Reckoning with Jason Herbert

This week we are joined Bathsheba Demuth to talk about the Chris Hemsworth-led In The Heart of the Sea. Bathsheba is the author of one of my favorite books,  Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait and we talk about the history of whaling, her work with Indigenous communities in the Yukon, and of course, Moby Dick. This is one of the most fun conversations I've had on this podcast and I hope you enjoy.

About our guest:
Bathsheba Demuth is writer and environmental historian specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern places and cultures began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon, where she trained huskies for several years. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, and ecologies intersect. In addition to her prize-winning book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, her writing has appeared in publications from The American Historical Review to The New Yorker and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is currently the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. 

This week my good friend and native Coloradan Kathleen Belew drops in to talk about the movie that etched the word "wolverines" into our lives forever: Red Dawn. We talk about how Red Dawn depicts Cold War fears on the big screen, and how it has been perceived in the *checks notes* forty years since its release. As usual, Kathleen and I talk about where to get the best food in Colorado, skiing, and god knows what else. This is a pod you've been asking for. I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Kathleen Belew is a historian, author, and teacher. She specializes in the history of the present. She spent ten years researching and writing her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2018, paperback 2019). In it, she explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common story about betrayal by the government, war, and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement mobilized and carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City. This movement was never adequately confronted, and remains a threat to American democracy. Her next book, Home at the End of the World, illuminates our era of apocalypse through a history focused on her native Colorado where, in the 1990s, high-profile kidnappings and murders, right-wing religious ideology, and a mass shooting exposed rents in America’s social fabric, and dramatically changed our relationship with place, violence, and politics (Random House).

Belew has spoken about Bring the War Home in a wide variety of places, including The Rachel Maddow Show, The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell, AC 360 with Anderson Cooper, Frontline, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered. Her work has featured prominently in documentaries such as Homegrown Hate: The War Among Us (ABC) and Documenting Hate: New American Nazis (Frontline). Belew is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. She earned tenure at the University of Chicago in 2021, where she spent seven years. Her research has received the support of the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Jacob K. Javits Foundation. Belew earned her BA in the Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, where she was named Dean’s Medalist in the Humanities. She earned a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University.

This week the legendary Seth Cotlar joins in with Kelsa and me to talk about Episode 5 of Franklin. We get into the dynamics between John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, talk about the need for more meat some of these storylines, and address the needs of the colonies to those of Ukraine in the present day. It's another great trip to the 18th century.

This week Agnes Arnold-Forster jumps in to talk about the emotional roller coaster that is Pixar's Inside Out. We talk about how historians have conceptualized emotions, their role in the human experience, and Agnes' new book which charts the history of nostalgia. This is such a cool pod because we go places we rarely get to visit. I hope you dig it.

About our guest:
Agnes Arnold-Forster is a writer; researcher; and historian. She has written, researched, and presented on everything from women's health in today's Britain to the history of cancer; from the 1918 flu pandemic to the well-being of surgeons in twenty-first-century America. She is an expert in the history of Europe, the USA, and Canada, and my research spans the eighteenth century to the present day. She explores societies, cultures, medicine, science, technology, emotions, and the world of work. She is currently writing a book about the history of nostalgia, due to be published by Picador in April 2024.

This week HATM friend Lindsay Chervinsky drops in to talk about Episode 4 of Franklin. We talk about the very real possibility all of this could fail, spies galore, a young Louis XVI (with a head!) and a villainous John Adams? Join in with us now!

About our guest:
 Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a presidential historian. 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 the forthcoming book, 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. 

This week Elsa Devienne drops in to talk about Gidget and the history and transformation of the California beach. We get into the fascination with the US and the environment, as well as the influence of Hawaii on California beach culture. We also jump into issues of body image, gender dynamics, and queer representation in beach movies and the global trasnformation of surf culture post Gidget. This is a fun talk.

About our guest:
 Elsa Devienne joined Northumbria University in 2019, having previously taught at Princeton University, Université Paris Nanterre, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her research lies at the intersection of urban history, environmental history, and the history of gender, body, and sexuality, with a focus on the 20th century. She is particularly interested in the history of Americans’ intense engagement with their coastlines, from the 19th-century beach-bathing boom until today’s climate crisis and its catastrophic consequences for coastal communities.

Her first book, La ruée vers le sable: une histoire environnementale des plages de Los Angeles (Sorbonne Editions, 2020), won the 2021 Willi Paul Adams Award awarded by the Organization of American Historians for the best book on American history published in a language other than English. A translated and updated version with a new epilogue is coming out with Oxford University Press in 2024 under the title Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles. She is also the author of several articles published in academic journals in the US and Europe, including in The Journal of Urban History, The European Journal of American Studies, California History, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire and Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales.   

This week begins our first episode covering the new series on Apple TV, FRANKLIN, starring Michael Douglas. Each week we'll recap the episode, fill in with historical backstory, and offer plenty of snark. We have a permanent cohost for the series in Kelsa Pelletiere, one of the foremost Franklin scholars in the world. And we'll rotate in new guests each week to provide fresh thoughts and perspective on what we are seeing onscreen. This is gonna be fun.

About our guests:
Kelsa Pelletiere is the guest host for the duration of the Franklin podcast miniseries. I sought out someone who is an absolute expert on the man and his life and seemingly everyone came back with Kelsa. She is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Mississippi. Her research focuses on early diplomatic history in the United States, specifically Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution. Her teaching interests include eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century American history; Revolutionary America; U.S. diplomacy; and the Atlantic world.

Craig Bruce Smith is an associate professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norfolk, VA. He authored American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era and co-authored George Washington’s Lessons in Ethical Leadership. He specializes in American Revolutionary and early American history, specifically focusing on George Washington, honor, ethics, war, the founders, transnational ideas, and national identity. In addition, he has broader interests in colonial America, the early republic, leadership, and early American cultural, intellectual, and political history.

This week Drew McKevitt returns to talk about Robocop (1987). We get into depictions of Detroit as a failed city and of Robocop as both the commercial answer to the Terminator and maybe the antithesis of Dirty Harry. And we dive deep into Drew’s new book to talk about the rise of the gun culture in the United States. Hanging with Drew is always a blast- he’s one of the smartest and funniest historians you’re gonna meet.

About our guest:
Drew McKevitt is an associate professor of history at Louisiana Tech University. He recently published a book called Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America. His new book is Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America. His next project examines U.S. workers in foreign-owned manufacturing facilities in the United States since the 1970s. You can find him on twitter at @drewmckevitt or his website, https://andrewcmckevitt.com/

This week the pod welcomes back Thomas Lecaque and John Wyatt Greenlee along with #HATM newcomer Anna Waymack to talk about maybe the best medieval movie ever made: A Knight's Tale. We talk Chaucer, romance, Heath Ledger, the Black Prince, and that fucking soundtrack. Let's go.

About our guests:
Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence. He has written for the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Foreign Policy and The Bulwark, among others. Follow him on Twitter: @tlecaque.

John Wyatt Greenlee is  a medievalist and a cartographic historian.His academic research is primarily driven by questions of how people perceive and reproduce their spaces:  how movement through the world — both experiential and imagined — becomes codified in visual and written maps. You can find him on twitter at @greenleejw 

Anna Waymack, is a Ph.D. candidate in Cornell's Medieval Studies Program, and was selected as a fellow in Olin Library's Summer Graduate Fellowship for Digital Humanities in 2016. As part of that fellowship, Anna developed digital humanities expertise and produced a public website focused on an aspect of her research, Geoffrey Chaucer and the charge of raptus brought forth by Cecily Chaumpaigne.

This week Jeff Melnick and Erik Baker jump in to talk about Steven Spielberg's Munich. We talk about the history behind the attacks in 1972, why they were relevant in 2005, and why they remain relevant today. And yes, we absolutely discuss the warfare and attempted genocide in Palestine today. This is a really important conversation and I hope that it helps to illustrate how movies can be part of historical dialogue. I learned a lot from these guys and I hope you will too.

About our guests:
Jeffrey Melnick is a professor at University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of 9/11 Culture: America Under Construction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Black-Jewish Relations on Trial (University Press of Mississippi, 2000), and A Right to Sing the Blues (Harvard University Press, 1999). You can find him on twitter at @melnickjeffrey1

Erik Baker is currently a Lecturer in the History of Science at Harvard University and oversee the senior thesis program for undergraduates. As an associate editor at The Drift, I've been involved since its inception. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in May 2022, and my dissertation won the 2023 Leo P. Ribuffo Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

His research delves into the modern U.S. work culture and the impact of scientific expertise on workers' self-perception. In his forthcoming book, Make Your Own Job: The Entrepreneurial Work Ethic in Modern America, he explores how social scientists and management intellectuals reshaped the American work ethic during the turbulence of twentieth-century U.S. capitalism. He has contributed articles on labor, politics, and American history to publications such as Harper’s, n+1, The Baffler, Jewish Currents, Jacobin, and The Drift, where he has been an editor since its inception.