Centre Trail History Podcast

Michael Ackerman, Joe Bagwell, Madison Rice and Alex Winkler examine the corruption surrounding the FIFA World Cup.

Zoe Doubles, Sam Goldizen, Jon Jones and Parker Selin produced this podcast episode, a fictional sports history show examining the popularity of women's baseball in the mid-twentieth century United States

We're very happy to share some student work! Ian Williams, Devin Hayes, Ellen Stephens, Braxton Couch and Torey Hawkins discuss whether industrialization is a necessary prerequisite for modern sport.

You can find out more about this class and see more student work at http://sites.centre.edu/popularsport

Tara and John get together at the end of Black History Month to discuss the life of Frederick Douglass, whose two hundredth birthday was this past February 14th. We particularly focus on the impact of his famous memoir A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and think about this month’s release of the new superhero blockbuster Black Panther in light of the holiday.

Tara and John discuss the Winter Olympics in Pyeonchang, South Korea and some wider historical questions around the Olympic Games. Where does this idea come from, how does it translate into a type of “Olympic ideal” and what are some of the ramifications of this for how countries interact with each other?

Tara and John talk about St. Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, which this year fall on the same day, raising interesting comparisons about their broader cultural impact. Come for the discussion of historical context of two juxtaposed cultural practices, stay for the sweet Anne of Cleves references.

Tara and John get together as the spring semester at Centre College starts to get underway. John is teaching the history of modern popular sport, and he talks a little about how to define sports and what kind of interesting historical questions that activity raises. Tara revisits her blog post on Founding Fathers, and talks about the use of that term, the role of prominent revolutionary figures in American politics and celebration of the revolutionary generation in American History.

Tara and John get together to discuss their upper division classes in the spring of 2018. Tara is teaching classes on the American Revolution and the history of American slavery, while John is teaching a class on popular sport in a modern, global context.

The conversation moves on to some pedagogy pretty quickly: how do professors build syllabi; how do we knit ideas together and how do we address practical concerns about work load and time management into the structure of our planned course work?

Tara and John get together to talk about the intensive term coming to an end. Warning: we are very tired in this episode! John talks about his recent op-ed in the “Made by History” blog in the Washington Post about American policy in East Asia, and Tara talks about the steampunk genre and its relationship to alternate histories.

Tara and John return for our first podcast in 2018 to talk about how they utilize the intensive “CentreTerm” class as a platform for experimenting with topics and pedagogy. Tara discusses her brand new class on alternative histories and John discusses his class on history and video games, which he is teaching for the third time in four years.

Join us to hear about how why we think the winter term is a good fit for trying new ideas. We have our students for three hours every day, and our class is the only one they are taking for sixteen class days. It is very challenging… and can get very tiring in a hurry… but the experience can lead to very rewarding results.