This week Kate Sheppard and Colin Colbourn return to ask if Notting Hill is the greatest romcom of its generation.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.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 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.Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age was published in July 2024. It has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and was a top 6 Reader's Choice non-fiction book on Goodreads.Dr. Colin Colbourn is the Lead Historian for Project Recover, where he manages historical operations to locate and identify U.S. service members missing in action from past conflicts. He is a graduate of Ball State University and went on to earn his MA and Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Southern Mississippi. His work at Project Recover blends family outreach, archival research, case analysis, and global field investigations to bring home missing service men and women. At Project Recover, Dr. Colbourn works with an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, oceanographers, marine scientists, and engineers in order to apply modern technology to the mysteries of the past. Dr. Colbourn also teaches U.S. Military History as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Delaware.

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 Tyler Anbinder joins in to talk about his experiences advising on Gangs of New York as well as his work tracing the Irish diaspora.About our guest:Tyler Anbinder is a specialist in nineteenth-century America and the history of immigration and ethnicity in American life. His latest book, 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, can be found at http://beyondragstoriches.org. His most recent book before Plentiful Country was City of Dreams (2016), a history of immigrant life in New York City from the early 1600s to the present.  And prior to that, in 2001, he published Five Points, a history of nineteenth-century America's most infamous immigrant neighborhood, 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 in 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 received 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.

Today my friend, Dr. Eric Becklin, defended his dissertation. And around here, we celebrate the wins. I talk about the process of graduate school and how important friends are to getting you to the finish line.

Dr. Karen Cox drops in to talk about the Trump Administration's plans to reinstall two former Confederate monuments, along with the Lost Cause mythology, and how we think about the Civil War.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.A successful public intellectual, Dr. Cox has written op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, TIME magazine, Publishers Weekly, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Huffington Post. She has given dozens of media interviews in the U.S. and around the globe, especially on the topic of Confederate monuments. She appeared in Henry Louis Gates's PBS documentary Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, Lucy Worsley's American History's Biggest Fibs for the BBC, and the Emmy-nominated documentary The Neutral Ground, which examines the underlying history of Confederate monuments.Cox is a professor emerita of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she taught from 2002-2024. She is currently writing a book that explores themes of the Great Migration, the Black press, and early Chicago jazz through the forgotten tragedy of the Rhythm Club fire, which took the lives of more than 200 African Americans in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1940.You can follow her on Bluesky @DrKarenLCox.bsky.social

This week Dr. Jacob Lee joins in to talk about the real Jeremiah Johnson—and why Redford's version may be a fantasy. About our guest:Jacob Lee is a historian of early America and the American West, focusing on colonialism and borderlands. His first book, Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi (Harvard University Press, 2019), embedded intertwined Native and imperial histories in the physical landscape of Middle America, a vast region encompassing much of the central Mississippi River valley. In the centuries between the collapse of the ancient metropolis of Cahokia around A.D. 1300 and the rise of the U.S. empire in the early 1800s, power flowed through the kinship-based alliances and social networks that controlled travel and communication along the many rivers of the midcontinent. Drawing on a range of English-, French-, Spanish-, and Illinois-language sources, as well as archaeology, oral history, and environmental science, Masters of the Middle Watersemphasized the power of personal relationships and the environment to shape the course of empires and nations.He is currently working on a history of the everyday operation of legal jurisdiction in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma and Kansas) from the 1820s through the 1850s. Tentatively-titled The Laws of Nations: Legal Jurisdiction and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Indian Territory, this project examines the ways that Indigenous nations, especially Cherokee Nation and Osage Nation, effected sovereignty over people and land through the assertion and exercise of jurisdiction over crimes committed within their borders. In adjudicating crimes ranging from murder to theft to bootlegging, Native nations repaired harms, defined citizenship, and exercised authority in the face of the efforts of U.S. federal and state governments to usurp and undermine Indigenous governance.

Jason and Thomas recap their voyages to destinations unknown: San Diego and Minnesota's Boundary Waters, plus Thomas and Jason discuss the excitement of fall semesters on campus.

This week we return to the vault to bring you Ridley Scott's unexpected western masterpiece: Thelma and Louise.

This week Craig Bruce Smith and Robert Greene II join in to talk about our favorite dystopian films, why this film slips under the radar, and what it was like when Craign recently met Arnold himself.

This week John Wyatt Greenlee, Colin Colbourn, and Alan Malfavon flyover to talk about James Gunn's Superman, the need for heroes in everyday lives, and casting the rest of the DCU.About our guests:Alan Malfavon is Assistant Professor of History at California State University San Marcos.  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. It argues how Afro-Mexicans facilitated, complicated, and participated in multiple socio-political processes that reshaped Veracruz and its borderlands. Colin Colbourn holds a Ph.D in U.S. History from the University of Southern Mississippi. His expertise includes mass communication and assisting in research efforts for unresolved casualties from past conflicts. Since 2007 he has published articles on Marine Corps history in Leatherneck: Magazine of the Marines, and was Associate Editor for the West Point History of Warfare. 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 social anthropologist Dr. Judith Scheele joins in from France to talk about her decades of research into the diverse and fascinating peoples and places of the Sahara Desert.About our guest:Judith Scheele is professor of social anthropology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, EHESS). She has spent almost two decades living in and researching Saharan societies. The author of three previous books, she now lives in Marseille, France.Find her book: https://amzn.to/3U8X19Y 

Looking back at the last seven years of HATM, along with my plans for the future.

This week, two of my favorite people in the world join in to talk about Brad Pitt's new film, F1  while they try to convert me into a Formula One racing fan. Ladies and Gentlemen, let's start our engines.  

If you want to move forward, get rid of it.

We're enjoying the holiday this week so we thought we'd bring one back from the vault. This week Dr. Craig Bruce Smith and Dr. Robert Greene II and I talk about Mel Gibson's The Patriot, the role of constructed memory in national identity, and the ethics of making historical dramas.

It's pretty frustrating. 

This week military historian Dr. Jonathan Carroll drops in to talk about Black Hawk Down and his new book Beyond Black Hawk Down: Intervention, Nation-Building, and Insurgency in Somalia, 1992-1995.About our guest:Jonathan Carroll is a former officer in the Irish Defence Forces who earned a PhD from Texas A&M University. He is an associate professor of military history at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.

Talking about my weekend trip with Comanche youths, along with some of my experiences with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, the Kiowa Tribe, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.

This week John Wyatt Greenlee returns as guest host and he's looking for a six fingered man. 

This week, our friend Dr Lou Moore drops in to talk about Diggstown and his work tracing black boxing from the end of the Civil War into the 20th century.

This week Dr. Paul Thomas Chamberlin drops in to talk about the history behind Operation Overlord and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.About our guest:Paul Chamberlin specializes in twentieth century international history with a focus on U.S. foreign relations and the Middle East. His first book, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford, 2012), is an international history of the Palestinian liberation struggle. His next book, The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (HarperCollins, 2018), is a global history of the bloodiest encounters of the Cold War.

Today neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr. Kieran Fox joins in to talk about the spiritual journey of Albert Einstein.About our guest:Dr. Kieran Fox is a neuroscientist (PhD 2016) and doctor (MD 2023), currently training to be a psychiatrist in the Research Resident Training Program at the University of California San Francisco. His research over the next few years will focus on the neural mechanisms and clinical potential of psychedelic medicines. During medical school, he used intracranial electrical stimulation (neuromodulation) of the human brain to research cognition and emotion in epilepsy patients.

This week Justin Rawlins and Craig Bruce Smith drop in to talk about Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning and their thoughts on the MI franchise. 

Writer and filmmaker Kevin Smokler returns to the pod to talk about his discussions with 25 different women filmmakers.About our guest:Kevin Smokler is a writer, documentary filmmaker and event host focused on our relationship as human beings with pop culture. His most recent book BREAK THE FRAME: CONVERSATIONS WITH WOMEN FILMMAKERS  contains 24 career-retrospective conversations with directors behind box office phenomenon like Captain Marvel, Oscar winners like Free Solo and the filmmakers who launched actors such as America Ferrera, Paul Rudd, Ryan Gosling and Jennifer Lawrence. His previous books, BRAT PACK AMERICA is a love letter to teen movies of the 1980s. His 2013 essay collection PRACTICAL CLASSICS is a 50 book attempt to reread one's high school reading list as an adult.His feature length documentary film VINYL NATION on the American renaissance of the vinyl record, won ten awards and screened at 50 film festivals worldwide. His new documentary MIDDLE GROUNDS, about coffee shops and civic dialogue will be released this year.

Today Rachel McCarthy James drops in to talk about the development of the axe and the myriad of ways it has been used to dispatch people and empires over the years.About our guest:Rachel McCarthy James was born and raised in Kansas, the daughter of baseball's Bill James and artist Susan McCarthy. She graduated from Hollins University in Roanoke, VA, where she studied writing and politics. Her first nonfiction book, The Man from the Train, was written in collaboration with her father and published in 2017. She lives with her husband Jason and pets in Lawrence, KS.

It's a new day here at the podcast. Historians At The Movies Podcast is now Reckoning with Jason Herbert. We're opening up our focus and the things we talk about here. 

Andor is the greatest Star Wars we've ever seen on any screen and it's not close. My close friend Alan Malfavon joins in to talk about the brilliance of this show, what it means to us, and what we hope to see next.About our guest:Alan Malfavon resituates Mexico's socio-political, cultural, and economic networks with the Atlantic World and the Greater Caribbean, and it dissects and problematizes those networks by centering the Black and Afro-Mexican experience. His research interrogates and subverts archival silences that have erased Black and Afro-Mexican agency from narratives of Mexican identity and nation-state formation, seeking to diversify these narratives by foregrounding the voices, perspectives, and actions of Afro-descendants.

This week Dr. Amy S. Kaufman drops in to talk about our favorite representations of Robin Hood, how he has changed through history, and her new novel, The Traitor of Sherwood Forest.About our guest:Amy S. Kaufman is the author of The Traitor of Sherwood Forest, a Robin Hood retelling based on the medieval ballads (Penguin Books, 2025). Amy holds a PhD in medieval literature and has written about the Middle Ages for both academic journals and popular websites, including The Washington Post. She is co-author of The Devil's Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (University of Toronto Press, 2020).A former English professor, Amy now writes full time from Vancouver, where she can't stop taking pictures of the mountains. The Traitor of Sherwood Forest is her debut novel.

This week Dr. Waitman Beorn drops in to talk about Defiance (2008) and his work researching the Holocaust in Europe during World War II.About our guest:Dr. Waitman Wade Beorn is an associate 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 was released in August 2024 from Nebraska University Press.  Between the Wires was recognised as a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the United States.

This week Bible scholar and TikTok superstar Dr. Dan McClellan drops in to talk about Ken Smith's 1999 thought piece on Catholicism and Dan's new book, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) about Scripture's Most Controversial Issues.

Today Dr. Scott Spillman joins in to talk about how historians have conceptualized slavery and its role in the development of the United States. Get ready for a history of the history of slavery.About our guest:Scott Spillman is an American historian and the author of the book Making Sense of Slavery: America's Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today (2025). His essays and reviews have appeared in The Point, Liberties, The New Yorker, The New Republic, n+1, the Chronicle Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has published academic articles in Reviews in American History, History of Education Quarterly, and North Carolina Historical Review.Scott has a PhD in history from Stanford University, and before that he studied history, English, and political philosophy at the University of North Carolina (and Duke University) as a Robertson Scholar. Originally from Atlanta, he now lives in Denver with his partner and their twin daughters. He also spends part of his time in Leadville, where he serves as chair of the city's historic preservation commission. When he is not reading and writing, he enjoys running in the mountains.

Today Dr. Zandria Robinson drops in to talk about Sinners and why it might be the best movie of the 21st century. We have a spoiler free introduction, a pause, and then a spoiler filled conversation about the Jim Crow South, the Great Migration, WWI, Chicago, Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan, sex, music, and of course THAT SCENE. This conversation is almost as amazing as this film. Share it widely.About our guest:Dr. Zandria F. Robinson is a writer and ethnographer working on race, gender, sound, and spirit at the crossroads of the living and the dead. A native Memphian and classically-trained violinist, Robinson earned the Bachelor of Arts in Literature and African American Studies and the Master of Arts in Sociology from the University of Memphis and the Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology from Northwestern University. Dr. Robinson's first book, This Ain't Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) won the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award from the Division of Racial and Ethnic Minorities of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her second monograph, Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (University of California Press, 2018), co-authored with long-time collaborator Marcus Anthony Hunter (UCLA), won the 2018 CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Title and the Robert E. Park Book Award from the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.Robinson is currently at work on an ancestral memoir, Surely You'll Begin the World (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), a life-affirming exploration of grief, afterlife connections, and how deep listening to the stories of the dead can inform how we move through the world after experiencing loss. Her 2016 memoir essay, “Listening for the Country,” was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Essay.Dr. Robinson's teaching interests include Black feminist theory, Black popular culture, memoir, urban sociology, and Afro-futurism. She is Past President of the Association of Black Sociologists, a member of the editorial board of Southern Cultures, and a contributing editor at Oxford American. Her work has appeared in Issues in Race and Society, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, the Annual Review of Sociology (with Marcus Anthony Hunter), Contexts, Rolling Stone, Scalawag, Hyperallergic, Believer, Oxford American, NPR, Glamour, MLK50.com and The New York Times Magazine.

News broke yesterday of Pope Francis' death at the age of  88. Matt Gabriele joins in to talk about the man, the history of the papacy, and what comes next.About our guest:Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies in 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.Gabriele has published numerous academic articles and several books, including An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade, which received the Southeastern Medieval Association's Best First Book in 2013. He has also presented at dozens of national and international conferences and has given invited talks at Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Virginia, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and Westfälische Wilhelms Üniversität-Münster.Gabriele is a regular contributor to Forbes.com; his public writing has appeared in such places as The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Slate, and The Roanoke Times; and interviews with him have aired locally, nationally, and internationally. He completed a bachelor's degree in history at the University of Delaware and a master's degree and a doctorate in medieval history at the University of California, Berkeley.

Today astrophysicist Dr. Mario Livio and Nobel-winning chemist Dr. Jack Szostak drop in to talk about the search for extraterrestrial life.About our guests:Dr. Mario Livio is an internationally known astrophysicist, best-selling author, and popular speaker. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. ​Dr. Livio has published more than 500 scientific articles. He has made significant theoretical contributions to topics ranging from cosmology, supernova explosions, and black holes to extrasolar planets and the emergence of life in the universe. He has received numerous awards and recognitions for his research, including having been selected as the “Carnegie Centenary Professor” by the universities of Scotland in 2003, and as the “Danz Distinguished Lecturer” by the University of Washington in 2006. Dr. Livio is also the author of eight popular science books, the most recent in collaboration with Nobel laureate Jack Szostak. His bestselling book The Golden Ratio won him the Peano Prize in 2003 and the International Pythagoras Prize in 2004, as the best popular book on mathematics. His book Is God A Mathematician? inspired the NOVA program “The Great Math Mystery,” which was nominated for an EMMY in 2016. His book Brilliant Blunders was selected by The Washington Post as one of the Notable Books of 2013. His book Galileo and the Science Deniers appeared in May 2020, and was one of the finalists for the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. Dr. Jack Szostak is a  biologist, Nobel Prize laureate, university professor at the University of Chicago, former professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. Szostak has made significant contributions to the field of genetics. His achievement helped scientists to map the location of genes in mammals and to develop techniques for manipulating genes. His research findings in this area are also instrumental to the Human Genome Project. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W. Greider, for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres.

We're a couple days removed from yet another on campus shooting. Sasha, Cari, and I ask what the hell is wrong with America and how did we get here.About our guests: Sasha Abramsky is The Nation's Western correspondent. He is the author of several books, including The American Way of Poverty, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar, and most recently Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. Follow him on Bluesky at @sashaabramsky.bsky.social. Dr. Cari Babitzke is a historian focusing on gun politics in the latter half of the 20th century.

Talking about Bobby Sands, the Troubles, the Irish Republican Army, and the Good Friday Agreement with John M. Burney and Andrew J. Auge.

Today Sasha Abramsky joins in for the first time to talk about why small towns are so susceptible to far right rhetoric and if there is hope for the future.About our guest:Sasha Abramsky is The Nation's Western correspondent. He is the author of several books, including The American Way of Poverty, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar, and most recently Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. Follow him on Bluesky at @sashaabramsky.bsky.social.

The gang is back together as we return to Indiana Jones franchise to talk about archaeology, British imperialism, representation of India on film, and why Harrison Ford never looked cooler than he did on the bridge. 

Physicist Matt Strassler drops in to talk about the origins of the universe and how we how what we know.About  our guest:Dr. Matt Strassler is a  theoretical physicist and writer. His research over the past thirty years has mainly been related mainly to the Large Hadron Collider, though he has written many papers on a wide variety of topics in string theory, quantum field theory and particle physics. He has recently completed a new book, called “Waves in an Impossible Sea“, in which, without assuming readers know any science or math, he explains modern physics and its centrality in human experience.

This week Kevin Smokler drops in to talk about The Breakfast Club, the Brat Pack, John Hughes, and the legacy of 80s teen movies. About our guest:Kevin Smokler is a writer, documentary filmmaker and event host focused on our relationship as human beings with pop culture. His most recent book BREAK THE FRAME: CONVERSATIONS WITH WOMEN FILMMAKERS  contains 24 career-retrospective conversations with directors behind box office phenomenon like Captain Marvel, Oscar winners like Free Solo and the filmmakers who launched actors such as America Ferrera, Paul Rudd, Ryan Gosling and Jennifer Lawrence. His previous books, BRAT PACK AMERICA is a love letter to teen movies of the 1980s. His 2013 essay collection PRACTICAL CLASSICS is a 50 book attempt to reread one's high school reading list as an adult.

April 1 marks the beginning of Autism Awareness Month in the U.S. and the U.K. so I invited neuroscientist Dr. Gina Rippon on the pod to talk about what autism is, the history of its diagnosis, and how women and girls have been overlooked in autism research.About our guest: Professor Gina Rippon is Professor Emeritus of Cognitive NeuroImaging at Aston University in the UK. Her research involves the use of state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to investigate developmental disorders such as autism, profiling different patterns of brain activity in autistic children and adults. Her current research explores the under-recognition of autism in women and girls, especially in neuroscience research. Her new book on this topic: The Lost Girls of Autism (UK)/Off the Spectrum (US) is released in April 2025.

Talking today about why we have to keep fighting and why we must move forward. Because it's not about us.

This week Dr. Kit Heyem visits from across the Pond to talk about their new book, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender. This was an awesome conversation to talk nonbinary histories through time and why that is relevant today.About our guest:Dr Kit Heyam (they/them or he/him) is a Leeds-based freelance writer, heritage practitioner, trans awareness trainer and academic. You can find them on Blue Sky at: https://bsky.app/profile/krheyam.bsky.social

In 1992 Bill Duke teamed up with Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum to create one of the best film noirs ever made and a masterpiece of Black cinema. Walter Greason and Tim Fielder join in to talk about it, the rise of hip hop, and the early 90s. About our guests:A native of Mississippi, Tim Fielder is an illustrator, cartoonist, animator and OG Afrofuturist. He is the founder of Dieselfunk Studios, an intermedia storytelling company, and is an educator for institutions such as the New York Film Academy and Howard University. Tim has served clients such as Marvel, Tri-Star Pictures, Ubisoft Entertainment, and the Village Voice, and is known for his TEDx Talk on Afrofuturism. He won the prestigious 2018 Glyph Award, and his work has been showcased in the Hammonds House Museum, Exit Art and NYU Gallatin Gallery. He attended Jackson State University, School of Visual Arts, and New York University. He lives in New York City.Walter Greason teaches American and world history, using media ecology, economics, and African diaspora studies. His areas of research include urban planning, Afrofuturism, and multimedia user experience design. He is an author, editor, and contributor to more than twenty books, mostly notably the award-winning books Suburban Erasure and The Black Reparations Project.  His work on the Timothy Thomas Fortune Cultural Center has garnered international acclaim for the innovative use of digital technology, leading to multiple urban revitalization projects in Minnesota, Florida, New Jersey, and Louisiana. He has written for or appeared as the feature guest on media outlets ranging from the Washington Post, USA Today, the Canadian Broadcast Channel, the Philadelphia Daily News, the Huffington Post, National Public Radio, Historians at the Movies, the New York Times Read Along, WURD Philadelphia, and Today with Dr. Kaye (WEEA, Baltimore). He was a Future Faculty Fellow at Temple University where he completed his Ph.D. in History and a Presidential Scholar at Villanova University where he studied History, English, Philosophy, Peace and Justice Studies, and Africana Studies. His most recent project, The Graphic History of Hip Hop, with Afrofuturist illustrator Tim Fielder, has been featured at the United Nations, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum for African American History and Culture, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Schomburg Center in the New York Public Library system, and San Diego Comic-Con in 2024.

In the early 20th century, the New York Times dubbed French philosopher Henri Bergson as "the most dangerous man in the world." Bergson scared a lot of people in how he brought philosophy to the masses but he also won critical acclaim, receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature and France's highest honor, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'honneur. Surprisingly, no English language biography exists of him. Until now. This week, Dr. Emily Herring joins in to talk about Bergson's rise to fame, his influence on 20th century thought, and the mysteries behind why he died in relative obscurity. About our guest:Dr. Emily Herring received her PhD from the University of Leeds and is now working as a freelance writer and editor. She is the author of the first biography of Henri Bergson in English, Herald of a Restless World. How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (2024 Basic Books).