The Whiskey Rebellion

Frank and David talk with Edinburgh PhD student Sarah Thomson. They discuss her research on how the Reagan administration tried to shape his historical legacy. 

Last Drops

Sarah: Karen Tumulty's The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

Frank: Andrew O'Shaughnessy's The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind

David: Reservation Dogs

Frank and David are joined by Edinburgh doctoral student James Mackay. They discuss James's research into Black refugees during the American Revolution. 

Last Drops

James: Karen Cook Bell's Running from Bondage

Frank: Mary Beth Norton's 1774 and Bruce Ragsdale's Washington at the Plow

David: Denise Lajimodiere's on Indian boarding schools 

Frank and David discuss how 9/11 changed the United States and the world over the last 20 years.

Last Drops

Frank:  Anand Gopal - The Other Afghan Women, Sound Expertise - Handel and the Slave Trade, RIP Betty Wood

David: BGEAH conference

Frank and David discuss Netflix's mini-series "The Chair" and how academia has been presented in film and television.

Last Drops

Frank: RIP Robert Middlekauff and Sturgill Simpson's Ballad of Dood and Juanita

David: Ancestry digitizes Freedmen's Bureau records

After a NYAG report detailed a long history of sexual harassment, NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced his resignation. Frank and David discuss the scandal and resignation.

Last Drops

David: What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind

Frank: enjoy the summer holiday

Joined by Miles Stanley, Frank and David discuss the life and career of historian Gary B. Nash.

Last Drops

Frank:  Congrats to Karin Wulf for her appointment as Director of the John Carter Brown Library

David: Questlove's new documentary Summer of Soul 

*POSTSCRIPT*

After listening to the episode, Gary Nash's colleague Marian McKenna Olivas got in touch with some corrections and added details about their important work on the National History Standards and the National Center for History in the Schools. She wrote: 

The 1994 History Standards were voted against 99-1 as you say. It was actually a resolution rather than a real power to vote them down, but it was obviously a political hot potato. However, an important correction is that that was not the end of the standards. The team went back to work and the revised standards published in 1996 went forward with little controversy. One of the things they did was pull out all the suggested activities and put them in volumes called “Bring History Alive.” Much of the counting of names in the 1994 version came from the activities. The reason so many mainstream figures were not named in the activities was that there was an assumption they were already in the textbooks! The activities were designed to push students to learn things not in the textbook. With some revisions and the activities moved to a separate publication, the standards were published and are still available: National Center for History in the Schools. History Standards (ucla.edu) Over 70,000 print copies were sold.

The standards are and always were voluntary. That has been true of any national standards published. The Obama Education Department did tie some funding awards into whether schools had adopted Common Core Standards, but that was the closest the US has gotten to any kind of ‘mandated’ standards.

The era outline is pretty much what is adopted by AP History, National Parks Education (Gary was very involved with this as well), and Library of Congress. Some states did adopt the outline.

The much overlooked aspect (in my opinion) were the Historical Thinking Standards. In addition to the eras breakdown, the important overarching idea that has persisted along with the way was the idea to keep looking for untold stories.

NCHS’s NEH funding dried up, but Gary was enchanted with the partnership between historians and classroom teachers, mostly because another of the unsung aspects of the work that went into the years that the teams worked on the standards were their primary source-based teaching units. Gary wanted to keep that work alive, so he convinced the UCLA History Department to take the center in so he could continue that work. He was able to partner with the Getty for a unit on Trajan’s Rome (when I started to freelance for him), the OAH, and anywhere he could scrape together funding to sponsor a teacher-historian partnership. The post 9-11 Teaching American History Grants gave the center funding for a time as did a partnership with Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History for a history-themed high school in East Los Angeles.

Lastly, in probably his last interview, about three weeks before he died, Gary did comment on your discussion question about whether there should be a national history (Gary at ~29 in). The whole episode is pretty solid. Enjoy: How can Americans best teach their children about history? | The Economist

The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection started its work earlier this week.  Frank and David discuss similar Congressional investigations, including those on Harpers Ferry, the KKK, and the Titanic.

Last Drops

Frank: Transatlantic Slavery Symposium

David: Slate's One Year podcast 

With record setting high temperatures in the United States (and elsewhere), Frank and David discuss how Americans have coped with the summer heat.

Last Drops

Frank: Ken Burns on Ernest Hemingway

David: The Imagineering Story on Disney+

The United States military recently and unceremoniously withdrew from Bagram Air Base last week, signally the beginning of the end of the nearly 20 year war in Afghanistan. Frank and David discuss how this compares to the ends of other wars in American history.

Last Drops

Frank: copy of the Declaration of Independence found in Scotland, auctioned 

David: slavery documents found in Maryland attic, auctioned 

Yesterday C-SPAN released its latest rankings of US Presidents. Frank and David look at the history of presidential rankings, critique C-SPAN's list, and examine Trump's place near the bottom.

Last Drops

Frank: biannual rant on the Declaration of Independence and Declaration of Arbroath.

David: Bobby Bonilla Day