Reckoning with Jason Herbert

1991's Black Robe is probably a movie you've never heard of, but maybe you should. It's one of the rare films that travel back to 17th Century New France to allow us to witness interactions between Indigenous communities and Jesuit missionaries. I watched this film in college and it made an impression on me. So I asked Michael Oberg to come on the pod to talk not only about this film but about how to teach this film as well as point out the complicated relationships between people during the era. This is maybe a bit more cerebral episode than some of the others, and I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Michael Leroy Oberg, the author of Native America, is Distinguished Professor of History at SUNY-Geneseo and founder of the Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History, which he directed from 2019 until 2022.  In addition to this textbook, he has written the following works:   Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585-1685 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Uncas: First of the Mohegans, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record: The Official Account of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005); The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians,  (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); the first edition of Native America; Professional Indian: Eleazer Williams’s American Odyssey, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); and Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).  He has published, as well, articles and reviews, and has worked as a historical consultant for native communities in New York and North Carolina, as well as for the Indian Resources Section of the United States Department of Justice.  He has won awards for his teaching and research in Montana and in New York, including the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

A lot of you love Legally Blonde. I mean really love Legally Blonde. So it was probably inevitable that two of my closest friends in the profession, Kristalyn Shefveland and Jennifer McCutchen, requested to do a pod on this film if only to torment me. This movie is so much more than I ever gave it credit for. We get into this film as a historical artifact, perhaps the last film of the 90s, it has so much to say about shattering glass ceilings, East Coast vs West Coast, fashion, performative perceptions, whether or not it's ok to be a fan of pop culture, and yes, why I seem to be drawn to attorneys. This pod is a blast and I hope you dig it.

About our guests:
Kristalyn Shefveland is an Associate Professor of American History at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville where she teaches classes on the American South, Indigenous and Settler relationships from the colonial era to the present, the American Revolution, and the Atlantic World. Her current research project is a book on historical memory of indigenous peoples in Florida, particularly the town of Vero Beach, on the Indian River. She is also working with students and communities on a local history project- River Cities Oral History- that seeks to capture stories and popular memory of the Ohio and Wabash River Valley settlements.

Jennifer McCutchen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of St. Thomas. She specializes in Early American History and Native History, with a focus on the themes of gender, power, exchange, and diplomacy. Her current project is an ethnohistorical study of gunpowder in the late eighteenth-century Creek Confederacy.

Every now and then we get the chance to talk to a scholar with a little extra knowledge on a particular subject. In this case, Dr. Waitman Beorn drops in to talk about Brad Pitt's tank film, Fury. Waitman knows the film well, especially since he commanded a tank prior to becoming a historian. Listen in now to hear him talk not only about WWII, but his experiences serving in the Tank Corps and how the lessons learned transcended his time there.  It's a fun and fascinating talk.

About our guest:
Dr. Waitman Wade Beorn is an assistant 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, tentatively entitled Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv.  His next research project is The Revenants: The Postwar Lives of Nazi Perpetrators.

 Dr. Beorn has published work in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Central European History, German Studies Review, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Politics and Governance, and the Geographical Review in addition to chapters in several edited volumes.  He has been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and Claims Conference fellowships. He is also active in the digital humanities.  

As a public-facing scholar, Dr. Beorn has published pieces in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Forward.  He has also appeared on MSNBC, CNN, Richard French Live on WRNN, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and TRT. He is an active contributor to public history and engagement on Twitter as well. Dr. Beorn teaches courses in Holocaust History, Comparative Genocide, German history, Eastern European history, Antisemitism, Modern European history, Public history, and Digital history. 

1994’s Legends of the Fall was one of a string of new age American western epics, featuring an ascendant Brad Pitt alongside Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn, Henry Thomas, and a stunning Julia Ormond. It’s not a perfect film, but like a lot helmed by Edward Zwick, gives us a ton to talk about: American wars Indigenous people, the Gilded Age & Progressive Era, WWI, PTSD, Prohibition, and the West. There’s a lot to unpack and that’s why I invited Edward O’Donnell onboard to talk it all out. 

About our guest:

Frequently appearing in historical documentaries on the History Channel, PBS, and Curiosity Stream. O’Donnell is also a podcaster and professor at Holy Cross College in Worcester, MA.

It is hard to find someone with a greater impact on American music and whose life demonstrates the complexities of the human experience than Ray Charles. This week we are joined by Michael Hattem to talk about one of the best biopics and performances I've ever seen with Ray (2004). This episode features candid discussions about the ups and downs of Ray Charles' life, how both his life and that of the United States have been shaped in memory, and a fascinating conversation about the history of African American musical traditions. I don't talk a lot in this episode, mostly because I was absolutely blown away by Michael's thoughts. I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Michael Hattem is a historian of early America, with a focus broadly on culture and politics in the long eighteenth century. He is especially interested in cultural memory in (and of) the American Revolution and early America generally, the origins and causes of the American Revolution, print culture, and colonial New York City. He is the author of Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution, which explores the role of changing historical memories in revolutionary American culture and politics.

He is an Associate Director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Previously, he served as a Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and Visiting Faculty at The New School in 2017-2018 and as Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Knox College from 2018 to 2020.

He is both a contributor to and Producer of The JuntoCast, the first podcast devoted to early American history and History Talks, a YouTube channel producing historical content by historians for a general audience. He also served as the Managing Editor and a co-founder of The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History and have contributed to numerous other websites. He has served as a historical consultant or contributor for a number of projects and organizations, including Hamilton: The Exhibition, American Yawp, Founders Online, as well as television documentaries and auctions.

You can find him on social media at @michaelhattem

This week we have a guest with a keen understanding of a film: Dr. Tyler Anbinder joins us to talk about Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese's 2002 epic that about the rise of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Tyler is not only an expert on the histories of New York City and of immigration, but served as an advisor for the film. He was, in this case, an actual historian at the movies. We talk about a range of topics: 19th century politics, immigration, nativism, race, the Civil War, New York, and of course, his experiences with the film itself. We also got a chance to touch on his upcoming book, and I hope to have him back on next year to talk about that. Really thrilled to have him on the podcast and I hope you dig the talk.

About our guest:
Tyler Anbinder is a specialist in nineteenth-century American politics and the history of immigration and ethnicity in American life. His most recent book, City of Dreams (2016), is a history of immigrant life in New York City from the early 1600s to the present.  Before that, in 2001, he published Five Points, a history of nineteenth-century America's most infamous immigrant slum, focusing in particular on tenement life, inter-ethnic relations, and ethnic politics.  His first book, Nativism and Slavery (1992), analyzed the role of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know Nothing party on the political crisis that led to the Civil War. Professor Anbinder has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and held the Fulbright Thomas Jefferson Chair in American History at the University of Utrecht. He has won awards for his scholarship from the Organization of American Historians, the Columbia University School of Journalism, and the journal Civil War History. He also served as a historical consultant to Martin Scorsese for the making of The Gangs of New York. His forthcoming book, to be published in March 2024 by Little, Brown, is entitled Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York. That project's digital history component, created with research assistance from more than two dozen GW students, has already been completed and can be found at http://beyondragstoriches.org.

2015's The Witch is in my mind about as scary as they come. It's also an incredible foray into the world of 17th century New England colonists and the chance to see how their fears manifested themselves in the world around them. Our guest, Mikki Brock, is no stranger to fear. She researches and teaches on the supernatural, plagues, and worst of all, the British (WOO HOO AMERICA). We talk all about this terrifying film and how Puritans conceptualized the worlds beyond, as well as exactly how one goes about talking about demon sex in class. This pod is a romp. I hope you enjoy it.

About our guest:
Mikki Brock a historian of early modern Scotland and an associate professor of history at W&L University. Her research centers on questions of religious belief and identity, and she is especially interested in the intersections of protestantism and the supernatural. She teaches and speaks widely on subjects including demonology, witchcraft, the British reformations, and Scotland in the popular imagination.
You can find her on twitter at @mikkibrock

2016's Live By Night was a rare miss by star and director Ben Affleck. On paper, it had everything you'd think it needed to be successful: great cast (Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, Chris Messina, Elle Fanning, Sienna Miller), a cool premise (mob sets up new scene during Prohibition), and a director in Affleck who has emerged as one of Hollywood's best. But it didn't quite hit.

But that doesn't mean it's not great for us. Live By Night offers the opportunity to talk about Ybor City,  the "Harlem of Tampa," and a town many of you have never heard of. But you should know Ybor City. As guest Sarah McNamara shows in her new book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, the comunidad features a vibrant Cuban American culture and history all to its own, and understanding it is key to knowing both Florida and the United States. We talk about the history of Ybor City, the role of race in Cuban American communities during Jim Crow, the changing nature of womanhood in Ybor families during the early 20th century, and the differences between Tampa and Miami's Cuban communities. This is maybe the best episode we've ever done.

About our guest:
Sarah McNamara is Assistant Professor of History and core faculty in the Latina/o/x & Mexican American Studies Program at Texas A&M University. McNamara’s research centers on Latinx, women and gender, immigration, and labor histories in the modern United States.

Her first book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, examines the U.S. South as a transnational, multi-racial borderland and argues that in this space gender and sexuality played a central role in the (re)making of race, community, region, and nation. Ybor City is the history of three generations of migrant, immigrant, and U.S. born Latinas and Latinos— predominantly from Cuba, the Caribbean, and the Americas—who collided in Tampa, Florida from the late nineteenth through the mid twentieth centuries. While popular narratives of the origins of Latina/o/x Florida focus on Cuban immigrants who fled the rise of Fidel Castro in the 1950s and 1960s, McNamara centers on earlier generations whose migration, labor, activism, and leftist politics established the foundation of latinidad in the sunshine state. This portrait of political shifts that defined Ybor City highlights the underexplored role of women’s leadership within movements for social and economic justice as it illustrates how people, places, and politics become who and what they are.

You can find her on twitter at @Dr_SarahMac

You've been asking for this film ever since I announced there would be a Historians At The Movies Podcast. Today we jump in head first to the Director's Cut of Ridley Scott's 2005 epic, Kingdom of Heaven. This is a beautiful and seriously flawed film, but it is fun to watch. I decided that a film this big needed an army of historians, so I invited back HATM Podcast alums David Perry, Matthew Gabriele, John Wyatt Greenlee to talk all things Crusades. We talk about the film's strengths and its flaws, and dive deep to discuss things that matter, such as how to see this film as a response to 9/11 and exactly how many orcas would it take to fight Liam Neeson.

About our guests:
Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies and the chair of the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. His research and teaching generally explore religion, violence, nostalgia, and apocalypse, whether manifested in the Middle Ages or the modern world. This includes events and ideas such as the Crusades, the so-called “Terrors of the Year 1000,” and medieval religious and political life. He has also presented and published on modern medievalism, such as recent white supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages and pop culture phenomena like Game of Thrones and the video game Dragon Age. His book, co-authored with David M. Perry, is out now: The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (Harper Books, 2021). His new book will also be with David M. Perry and is entitled Oathbreakers: The Carolingian Civil War and the Collapse of an Empire in the Middle Ages (Harper Books, 2024).

David M. Perry is a journalist and historian. He is the co-author of The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, out now from Harper Collins. The Boston Globe called it “incandescent and ultimately intoxicating.” Perry was a professor of Medieval History at Dominican University from 2006-2017. His scholarly work focuses on Venice, the Crusades, and the Mediterranean World. He’s the author of Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (Penn State University Press, 2015). Now he works for the University of Minnesota, convincing students that studying history is good for them and good for their careers (it is!).

John Wyatt Greenlee is a life-long map enthusiast. I love how maps can make fantasy worlds come alive, and how they can give context to histories. He holds a PhD in medieval history, with a focus on the history of maps and map making. He has written articles on cartographic analysis, setting maps within their historical and cultural contexts. He has built multiple digital projects annotating medieval map. In addition to maps, he spends time working on his other major academic interest: the role of eels in human history. He is The Surprised Eel Historian on Twitter — perhaps the world’s only eel historian!

Thomas Lecaque is an Associate Professor of History at Grand View University. He was born in France, lived in Bulgaria for the first two years of his life, and grew up in Kirksville, Missouri. He holds a Ph.D. in Pre-Modern European History from the University of Tennessee, an M.A. in English with a focus on Old English and Anglo-Nor

It's summertime and that means busting out those beach bodies! This week Natalia Mehlman Petrzela drops in to talk about the creation of the modern fitness world beginning in the early 1980s and seen onscreen with the John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis film, Perfect (1985). Natalia and I talk about her new book FIT NATION: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession along with how social media continues to transform the way we look at bodies (and ourselves) and even how academics present their sexuality through fitness online. This is such a great conversation. I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is a historian of contemporary American politics and culture. She is the author of CLASSROOM WARS: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015), and FIT NATION: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2023). She is co-producer and host of the acclaimed podcast WELCOME TO YOUR FANTASY, from Pineapple Street Studios/Gimlet and the co-host of PAST PRESENT podcast. She is a frequent media guest expert, public speaker, and contributor to outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the Atlantic.

Natalia is Associate Professor of History at The New School, co-founder of the wellness education program Healthclass 2.0, and a Premiere Leader of the mind-body practice intenSati. Her work has been supported by the Spencer, Whiting, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations. She holds a B.A. from Columbia and a Ph.D. from Stanford and lives with her husband and two children in New York City.

You can find her website at https://nataliapetrzela.com/ or find her on twitter at @nataliapetrzela.