The History Evolution

In the first episode of the second season, I talk with Erik Loomis, professor of labor history at the University of Rhode Island, and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes and Organizing America: Stories of Americans who Fought for Justice. We discuss the importance of understanding labor history, the nature of work, what it means to organize, and what is required if workers are to succeed in improving work in modern America.

Books Mentioned in This Episode:

Erik Loomis, A History of America in Ten Strikes (New York: The New Press, 2018).

Erik Loomis, Organizing America: Stories of Americans who Fought for Justice (New York: The New Press, 2025).

In this 5th of July Bonus episode, I look to Frederick Douglass and Randolph Bourne in sorting out my own conflicted feelings about America's 250th birthday.

If you're interested in the texts mentioned in this podcast, here are some places you can find out more, in order of their appearance in the show.

• Langston Hughes, "Let America be America Again," Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147907/let-america-be-america-again.
• Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?," Frederick Douglass: Speeches and Writings. Library of America, 2022.
• Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America," The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1916/07/trans-national-america/304838/.
• Frederick Douglass, "Our Composite Nation," Frederick Douglass: Speeches and Writings. Library of America, 2022.

In the third and final episode of the first season of The History Evolution, I talk with Daniel K. Richter about his efforts to tell the colonial and revolutionary history of the United States from "the other side of the frontier." What do we see when we try "facing east from Indian country," and why does it matter? 

Our conversation ranged from questions of historical methodology and the importance of the historical imagination to the  different ways in which Native Americans and colonists understood their relationship to each other, to the power Native Americans exerted over those relationships up into the 18th century. We finished by discussing the ways in which the transformation of the frontier after the Seven Years' War enabled a new, radicalized definition of Native American and European identity that had profound effects on the country that emerged from the Revolutionary War.

The next season of The History Evolution will be released in the fall and will focus on labor history. Be sure to hit the subscribe button so you won't miss it. I'll also be releasing some bonus material over the summer, so stay tuned and remember: We can change the world. History can help.

Books Mentioned in this Episode

Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (Harvard University Press, 2003).

Daniel K. Richter, Trade, Land, and Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America (Belknap Press, 2013).

Daniel K. Richter, The Lords Proprietors: Land and Power in Seventeenth-Century America, forthcoming.

In the second episode of the podcast, Drs. Shea Howell, Stephen Ward, and Michael Doan talk to me about the ideas and activism of James (a.k.a. "Jimmy") and Grace Lee Boggs, a couple whose activism spanned almost every progressive movement of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. We discuss their conviction that history as the story of the future as well as the past, how they used the past to inform their activism today, and where they thought they could see future of America being created.

To learn more about the Boggs and their work, and to see how it is being carried forward, visit the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center's website. 

Books and Media Mentioned in This Episode:

James and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (Monthly Review Press, 1974).

Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution (University of California Press, 2012).

James Boggs, Pages from a Black Radical's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader: A James Boggs Reader, edited by Stephen M. Ward (Wayne State Press, 2011).

E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (Harper Perennial, 2010).

Coming Soon! Michael Doan, Rehearsing the Future: The Thought and Practice of James and Grace Lee Boggs (AK Press, 2026).

Grace Lee Boggs, American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs (Cherry Sky Pictures, 2013).

Photo Credit: By Castilibrary8 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117059046

In the first episode of the podcast, I talk with Dr. Ed Pavlić about James Baldwin's evolving understanding of history and what we can learn from it. Baldwin was one of the major influences on the philosophy behind this podcast, and his changing ideas—from history as nightmare to history as lover—reveal a profound insight into the role of history as part of what it means to be human.

We can change the world. History can help.