History Talk

How and what we eat defines who we are. Food is both everywhere and nowhere, so normal that we rarely consider how radically the production and consumption of food have shaped not only human culture but the environment as well (and how radically the production of food has changed over time). Sample a little food history with historians Chris Otter, Helen Veit, and Sam White, who reveal that what we shove into our mouths has shaped our cultures, our bodies, and our planet.

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Posted December 2015

Delegates from across the globe will soon gather at the Paris Climate Change Conference, set to begin at the end of November. Sponsored by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, conference representatives will endeavor—not for the first time—to find ways to "stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system." On this episode of History Talk, three environmental historians, Sam White, John Brooke, and Nicholas Breyfogle, discuss past patterns of climate change—both recent and others from the deep planetary past—and what these historical processes of climate adaptation and survival tell us about humanity's prospects today.

Posted November 2015

A transcript of this podcast is available here.

Over the past months, the news media has presented dramatic scenes of desperate people trying to reach Europe by embarking on flimsy boats in Turkey and Greece, crossing barbed wire fences in Bulgaria and Hungary, catching rides in overcrowded trains in Macedonia, and sleeping in public squares in Serbia and elsewhere. But many more refugees find themselves in Middle Eastern countries like Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon. This is hardly the first time that Europe or the Middle East has experienced mass migration. And all of the migrants in these two regions are but a small proportion of the total number of migrants across the globe. Locals are divided; while some greet the refugees with water, blankets, and toys, others utter ugly words, emphasize their own economic vulnerability, or simply turn their eyes away. Join guests Theodora Dragostinova, Robin Judd, and Steven Hyland as they discuss today’s refugee and migrant crisis in not only Europe but in the Middle East, too—all within the much larger context of global migration history.

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Posted October 2015

A New York Times editorial has declared it “A New Chapter for America and India.” India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made a point to reach out to the United States and will visit America for a second time at the end of September 2015. Does Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or “BJP,” also spell a new chapter for the world’s most populous democracy? What role does religion play in everyday Indian politics? And how does India—with a rising population and facing serious environmental issues—view itself on the world stage? Join guests Mytheli Sreenivas and Wendy Singer and hosts Leticia Wiggins and Patrick Potyondy as they explore the past and present of India.

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Posted September 2015

In a recent, much publicized lecture — “It Takes a Historian to Understand the Middle East…Doesn’t It?” — Jane Hathaway of Ohio State's History Department offered a challenge to pundits and policymakers who seem unable to offer sound strategies for the Mideast. In this episode, hosts Leticia Wiggins and Patrick Potyondy ask three historians — Ayse Baltacioglu-Brammer, Patrick Scharfe, and Jane Hathaway — to lay out what you really need to know to understand this troubled region.

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Posted August 2015

[A transcript of this podcast is available here.]

Check out a lesson plan based on this article: Foreign Policy and the 3 Branches of Government, Syrian Crisis & American Government, and the Question of Immigration

Money and politics. While some think these two should be like oil and water, the simple fact is they’re not. And in the wake of the 2012Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court, Americans have worried over whether money really should equal free speech. Join hosts Leticia Wiggins and Patrick Potyondy as they ask guests Paula Baker, Marc Horger, and Steven Conn about the influence of dollars on the ballot box in U.S. history. At the core of this intriguing discussion is this: do huge bags of money really affect national politics as much as many fear? The answer is more complicated than you might think.

Posted June 2015

Check out a lesson plan based on this article: Voting Restrictions in a “Democratic” United States

Violence against women has a long history in human communities. Yet, we live in a time when people across the planet are beginning to give greater attention to this problem and, at times, to stand against misogynistic violence in all its forms. Recently, the United Nations created the "He for She" campaign, which highlights that violence against women remains a global problem that exists at "alarmingly high levels." This month, History Talk hosts Patrick Potyondy and Leticia Wiggins sit down to discuss the origins of gender violence, its existence throughout history, and issues affecting women globally with scholars Treva Lindsey, Cathy Rakowski, and Peggy Solic.

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Posted May 2015

April 24, 2015 marks the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Beginning in 1915 in the midst of the strains of World War I, Ottoman officials oversaw the deportation and massacre of anywhere between several hundred thousand and 1.5 million Armenian people. The result was the physical annihilation of the Armenian communities that had lived in the Anatolian peninsula for more than 2500 years. But labeling it as a “genocide” has proven controversial and unacceptable for the Turkish Republic. Join your History Talk hosts Leticia Wiggins and Patrick Potyondy as they interview Ronald Grigor Suny, Ayse Baltacioglu-Brammer, and John Quigley to discuss what is now known about the  history of these events, the meaning of the legal and historical label “genocide,” and why coming to terms with mass atrocities is so difficult today.

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Posted April 2015

How we understand policing in the United States depends not only on what issues we focus on but also how far back we look. In this episode of History Talk, hosts Leticia Wiggins and Patrick Potyondy sit down with the historians Marcus Nevius, Lilia Fernández, and Clay Howard to take a longer and broader view of the matter. They discuss how modern policing problems are connected to a range of historical issues such as slave patrols, the spectacle of lynching, mental health problems, the War on Drugs, as well as controlling publicly-acceptable behavior, labor, immigration, and gender.

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Posted February 2015

This month History Talk hosts Patrick Potyondy and Leticia Wiggins explore the political climate of a nation that's remained on distant diplomatic terms with the United States though it's only 90 miles away from the U.S.'s southernmost point. But U.S. - Cuba relations could be in for a dramatic change since President Obama's mid-December announcement. Join in the conversation with historians of Latin America - U.S. relations, Lilia Fernandez, Hideaki Kami, and Jaime Suchlicki.

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Posted January 2015

[A transcript of this podcast is available here.]