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.

Sasha Abramsky drops in to talk about what effect tariffs might have on Hollywood and just what exactly do we do with Alcatraz prison.

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.

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.