Reckoning with Jason Herbert

This week Historians At The Movies revisits what is obviously the most historically accurate film ever made: Mel Gibson's The Patriot (2000). Ok, so maybe the movie plays fast and loose with history, but does that mean we can't have fun with it? Craig Bruce Smith and Robert Greene II jump in to jump on The Patriot.

About our guests:
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.

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.

This week Historians At The Movies gets into Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. And I've got two of the best damn historians working today to talk about it. And yes, we're ranking the hottest presidents of all time.

About our guests:
Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and currently is a fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. She received her B.A. with honors in history and political science from George Washington University, her masters and Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, and her postdoctoral fellowship from Southern Methodist University. Previously Dr. Chervinsky worked as a historian at the White House Historical Association. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Bulwark, Time Magazine, USA Today, CNN, NBC Think, and the Washington Post. Dr. Chervinsky is the author of the award-winning book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, recently out in paperback, and the forthcoming book An Honest Man: The Inimitable Presidency of John Adams.

Dr. Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of four books: Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner 2022); The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020; finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History); Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia, 2012); and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (Georgia, 2005). Megan writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, and TIME. For several years, she also wrote movie and TV series reviews for the Civil War Monitor. Before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014, Megan taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She grew up in Colorado but now lives outside Boston with her husband and two cats. 

This week HATM  revisits 1997's Soul Food to talk about food history, the African diaspora in the United States, and gendered spaces in the house. To do so, I got two of the best damn scholars of food history in the United States: Adrian Miller and Mark Johnson. If you don't know their work, you soon will because they drop some absolute knowledge bombs in this podcast. And yes, we're gonna settle the best bbq debate once and for all. I hope you like the episode.

About our guests:
Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner, attorney, and certified barbecue judge who lives in Denver, Colorado. Miller’s first book, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time won the James Beard Foundation Award for Scholarship and Reference in 2014. His second book, The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, From the Washingtons to the Obamas was published on President’s Day 2017. It was a finalist for a 2018 NAACP Image Award for “Outstanding Literary Work – Non-Fiction,” and the 2018 Colorado Book Award for History. Adrian’s third book, Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue, was published in Spring 2021.

Mark A. Johnson, from Milwaukee, works at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He graduated in 2016 with a Ph.D. in History from the University of Alabama. Previously, he earned an M.A. from the University of Maryland and B.A. from Purdue University. Before joining the UTC faculty, he worked as a Visiting Lecturer at Georgia State University.

He specializes in the history of the United States and, specifically, the U.S. South and African American History. In 2017, he published An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue: From Wood Pit to White Sauce. In 2021, his new book, Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932 came out with University Press of Mississippi. He previously published articles in Southern Cultures and Louisiana History. Currently, he’s working on a cultural history of bacon in the United States.

This episode is two of my favorite people talking about Star Wars and how it fits in discussing archival research and the North American borderlands. And yes, we rank the films, definitively.

About our guests:
Alejandra Dubcovsky is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She is also the inaugural fellow in the Program for the Advancement of the Humanities, a partnership of The Huntington and UC Riverside that aims to support the future of the humanities. She received her BA and PhD from UC Berkeley. She also has a Masters in Library and Information Science from San Jose State.

Her first book, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (HUP 2016), won the 2016 Michael V. R. Thomason Book Award from the Gulf South Historical Association. Her forthcoming book, Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South will be released by Oxford University Press in May 2023.

Alan Malfavon is assistant professor of history at washington state university. He is a historian of late-colonial and early independent Latin America.  His first book, Men of the Leeward Port: Veracruz’s Afro-Descendants in the Making of Mexico, under contract with the University of Alabama Press, focuses on the understudied Afro-Mexican population of Veracruz and its hinterland of Sotavento (Leeward) and uses it to reframe the historical and historiographical transition between the colonial and national period.

This week we're dipping into Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise (1991). This is such a powerhouse film and we can use it to talk about a ton of issues related to the early '90s and all the way to today. And this movie is just awesome. So watch it as soon as you can. Currently available on Amazon Prime.

About our guests:
Dr. Lauren MacIvor Thompson is a historian of early-twentieth-century women’s rights, medicine, law, and public health. She is an Assistant Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies at Kennesaw State University and serves as the faculty fellow at the Georgia State University College of Law’s Center for Law, Health & Society. Her book, Rivals and Rights: Mary Dennett, Margaret Sanger, and the Making of the American Birth Control Movement is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press.

Jacqueline Antonovich is a historian of health, medicine, and politics in the United States. She is an Assistant Professor in History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, where she also directs the Shankweiler Scholars Medical Humanities Honors Program. She is currently working on a book with Rutgers University Press on women physicians and medical imperialism in the turn-of-the-century American West.

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We're joined this week by my good friend and fellow University of Minnesota alum Dr. Adam Blackler to talk about Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. Folks, I'd never seen this film before watching it for the pod so listening to Adam dissect it is a thing of beauty. But stay on, because he'll talk about his work in German colonial Africa as well as German cinema and how it informs the present. It's good stuff.

About Adam: Adam A. Blackler is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wyoming. He is a historian of modern Germany and southern Africa, whose research emphasizes the transnational dimensions of imperial occupation and settler-colonial violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His scholarly and teaching interests also include the political and social dynamics of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the interdisciplinary fields of holocaust & genocide Studies and international human rights. Dr. Blackler’s  book, entitled An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa, is in the Pennsylvania State University Press’s series “Germans Beyond Europe” sponsored by the Max Kade Research Institute. His most recent publications include a co-edited anthology, entitled After the Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies, and a chapter in the multi-volume collection, A Cultural History of Genocide. Dr. Blackler is presently researching a book project that explores the vibrant topography of Berlin’s parks, market squares, streets, and municipal districts before and during the Weimar Republic.

What is it about time travel movies that entices us all? I guarantee if you start thinking about your favorite films there's a time travel movie in there somewhere. Besides, isn't history a way of traveling to the past and thinking about what we would've done in those circumstances? This week, we're getting medieval on the HATM Podcast with two historians who are rethinking the Middle Ages. They've got a new book, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, and they picked one crazy movie to talk about: Time Bandits. Buckle up.

About our guests:
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. 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!).

Matthew Gabriele's research and teaching focus on religion, violence, nostalgia, and  apocalypse (in various combinations), whether manifested in the Middle  Ages or 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 more generally. He also has  presented and published on modern medievalism, such as recent white  supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages and pop culture phenomena  like Game of Thrones or video games.

And these guys have a new book on the way next year: Oathbreakers: The Carolingian Civil War and the Collapse of an Empire in the Middle Ages. These dudes are awesome. Give it a listen.

There are few films that can be considered as perfect movies. But 1974's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three may be on that list. We're joined this week by Eric Rauchway, a professor at UC Davis and specialist of The New Deal. We break down what this movie has to say about American politics coming out of  World War II, the meaning of the subway to the people of New York City, and whether or not Walter Matthau is the first American action hero. You're going to like where this takes us.

About Eric Rauchway:
The author most recently of Why the New Deal Matters (Yale University Press, 2021), he writes about U.S. history with a focus on the period from 1933-1945. He is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and has written seven books of history, as well as a novel. I’ve been on National Public Radio, BBC Radio 4, C-SPAN, and the Black News Channel, among other media, and has written for the Times Literary Supplement, as well as Dissent, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and a variety of other publications.

You can find him on twitter at @rauchway

We all know Die Hard is a Christmas movie, but is it a history movie? This week we're talking to two of the most prominent historians of the Early American Republic to get to the bottom of the debates. You're gonna love where this goes.

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. Gordon-Reed won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008). In addition to articles and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (UVA Press, 1997), Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, a collaboration with Vernon Jordan (PublicAffairs, 2001), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002), a volume of essays that she edited, Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010) and, with Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016). Her most recent book is On Juneteenth (Liveright Publishing, 2021). Gordon-Reed was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queens College) 2014-2015. Between 2010 and 2015, she was the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  She was the 2018-2019 President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She is the current President of the Ames Foundation.  A selected list of her honors includes a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Gordon-Reed served as a member of the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College from 2010 to 2018.  She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and was a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019, she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.

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. Smith earned his PhD in American history from Brandeis University. Previously, he was an associate professor of military history at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), an assistant professor of history and the director of the history program at William Woods University, and he has taught at additional colleges, including Tufts University. He specializes in American Revolutionary and early American history, with a specific focus 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.

When I was a graduate student studying slavery in the Americas, there were a host of books you had to read. Among them was and is this dude, Brett Rushforth. Brett has since become a friend of mine and what you'll find when listening is that this guy is not only one of the smartest people working the field, he's a giving human being and I'm so flattered that he chose to sit down and talk about one of our mutual favorite films: Up in the Air. This episode is gonna surprise you when you see where it goes.

About Brett:
Brett Rushforth is a scholar of the early modern Atlantic world whose research focuses on comparative slavery, Native North America, and French colonialism and empire. His first book, Colonial North America and the Atlantic World: A History in Documents (co-edited with Paul W. Mapp), uses primary documents to trace the history of North America in its Atlantic context from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. His second book, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, examined the enslavement of American Indians by French colonists and their Native allies, tracing the dynamic interplay between Native systems of captivity and slavery and French plantation-based racial slavery. In 2013, Bonds of Alliance was named the best book on American social history by the Organization of American Historians (Curti Award), the best book on French colonialism before 1848 by the French Colonial Historical Society (Boucher Prize), the best book on the history of European expansion by the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI Biennial Book Prize), and the best book on French history and culture by the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University (Wylie Prize). It was also one of three nominated finalists for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the best book on the history of slavery. He is currently completing, with Christopher Hodson, a book titled Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Age of Discovery to the Age of Revolutions, which explores the relationships between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans across four centuries, from roughly 1400 through Haitian independence in 1804.