American History Too!

By Recorded History Podcast NetworkSociety & Culture History

American History Too! episodes

January 22, 2016 Episode 20 - The Special Relationship?
Is there a ‘Special Relationship’ between the United States
and the United Kingdom? And, if there
is, what actually is ‘special’ about it?
Those are the two questions we seek to answer on this month’s American History Too!. Tune in for a guided tour of the ups and the
downs of the US-UK relationship over the past 200 years – particularly during the post-World War II era – and come to your own conclusion on this fascinating
topic.
New Year, New Format - we also introduce an opening question
to the podcast!
This week: If you could have dinner with three figures in
American History who would they be?
We have our answers, but we are more interested in yours! Let
us know at @ahtoopodcast or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/americanhistorytoo
We’ll be back next month to discuss tumultuous presidency of
Herbert Hoover with Alastair Duthie.
Cheers,
Mark and Malcolm

Reading List
Aldrich, Richard J., ‘British intelligence and the
Anglo-American “Special relationship” during the Cold War’, Review of International
Studies, 24:3 (Jul.,1998), 331-351
Ashton, Nigel, ‘Harold Macmillan and the “Golden
Days” of Anglo-American Relations Revisited, 1957–63’, Diplomatic History,
29:4 (September 2005), 691-723.
Cooper, James, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan: A Very Political Special Relationship (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012),
Danchev, Alex, ‘The Cold War “Special
Relationship” Revisited’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 17:3 (2006), 579-595
Dobson, Alan and Steve Marsh, ‘Anglo-American
Relations: End of a Special Relationship?’, The International History Review,
36:4 (2014), 673-697
Dumbrell, John, A Special Relationship:
Anglo-American Relations from the Cold War to Iraq, 2nd Edition
(Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006)
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri, In Spies We Trust: The
Story of Western Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri, ‘The End of an Exclusive
Special Intelligence Relationship: British-American Intelligence Co-operation
Before, During and After the 1960s’, Intelligence and National Security,
27:5 (2012), 707-721
Khalil, Osamah F., ‘The Crossroads of the World:
U.S. and British Foreign Policy Doctrines and the Construct of the Middle East,
1902–2007’, Diplomatic History, 38:2 (Feb., 2014)
McGarr, Paul M., The Cold War in South Asia:
Britain, the United States, and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013),
Ovendale, Ritchie, Anglo-American Relations in
the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1998)
Parr, Helen, ‘Britain, America, East of Suez and
the EEC: Finding a Role in British Foreign Policy, 1964–67’, Contemporary
British History, 20:3 (2006), 403-421.
Rossbach, Niklas H., Heath, Nixon and the
Rebirth of the Special Relationship: Britain, the US and the EC, 1969-74
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),
Ruane, Kevin and James Ellison, ‘Managing the
Americans: Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and the Pursuit of Power-by-Proxy in
the 1950s’, Contemporary British History, 18:3 (Autumn 2004), 147-167
Svendsen, Adam D.M., Intelligence Cooperation
and the War on Terror: Anglo-American Security Relations after 9/11
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2010)
Tate, Simon, A Special Relationship?: British
Foreign Policy in the Era of American Hegemony (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2012)

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55 min
December 22, 2015 Episode 19 - Nixon and Elvis - The President and the King
On December 21, 1970, a man dressed in black and wearing
sunglasses entered the Oval Office of the White House. He desperately wanted to
bring a Colt .45 pistol with him, but even without it, his purpose was clear.
In front of him stood a craggy, slightly crumpled figure. The man in black
advanced, but his intent was not assassination. He had come seeking a badge. A
badge that he thought would give him power. The man he met had worked all of
his life to gain power, and now that he had it, he would do everything he could
to hold on to it. This was one of the most bizarre meetings ever to take place
in the White House, for the man in black was the King of Rock n’ Roll, Elvis
Presley and the craggy, crumpled man was President Richard M. Nixon. The
photographs of that meeting are some of the most requested images from the US
National Archives, but by the end of the 1970s, Elvis would be dead and Nixon
would have resigned in disgrace. Yet, the event has gained the status of a
modern myth and helps to illustrate the interconnectedness of power, politics,
and popular culture. So, on Episode 19 of American History Too, we explore the
fascinating, bizarre, and sometimes sad story of the meeting between the
President and the King.

Reading/Viewing List
Irwin
F. Gellman, The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and
Nixon, 1952-1961 (Yale University Press, 2015)
Iwan
Morgan, Nixon (Arnold: 2002)

This
is Elvis (documentary, 1981)
National
Security Archive: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nsa/elvis/elnix.html
Douglas
Brode, Elvis: Cinema and popular culture (London:
McFarland, 2006)
Peter
Carlson, 'When Elvis Met Nixon', The Smithsonian Magazine,
December 2010, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/history/when-elvis-met-nixon-69892425/
Peter
Guralnik, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (London,
Boston: Little, Brown, 1994)
Glen
Jeansonne, David Luhrssen, and Dan Sokolovie, Elvis Presley,
Reluctant Rebel: His Life and Our Times (Santa Barbara: Praeger,
2011)

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54 min
November 21, 2015 Episode 18 - Women and Murder at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Ever thought that the United States is a more violent
country than other ‘Western’ nations? And, if so, have you ever wondered
why?
On Episode 18 of American History Too! we
are joined by the University of Edinburgh’s Rian Sutton (@riansutton) to
discuss America’s more violent nature by looking at what one historian terms
its ‘homicide problem’ (n.b. it’s more complicated than guns and
cowboys!).
The reasons for the US’s higher murder rate than Europe
since the mid-nineteenth century remain disputed and Rian, discussing her
research on women and murder, illuminates this ongoing debate. Rian also outlines
how women have murdered in the US, why some women have escaped
prosecution despite damning evidence, and how the public have often
reacted to such crimes.
Finally, if you want to hear a whole lot of grizzly
anecdotes – mostly featuring a woman wielding an axe – then this is the podcast
for you!
--
We hope you enjoy this podcast and we’ll be back next month
with our next episode on ‘The President and The King’
Cheers,
Mark and Malcolm
@ahtoopodcast
Reading:
Britton,
Dana M. ‘Feminism in Criminology: Engendering the Outlaw.’ American
Academy of Political and Social Science 571, no. Sept (2000): 57-76.
D'Cruze,
Shani, Sandra Walklate, and Samantha Pegg. Murder: Social and Historical
Approaches to Understanding Murder and Murderers. London: Routledge,
2011.
Filetti,
Jean S. ‘From Lizzie Borden to Loren Bobitt: Violent Women and Gendered
Justice.’ Journal of American Studies 35, no. 3 (2001): 471-484.
Halttunen,
Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic
Imagination. London: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Lane,
Roger. Murder in America: A History. Columbus: The Ohio
University Press, 1997.
Lane,
Roger. ‘Murder in America: A Historian’s Perspective.’ Crime and Justice
25, (1999): 191-224
Linders,
Annulla, and Alana Van Gundy-Yoder. ‘Gall, Gallantry, and the Gallows:
Capital Punishment and the Social Construction of Gender,
1840-1920.’ Gender and Society 22, no. 3 (2008): 324-48.
Monkkonen,
Eric H. Murder in New York City. London: University of California
Press, 2001.
Monkkonen,
Eric H. ‘AHR Forum: Homicide: Explaining America’s Exceptionalism.’
American Historical Review 111, (2006): 76-94.
Roth,
Randolph. American Homicide. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009
Shipman,
Marlin. The Penalty Is Death: U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Women's
Executions. London: University of Missouri Press, 2002.

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50 min
October 18, 2015 Episode 17 - The Scopes Trial
In the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, the morning of Friday
July 10, 1925 was blisteringly hot. Outside the country courtroom, a crowd of
around 1000 people had gathered. Squeezing through the throng came a young
schoolteacher and athletics coach, John Scopes. Scopes was accompanied by Clarence
Darrow, one of the most famous lawyers in the United States. But when a cheer
went up from the assembled mass, it was not for Scopes or Darrow, but for the
elderly, burly figure of Williams Jennings Bryan. Lawyer, moralist, three times
Presidential candidate, religious authority, and key figure in the Populist
movement of the 1890s. These two legal titans were here to defend and prosecute
John Scopes. His crime was admitting to teaching Darwinian evolution in
defiance of a state law banning the promulgation of evolutionary theory.
The
Scopes Trial has entered popular myth and legend, claimed as a victory by both
sides, misrepresented and misunderstood in film and literature. So, in Episode
17 of American History Too! we’re going to look at the 1925
Scopes Trial and try to get to the heart of what was actually going on.
Reading List
Barry Hankins, Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the
Roaring Twenties and Today’s Culture Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial
and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (Harvard
University Press, 1998)
Michael Lienisch, In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the
Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement (University of
North Carolina Press, 2007)
Jeffrey P. Moran, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History With
Documents (Bedford/St Martin’s, 2002)
Ronald Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Harvard
University Press, 1998)
Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford University
Press, 2007)
Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith:
Religion in American War and Diplomacy (Anchor Books, 2012)
Adam Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks,
and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (University of Chicago
Press, 2014)

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56 min
September 20, 2015 Episode 16 - Irish-Americans and the Civil War
American History Too!
is back for a new semester and we’re examining the Irish-American experience of
the Civil War (1861-1865). To help us
delve into this vast and interesting topic is the University of Edinburgh’s
Catherine Bateson.
Cat guides us through Irish immigration to North America,
the different military and civilian roles played by Irish-Americans during the
war, and some of the music that emerged from the Irish-American experience of
the young nation’s most brutal conflict.
We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed listening
to Cat while recording it.
Thanks again to all of our listeners; we are humbled to be
nearing the 10,000 listens landmark in our first year of podcasting. As always
if you have any questions or feedback then please get in touch at @ahtoopodcast
or [email protected]
We’ll be back next month to discuss the fascinating Scopes
trial of the 1920s.
Cheers,
Mark and Malcolm
Reading List
David T. Gleeson, The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013)
Christian G. Samito, Becoming American Under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship During the Civil War Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
Damian Shiels, The Irish in the American Civil War (Dublin: The History Press Ireland, 2013)
Christian McWhirter, Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
Kerby A. Miller, Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration (Dublin: Field Day, 2008)
Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-1865 (New York: OUP, 2012)
Susannah J. Ural, The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861-1865 (New York: New York University Press, 2006)
Susannah J. Ural, (ed.), Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 2010)
Irish in the American Civil War: Exploring Irish Involvement in the American Civil War, http://irishamericancivilwar.com/
Britain and the American Civil War, British Library online gallery exhibition, http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/uscivilwar/

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53 min
August 14, 2015 Episode 15b - Jimmy Carter and the ‘Malaise’ of the 1970s (Part 2)
We’re back with the second part of our discussion of
President Jimmy Carter and his times. On
this episode we cast our eye beyond the United States and discuss the
tumultuous foreign events that took place during the late 1970s in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America. Why is Jimmy Carter,
a president who brokered a historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt,
remembered as a weak leader who presided over American decline on the world
stage?
We wrap up with a discussion of Carter’s post-presidency and
ask, is he the greatest of all the post-presidents?
Also, we should note that we recorded this podcast before
the sad news that Jimmy Carter has been diagnosed with cancer.
Thanks again for listening,
Mark and Malcolm
@ahtoopodcast

Reading for both podcasts 15a and 15b:
Jimmy Carter, White
House diary (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2010)
Andrew Scott Cooper, The
Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia changed the balance of power in
the Middle East (Oxford: Oneworld
Publications, 2011)
Kenneth Earl Morris, Jimmy
Carter: American moralist (Athens,
GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996)
Scott Kaufman, Plans
Unraveled: The Foreign Policy of the Carter Administration (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2008)
Dominic Sandbrook, Mad
as Hell: the crisis of the 1970s and the rise of the populist Right (New
York: A.A. Knopf, 2011)
‘Jimmy Carter’, PBS
American Experience (2002)

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56 min
July 15, 2015 Episode 15a - Jimmy Carter and the ‘Malaise’ of the 1970s (Part 1)
‘History’s greatest
monster’ or an underrated and admirable president?
We’re back and we’re discussing President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981)
and his times. Such are the amount of
topics that we need to cover that the podcast will be split into two, with this
month’s release dealing primarily with the domestic issues of late 1970s.
Welcome to a land of self-doubt, oil shocks, and a tanking
economy, where the issues that would define the ‘culture wars’ for the next
four decades were taking shape.
Presiding over it all is the Democratic President James Earl Carter, a
born-again Christian from Plains, Georgia who has promised to never lie to the
American people. Was Carter’s presidency
consigned to failure by events beyond his control or was the ‘American moralist’
responsible for his own downfall? Hopefully,
by the end of the two podcasts you’ll be able to form your own opinion!
Thanks again for listening,
Mark and Malcolm
@ahtoopodcast
Reading for both podcasts 15a and 15b:
Jimmy Carter, White
House diary (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2010)
Andrew Scott Cooper, The
Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia changed the balance of power in
the Middle East (Oxford: Oneworld
Publications, 2011)
Kenneth Earl Morris, Jimmy
Carter: American moralist (Athens,
GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996)
Scott Kaufman, Plans
Unraveled: The Foreign Policy of the Carter Administration (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2008)
Dominic Sandbrook, Mad
as Hell: the crisis of the 1970s and the rise of the populist Right (New
York: A.A. Knopf, 2011)
‘Jimmy Carter’, PBS
American Experience (2002)

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51 min
May 30, 2015 Episode 14 - The HIV/AIDS Crisis in the 1980s
We return for the fourteenth
episode of American History Too! to
discuss a horrifying and shameful period in US history: the outbreak and response to the HIV/AIDS
crisis during the 1980s.
Academic impartiality
is at a premium as we delve into social and cultural reasons behind the US
government’s failure to tame the spread of the deadly virus. We also consider the important cultural touchstones
that HIV/AIDS inspired and also the evolution of gay rights in the US.
For those interested,
the British broadcast about AIDS that begins the show can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SqRNUUOk7s
The broadcast stood
in stark contrast to official US silence on the issue.
We’ll be back in a
couple of weeks to start our series entitled ‘The Revolutionary Sixties?’
Thanks again for
listening,
Mark & Malcolm
Contact at
@ahtoopodast or [email protected]
Reading List
Jennifer Brier, ‘“Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS Out”: Anti-AIDS
Activism and the Legacy of Community Control in Queens, New York’, Journal
of Social History, 39:4 (Summer, 2006), 965-987
Elizabeth Fee and Nancy Krieger, ‘The Emerging Histories of
AIDS: Three Successive Paradigms’, History and Philosophy of the Life
Sciences, 15:3 (1993), 459-487
Randy Shilts, And the band played on: politics,
people, and the AIDS epidemic (New York: Penguin, 1987)
Films and Documentaries
And the Band Played On , HBO film based on Randy Shilts book (1993)
Dir. Jonathan Demme,
Philadelphia (1993)
Angels in America, HBO miniseries (2003)
‘The Age of Aids,’ PBS
Frontline (2006) – numerous interviews available on website.

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57 min
April 18, 2015 Episode 13 - Fallout - The Sequel
On the thirteenth episode of American History Too! we embark on our very first sequel – picking up
where episode six left off in our discussion of Nuclear Fallout.
Why did one researcher collect thousands of baby teeth and
why are her results quite terrifying?
When and where did the US almost nuke its own citizens – and how was
disaster averted? Were fallout shelters
a genuine attempt to help the population in the event of nuclear warfare or
were they merely ‘for show’? Our
resident nuclear aficionado has all the answers.
Finally, how was nuclear fallout represented in film and
literature during the 1950s and 1960s? We
explore On the Beach, Dr Stangelove, and why the British government chose to censor Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965) which depicted the
impact of nuclear warfare on Great Britain.
And always remember, ye
cannae spend a dollar when your deid!
We’ll be back in a fortnight with a discussion of the
contentious decade that was the 1980s.
Cheers,
Mark and Malcolm
Reading List
Brown, JoAnne, ‘”A Is for Atom, B is For Bomb”: Civil
Defense in American Public Education, 1948-1963,’ The Journal of American History,
75:1 (June, 1988), 68-90
Chapman, James, ‘The BBC and the Censorship of The War Game
(1965),’ Journal of Contemporary History, 41:1 (January,
2006), 75-94
__________‘"The War Game" Controversy—Again,’ Journal
of Contemporary History, 43:1 (January, 2008), 105-112
Cordle, Daniel, ‘Beyond the apocalypse of closure: nuclear
anxiety in the postmodern literature of the United States,’ in Andrew Hammond
(ed.), Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict (Abingdon, 2006)
Davis, Tracy C., Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear
Civil Defense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)
Rosi, Eugene J., ‘Mass and Attentive Opinion on Nuclear
Weapons Test and Fallout, 1954-1963’, The Public Opinion Quarterly, 29:2
(Summer, 1965), 280-297
Shaw, Tony, ‘The BBC, the State and Cold War Culture: The
Case of Television's The War Game (1965),’ The English Historical Review,
121:494 (December, 2006), 1351-1384
Wayne, Mike, ‘Failing the Public: The BBC, The War Game and
Revisionist History, A Reply to James Chapman,’ Journal
of Contemporary History, 42:4 (October, 2007), 627-637
Weart, Spencer, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Winkler, Allan M., Life Under A Cloud: American Anxiety
About the Atom (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993)
Wittner, Lawrence S., The Struggle Against the Bomb, Vol.2:
Resisting the Bomb: A history of the world nuclear disarmament movement,
1954–1970 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1997)

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49 min
April 04, 2015 Episode 12 - The Vietnam War
On the twelfth podcast of American History Too! we wade through the quagmire of the Vietnam
War. In discussing arguably the first
war that the United States ever lost, we consider the divisions the war created
at home and how Vietnam Veterans were treated by the general public. We also chat extensively about the Kent State Shootings - 'the most popular murders ever committed in the United States' - and the backlash to the antiwar movement.
Find out why the US was in Vietnam, why Great Britain never
joined the coalition fighting in Vietnam, and Malcolm explains why the massive
hit movie Aliens is in fact a film
about the war in Southeast Asia!
All this and much, much more on this week’s bumper length American History Too!
Cheers,
Mark and Malcolm
Reading and Viewing List
-
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Peace now!: American society and the ending of the Vietnam War
(1999)
-
Stewart O’Nan, The Vietnam Reader: The Definitive Collection of Fiction and Nonfiction
on the War (1998)
-
Platoon (1986)
-
Born on
the Fourth of July (1989)
-
Coming
Home (1978)
-
Apocalypse
Now (1979)
-
Aliens
(1986)

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50 min