Skipped History

Earlier this week, I spoke with Professor David Greenberg about his new biography, John Lewis: A Life. I was curious about lesser-known sides of the iconic activist, whose steadfast commitment to nonviolence was both admired and critiqued during the Civil Rights Movement. Lewis “wasn’t without his flaws,” Professor Greenberg told me, but he grew into “a reminder that America had been through worse and not only survived but improved.” I’ll be drawing on that lesson more than ever in the months and years ahead—that is, as you’ll see, when I’m not politely vandalizing right-wing politicians’ cars.

David Greenberg is a professor of history, journalism, and media studies at Rutgers. He writes regularly for Politico, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd (University of New Orleans) is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America. She’s also the host of the American Campus Podcast. Her work, which has appeared in various national publications, traces the modern conservative movement to campus wars in the late 1960s. In her estimation, neither Trump nor the conservative agenda is actually very popular. The question is how we can advance policies that are.

In our last interview before the election, I spoke with Professor Elizabeth Hinton, whose work has been instrumental in shaping my understanding of inequality and urban violence. Professor Hinton highlights how leaders of both political parties have long known “what’s required to meaningfully address the problems of poverty and racism,” but time after time, have opted for more politically palatable short-term solutions. The result? Continued over-policing and stratification.

In Professor Hinton’s mind, Kamala Harris doesn’t offer the kind of structural transformation we need, but in a choice between her and Donald Trump—well, let’s just say Professor Hinton advises voting “like your life depends on it.”

My guest today is Rebecca Nagle, an award-winning journalist and citizen of Cherokee Nation, and the author of By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land. Rebecca details the history of violence, dispossession, and resistance behind a monumental Supreme Court case decided in 2020. The case resulted in the restoration of tribal land, but it’s not exactly all unicorns and rainbows now. Rather, in Rebecca’s words, the victory reveals “what can happen when the U.S. government follows the law, even though it has a tendency not to.”

Amid the anxious wait for Hurricane Milton last week, I asked Professor Jack E. Davis if he’d come back on Skipped History to review some storm history. In The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, Professor Davis explores how and why Americans began to build on the Gulf Coast. The aftermath of one hurricane in particular generated a practice of trying to overcome, rather than retreat from, extreme weather. Over 120 years later, Professor Davis insists we need a moratorium on building near the water.

Jack is a history professor at the University of Florida specializing in environmental history and sustainability studies. He’s the author or editor of ten books, including The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird, which we discussed last year, and The Gulf, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2018.

In our latest interview on the election, I spoke to Professor Drew McKevitt about guns. The gun problem feels insurmountable—in just one example, a new report from Everytown found that “the number of gun violence incidents on school grounds in 2024 so far has outpaced the total number of incidents in all of 2023.”

But as Drew recounts, the feeling that g…

In The Burning Earth, Professor Sunil Amrith delivers a global, history-spanning account of our planet’s environment. One subject he comes back to over and over again is food: rice, sugar, wheat, meat, and more. I asked him about the societal impact of each crop and why he believes there’s no faster way to slow the climate crisis “than changing food systems and agriculture.”

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History and professor in the School of the Environment at Yale University. He’s the author of five books and a recipient of multiple awards including a MacArthur “Genius” fellowship.

The timing for today’s interview, I think, needs no introduction. Professor Rashid Khalidi details Israel’s long history of relying on outside powers to build a Jewish state: first, the British, and now, of course, the U.S. That record reveals the sizable influence outside forces have today to end the violence unfolding in Palestine (and now Lebanon). Public opinion shifting against Israel suggests to Professor Khalidi that “both sides are almost fated to have to figure out how to reconcile,” though as you’ll see, that’s not exactly a source of hope for him right now.

Professor Khalidi is a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East and the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. Professor Khalidi served as editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies from 2002 until 2020. He was also president of the Middle East Studies Association and has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, Georgetown University, and the University of Chicago. Professor Khalidi has authored a number of books including, most recently, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, the subject of our conversation today.

Why are conservatives so hellbent on dismantling public education? Project 2025 calls for the Department of Education to be eliminated. It further suggests that education policy should “follow the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955, wherein education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families.”

As Jennifer C. Berkshire and Jack Schneider reveal, the assault on public schools “has never been just about education.” Rather, it connects back to resistance to the integration of schools and a long-running war on unions. And in our interview, Jennifer and Jack examine how the attempted privatization of schools would essentially mean returning to an unequal education system from hundreds of years ago.

Jennifer is the Bloch Lecturer in Education Journalism and a lecturer in Education Studies at Yale. Jack is the Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Individually, Jennifer and Jack’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other publications. Together, they’re the co-hosts of the education policy podcast, Have You Heard, and the coauthors of two books, including most recently, The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual.

In our latest interview about the 2024 election, I welcomed Professor Kellie Carter Jackson back to Skipped History. In past conversations, Professor Carter Jackson and I explored lessons from Black abolitionists and the effectiveness of violent resistance. Both topics came up again as we discussed Professor Carter Jackson’s excitement over Kamala Harri…