Reckoning with Jason Herbert

This week Lindsay Marshall jumps in to talk about the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman epic-that-wasn't: Far and Away (1992). This is an awesome talk. We talk about the process of interviewing and getting hired at a university, the myth of Irish slavery, the West on film. Lindsay is a former high school teacher so we get into the difficulties of teaching at that level and why AP US History is an absolute dumpster fire. This is a great episode.

About our guest:
Lindsay Marshall is a historian of Native North America and of popular memory. She earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Oklahoma and is the incoming Assistant Professor of History at Illinois State University. You can find her on twitter at @lindstorian.

This week marks the return of Michael Keaton to the big screen as Batman in The Flash. So I thought it was an opportune time to revisit Batman (1989) with Blake Scott Ball. This is a large episode--the longest we've released yet, and for good measure. We get into why Batman is a necessary addition to the superhero pantheon, what happens if Gotham is in Mississippi, and finally, we rank all of the Batmen. This episode is so much fun.

About our guest:
Dr. Blake Scott Ball joined the Huntingdon faculty in the fall of 2017 after completing his doctoral degree. He has previously taught as an assistant professor at Miles College, as an adjunct professor at the University of North Alabama, and as an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama. He served as assistant director for the New Summersell Center Public History Initiative at the University of Alabama, and as a graduate assistant for the Alabama Historical Association. An avid writer, he served as editor for the Southern Historian graduate history journal and as a contributor and assistant editor for The Historian behind the History, a collection of oral stories documenting historians’ graduate training and insights into the historical profession, published by the University of Alabama Press in 2014. His book, “Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts,” was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. You can find him on twitter at @bsb1945

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Jurassic Park, a movie that both plays with history and made history. Like Jaws and Star Wars before it, Jurassic Park changed what we thought was possible in movie theaters while commenting on our fascination with the pre-human past. I asked Dr. Elizabeth Jones, author of Ancient DNA: The Making of a Celebrity Science (on sale from Amazon right now) to come on the show to talk about how Jurassic Park changed the science of paleontology and just why that velociraptor scene in the kitchen is so damn good.

About our guest:
Dr. Elizabeth Jones holds a PhD in Science & Technology Studies from University College London, a MA in History & Philosophy of Science from Florida State University, and a BA in History & Philosophy from North Carolina State University. Currently, she works at the North Carolina Museum and Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University as the Coordinator for Cretaceous Creatures, a public science project that engages 8th grade science teachers and students across the state in making their own microfossil discoveries.

Show notes:
https://www.newsweek.com/new-dinosaur-utah-moros-intrepidus-tyrannosaurus-rex-1338776

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/back-brontosaurus-dinosaur-just-might-deserve-its-own-genus-species-science-180954892/

www.cretaceouscreatures.org

https://colossal.com/george-church-the-future-without-limit/

This episode may be the very epitome of why I started this podcast. This week I'm joined by my friend Jeff Melnick to talk about an absolutely batshit film called Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Jeff is the perfect guy to talk about this movie; he wrote a terrific book about the Manson murders called Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl: Inside the Lives of America's Most Infamous Family. But that only hints at what's inside this episode. Using this movie, Jeff and I get into all sorts of dialogue about pop culture, the conflicts in Florida, hip hop, course design, anti-fandom, and yes, Hootie and the Blowfish.  I think you're gonna love this episode.

About our guest:
Jeffrey Melnick has been thinking about the Manson Family since first encountering the book and miniseries Helter Skelter in the 1970s. 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

This week Kathleen Belew joins us to talk about maybe the most '90s action movie ever made, Con Air. We get into everything on this film, including Kathleen's work on white power and paramilitary movements in the United States, the cultural production of the South, Nicolas Cage as an action star, and yes, maybe the worst Southern accent in history. This movie has it all.

About our guest:
Kathleen Belew 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).

For our 25th episode, we have only one question: IS THERE A CAVE?
This week we are joined by two scholars ready to get medieval on us all: Thomas Lecaque and John Wyatt Greenlee.  We're celebrating the great epic that wasn't: The 13th Warrior. This movie is so good and so bad at the same time that it's hard to quantify. But we're gonna do it anyway. We're talking Vikings, the Abassid Empire, man-bears, and maybe the greatest language scene in film history. Grab some mead, because it's made from honey, just like this podcast.

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 

This week Lauren Lassabe Shepherd swings by to talk about why we love college and why some of us just can't seem to grow up. We get into the production of her forthcoming book, the process of creating oral histories, and perhaps surprising roles that Greek life now perform in the lives of college students.

She's got a new book coming out this summer about the campus wars in the United States and you can check it out here: https://www.amazon.com/Resistance-Right-Conservatives-America-Politics/dp/1469674491/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2TV97KWZ9WPPU&keywords=lauren+lassabe+shepherd&qid=1683559714&s=books&sprefix=LAUREN+LASSABE%2Cstripbooks%2C259&sr=1-1

About our guest:
Shepherd’s expertise is in the history of United States higher education from the 20th century to present, especially on the topic of backlash against progressivism in the academy. She teaches in the Department of Education and Human Development at the University of New Orleans. Shepherd’s first book, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars is forthcoming in 2023 from the University of North Carolina Press. Her second book is a historical survey of American colleges and universities since the 1960s. In addition to research and writing, she enjoys teaching Pilates and practicing yoga. She lives with her husband and their dogs in South Mississippi.

You can find her at @llassabe on twitter.

This week Historians At The Movies Podcasts welcomes Dr. Rob Thompson to the show to talk about Oliver Stone's Platoon, the legacy of the Vietnam War in the United States, and the best movies about the conflict. Rob's a cool dude and we had a great discussion.

About our guest:
Rob has  a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Southern Mississippi. He specializes in the study of the Vietnam War, with a focus on the confluence of conventional warfare and pacification at the province level. His research placed American strategy in the context of a single province—Phú Yên. He is also familiar with the history of American diplomacy and the history of Modern Europe. Before studying history in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, he completed an MA at Wilfrid Laurier University in lovely Waterloo, Ontario and my BA near the ocean at Virginia Wesleyan College, now University. He is presently a historian with the Films Team at Army University Press at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

This week we are joined by Robert Greene II and Eric Leonard to do a deep dive into Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. We'll get into what the film has to say about the end of the Cold War, the process of aging, and the rivalry between the OG and Next Generation crews. Plus, we rank the best and worst of all things Star Trek. Rob and Eric are two of the historians who know Star Trek better than almost anyone alive and this is an awesome podcast for anyone who is a fan of the series.

About our guests:
Robert Greene II is an assistant professor of history at Claflin University and publications chair for the Society of US Intellectual Historians and lead associate editor for Black Perspectives. You can find him at @robgreeneII on twitter.

Eric Leonard Leonard has more than 25 years of National Park Service experience. You can find him at @frebodar on twitter.

This week guests Rachel Gunter and Nicole Gunter join me to talk about whether or not Carrie is a high school film, what Stephen King has to say about women, and whether or not the remake stands up to the original.

About our guests:
Rachel Michelle Gunter received her Ph.D. in history from Texas A&M University in 2017 and is a Professor of History at a community college in North Texas. Her research focuses on the woman suffrage movement and its effects on the voting rights of other groups including immigrants, servicemen, WWI veterans, Mexican Americans and African Americans. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Suffragists, Soldiers, and Immigrants: Drastic Changes to Voting Rights in the Progressive Era.

 Nicole Donawho is a Professor of History at a community college in North Texas. She specializes in dual credit and history pedagogy. Her main non-academic interests are Star Trek, tattoos, and dogs.