POPULARITY
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 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.
Frederick Douglas was the “prose poet of America's (and perhaps a universal) body politic. He searched for the human soul, envisioned through slavery and freedom in all their meanings. There had been no other voice quite like Douglass's.” Join me and Professor David Blight as we discuss his Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. The lessons Douglass taught about freedom, dignity, and justice nearly 150 years ago are as important and relevant today as they were then. Guest David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University David W. Blight is a teacher, scholar and public historian. At Yale University he is Sterling Professor of History, joining that faculty in January, 2003. As of June, 2004, he is Director, succeeding David Brion Davis, of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. In his capacity as director of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, Blight organizes conferences, working groups, lectures, the administering of the annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and many public outreach programs regarding the history of slavery and its abolition. He previously taught at Amherst College for thirteen years. In 2013-14 he was the William Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge University, UK, and in 2010-11, Blight was the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th-Century American History at the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. During the 2006-07 academic year he was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, New York Public Library. In October of 2018, Simon and Schuster published his new biography of Frederick Douglass, entitled, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which garnered nine book awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. The Douglass book has been optioned by Higher Ground Productions and Netflix for a projected feature film. Blight works in many capacities in the world of public history, including on boards of museums and historical societies, and as a member of a small team of advisors to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum team of curators. For that institution he wrote the recently published essay, “Will It Rise: September 11 in American Memory.” In 2012, Blight was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and delivered an induction address, “The Pleasure and Pain of History.” In 2018, Blight was appointed by the Georgia Historical Society as a Vincent J. Dooley Distinguished Teaching Fellow, which recognizes national leaders in the field of history as both writers and educators whose research has enhanced or changed the way the public understands the past. Blight's newest books include annotated editions, with introductory essay, of Frederick Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (Yale Univ. Press, 2013), Robert Penn Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro, (Yale Univ. Press, 2014), and the monograph, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (Harvard University Press, published August 2011), which received the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book in non-fiction on racism and human diversity. American Oracle is an intellectual history of Civil War memory, rooted in the work of Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin. Blight is also the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Narratives of Emancipation, (Harcourt, 2007, paperback in 2009). This book combines two newly discovered slave narratives in a volume that recovers the lives of their authors, John Washington and Wallace Turnage, as well as provides an incisive history of the story of emancipation. In June, 2004, the New York Times ran a front page story about the discovery and significance of these two rare slave narratives. A Slave No More garnered three book prizes, including the Connecticut Book Award for non-fictio...
Frederick Douglas was the “prose poet of America's (and perhaps a universal) body politic. He searched for the human soul, envisioned through slavery and freedom in all their meanings. There had been no other voice quite like Douglass's.” Join me and Professor David Blight as we discuss his Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. The lessons Douglass taught about freedom, dignity, and justice nearly 150 years ago are as important and relevant today as they were then. Guest David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University David W. Blight is a teacher, scholar and public historian. At Yale University he is Sterling Professor of History, joining that faculty in January, 2003. As of June, 2004, he is Director, succeeding David Brion Davis, of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. In his capacity as director of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, Blight organizes conferences, working groups, lectures, the administering of the annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and many public outreach programs regarding the history of slavery and its abolition. He previously taught at Amherst College for thirteen years. In 2013-14 he was the William Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge University, UK, and in 2010-11, Blight was the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th-Century American History at the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. During the 2006-07 academic year he was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, New York Public Library. In October of 2018, Simon and Schuster published his new biography of Frederick Douglass, entitled, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which garnered nine book awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. The Douglass book has been optioned by Higher Ground Productions and Netflix for a projected feature film. Blight works in many capacities in the world of public history, including on boards of museums and historical societies, and as a member of a small team of advisors to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum team of curators. For that institution he wrote the recently published essay, “Will It Rise: September 11 in American Memory.” In 2012, Blight was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and delivered an induction address, “The Pleasure and Pain of History.” In 2018, Blight was appointed by the Georgia Historical Society as a Vincent J. Dooley Distinguished Teaching Fellow, which recognizes national leaders in the field of history as both writers and educators whose research has enhanced or changed the way the public understands the past. Blight's newest books include annotated editions, with introductory essay, of Frederick Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (Yale Univ. Press, 2013), Robert Penn Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro, (Yale Univ. Press, 2014), and the monograph, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (Harvard University Press, published August 2011), which received the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book in non-fiction on racism and human diversity. American Oracle is an intellectual history of Civil War memory, rooted in the work of Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin. Blight is also the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Narratives of Emancipation, (Harcourt, 2007, paperback in 2009). This book combines two newly discovered slave narratives in a volume that recovers the lives of their authors, John Washington and Wallace Turnage, as well as provides an incisive history of the story of emancipation. In June, 2004, the New York Times ran a front page story about the discovery and significance of these two rare slave narratives.
Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University and the Rogers Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington, uses images shot by landscape photographer Jesse White to explore California's history.
Steven Hahn, professor of history at New York University and the Rogers Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington, considers what the history of the United States would look like, especially for the 19th century, if we travel east and west from the middle of the country and north from Mexico and the Caribbean. Recorded on Oct. 5, 2016.
Joseph T. Glatthaar, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth-Century American History, compares the great Union and Confederate armies in the American Civil War. A book signing will follow the talk. This is part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture Series at The Huntington.
Joseph T. Glatthaar, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth-Century American History, compares the great Union and Confederate armies in the American Civil War. A book signing will follow the talk. This is part of the Distinguished Fellow Lecture Series at The Huntington.
Joan Waugh discusses how the Civil War Sesquicentennial is being commemorated, focusing on selected events from 1863 (including the Battle of Gettysburg) and exploring how memory traditions have shaped the war’s legacy. Waugh is professor of history at UCLA and the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th–Century American History at The Huntington in 2013–14.
Bruce Levine, author of “The Fall of the House of Dixie,” discusses the specific social and political forces that launched and shaped the revolutionary process of the Civil War. Levine is professor of history at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th-Century American History for 2012–13.
Bruce Levine discusses the demise of the south and the destruction of slavery. Levine is the author of "The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South." He is professor of history and African American studies at the University of Illinois and the Rogers Distinguished Fellow of 19th-Century American History at The Huntington Library for 2012-13.
Harry Stout reflects on the timeless oration of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, which may be considered America’s greatest sermon. Stout is professor of American religious history at Yale University and the Rogers Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington for 2011–12.
Frederick Douglass, former slave and great African American statesman, wrote three autobiographies that reveal—and hide—many elements of his life. David W. Blight, author of the forthcoming Frederick Douglass: A Life, examines how the biographer probes through and beyond Douglass’ own story to capture a complete picture..Blight is the Rogers Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington for 2010–11. He is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition.
Frederick Douglass, former slave and great African American statesman, wrote three autobiographies that reveal—and hide—many elements of his life. David W. Blight, author of the forthcoming Frederick Douglass: A Life, examines how the biographer probes through and beyond Douglass’ own story to capture a complete picture..Blight is the Rogers Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington for 2010–11. He is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition.