Reckoning with Jason Herbert

This week Christina Abreu drops in to discuss Cuban-American history, Cuban music, and the representation of Cubans in film. We explore the origins and characteristics of Cuban music, as well as the migration of Cubans to the United States in the 1950s. We also discuss the relationship between Cuban-Americans and other Latino groups, as well as the integration and segregation within Cuban-American communities. This is a fun podcast and deep dive into Cuban American history. I hope you dig it.

About our guest:
Christina Abreu is associate professor of history and director of the Center for Latino/Latin American Studies at Northern Illinois University. Her research focuses on the role of race, nationalism, and migration in the Cuban and Spanish Caribbean diasporic communities of the United States with a particular emphasis on popular culture.  Her first book, Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Cuban New York City and Miami, 1940-1960, examined the relationship between black and white Cuban musicians and the Cuban and broader Latinx communities of New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s. In her second book, Patria over Profits: The Story of Afro-Cuban Boxing Champion Teófilo Stevenson, she offers a cultural history of the life and times of Afro-Cuban boxing champion Teófilo Stevenson, winner of three heavyweight boxing Olympic gold medals in 1972, 1976, and 1980. In detailing Stevenson’s triumphs in the ring, another more complex and interconnected story emerges about revolutionary Cuba and the island’s Afro-Caribbean connections, race and black athletic activism, Cuban exile culture and politics, and international sports celebrity. Patria over Profits is under contract with the Sport and Society series at the University of Illinois Press.

We've reached the end of the mission here at Historians At The Movies. This week Sarah, Colin, Luke and I talk about the final thrust of the air war in Germany, POW camps and escape attempts, Rosie's legacy, and the melancholy of leaving the war behind. We also give our final thoughts about the series, where to place it alongside Band of Brothers and The Pacific and what series we'd like to see next. Hope you've enjoyed this ride as much as we did.

This week Karen L. Cox swings by to talk about the South, the 70s, and why Burt Reynolds was so damn cool. This is probably the first time you’ve heard Smokey and the Bandit on a history podcast, but that’s what we are here for. This one is fun. 

About our guest:
Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.  She is the author of four books, the editor or co-editor of two volumes on southern history and has written numerous essays and articles, including an essay for the New York Times best seller Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Her books include Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, and most recently, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, which was published in April 2021 and won the Michael V.R. Thomason book prize from the Gulf South Historical Association.

This week Sarah, Colin, and Luke drop in to talk about the penultimate episode of Masters of the Air. We've a lot to talk about in this episode- inlcuding the air war in Italy and Romania, which highlighs the strategic and tactical operations of the 15th Air Force and the role of the Tuskegee Airmen. We also revist the prison camp storyline, to talk about the tensions and fraying relationships among the POWs. This leads to discussions on the themes of racism and prejudice in World War II, the importance of training and race relations, the need for prioritizing storylines and themes, the ineffectiveness of the spy plot, the need for a comprehensive air war series, unresolved plotlines and character arcs, the problem of multiple plots and poor character development, and our speculations on the final episode of the series. This is easily the best episode we've done on this series. Hope you like it.

This week Mary Hicks and Margari Hill drop in to talk all things DUNE. We focus on Dune Part 2 but also talk about the historical influences on Frank Herbert as he wrote Dune, along with how Dune influenced the science fiction and fantasy that came afterward.  We talk about the parallels between the fictional universe and historical events, such as the Ottoman Empire and the interactions between European powers and Indigenous communities. We also get into the portrayal of whiteness in the film and the complexities of women's roles and agency within the narrative. We dive into the egalitarianism in the Fremen world and the infiltration of outside values. The depiction of female spirituality and the complexity of women characters are discussed. The casting and representation in the film, particularly in relation to Middle Eastern culture, are examined. Mary and Margari also touch on the historical resonances and sensitivity in the film. The difference between a cautionary tale and a hopeful vision is explored. This conversation is one of the best we've ever had on this podcast and I hope you like it.

About our guests:
Mary Hicks is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.

Margari Hill  is the co-founder and Executive Director of Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative (MuslimARC), a human rights education organization. She is also a freelance writer published in How We Fight White Supremacy (2018) Time, Huffington Post, and Al Jazeera English. She earned her master’s degree in History of the Middle East and Islamic Africa from Stanford University in 2006.  Her research includes transformations in Islamic education, colonial surveillance in Northern Nigeria, anti-colonial resistance among West Africans in Sudan during the early 20th century, interethnic relations in Muslim communities, anti-bias K-12 education, and the criminalization of Black Muslims. She is on the Advisory Council of Islam, Social Justice & Interreligious Engagement Program at the Union Theological Seminary. For her work, she has received numerous awards including the Council of American Islamic Relation’s (CAIR) 2020 Muslim of the Year award,  Khadija bint Khuwaylid Relief Foundation Lifetime Humanitarian award in 2019,  the Big Heart Award in 2017, and MPAC’s 2015 Change Maker Award. She has given talks and lectures in various universities and community centers throughout the country.

This week Sarah, Luke, Colin, and I continue to follow the Bloody Hundredth in what amounted to a tonal shift for the series. We talk about life inside German POW camps, the Great Escape, the Battle of Berlin, and Black Monday. We dive into the Red Cross and also compare the experiences of American prisoners in Europe and the Pacific, along with those of German prisoners in the United States. We also talk about Crosby's affair with Landra, as well as the arrival of the P-51 Mustang over the skies of Europe in 1944. And maybe you hear my Bill Clinton impression for the very first time. This is our best pod on this series yet.

This week Matt Guariglia drops in to talk about Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruises's Minority Report. We also discuss the history of policing in New York City and its impact on other cities. We jump into as eugenics, race and ethnicity in policing, gender dynamics, and the influence of World War I on the evolution of criminality in New York City and the rest of the United States as well as the Italian-American experience and the assassination of Joseph Petrosino. This is a fun talk about a somewhat overlooked Spielberg/Cruise collaboration. I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Matthew Guariglia is a historian and inter-disciplinary scholar serving as senior policy analyst for surveillance and technology policy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) where he focuses on policy and advocacy related to how local & federal law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and private corporations use technology. He currently holds academic affiliations in the Emory University Department of History and at Indiana University and the Institute of American Thought in support of research into the long history of how the U.S. government collects information on individuals and the relationship between information technologies and punitive state power and activism.

His first book Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York is out now from Duke University Press. He is also the co-editor of the Essential Kerner Commission Report (Liveright, 2021). He has a PhD in History from the University of Connecticut where my dissertation was awarded the 2020 Outstanding Dissertation Award by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. 

 He is also a researcher with years of experience with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requesting. His writing can also be found in the Washington Post, NBC News, TIME, Slate, VICE, MuckRock, and the Urban History Association's blog, The Metropole.

This week Sarah, Luke, Colin, and I dive into the latest episode of Masters of the Air, talking specifically about the experiences of Americans in German POW camps, heterosexual and homosexual relationships of American servicemen, a perceived anti-British bias on the show, and our first glimpses of the Holocaust on the series. This is our deepest dive yet. Hope you like it.

This week Edda Fields-Black joins in to talk about her book on Harriet Tubman and the film Harriet. We talk about the importance of accurate terminology in black history, the role of religion in enslaved people's lives, the challenges of escaping from South Carolina, and the emotional impact of historical research. We also get into the need for more biopics on historical figures and recommend books and scholars for further reading. Edda's new book is gonna CHANGE THINGS, y'all. I hope you like the pod.

About our guest:
Edda Fields-Black is a specialist in the trans-national history of West African rice farmers, peasant farmers in pre-colonial Upper Guinea Coast and enslaved laborers on rice plantations in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry during the antebellum period.

Fields-Black’s new book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War (Oxford University Press, trade list, February 2024) offers the fullest account to date of Tubman’s Civil War service. This narrative history tells the untold story of the Combahee River Raid from the perspective of Tubman and the enslaved people she helped to free based on new sources not previously used by historians, as well as new interpretations of sources familiar to Tubman’s biographers. It is the story of Harriet Tubman’s Civil War service during which she worked as a cook and nurse in Beaufort, SC, and gathered intelligence among freed people and enslaved Blacks. It is the story of enslaved people who labored against their wills on seven rice plantations, ran for their lives, boarded the US gunboats, and sailed to freedom.

This week we hit the halfway point in Masters of the Air. Dr. Sarah Myers had to drop out of formation this week so we welcome back Dr. Luke Truxal and Dr. Colin Colbourn to talk about Black Week for the Bloody Hundreth as well as how air crews dealt with the loss of Buck Cleven, Crosby's role as group navigator, the disaster at Munster, and Colin's work recovering fallen service members as part of Project Recover.