Annette Joseph Gabrielle talks with Bianca Williams about African American women who travel to Jamaica as tourists looking for happiness, intimacy, and new identities free from the limits of American racism. Joseph-Gabrielle is an assistant professor of French at the University of Minnesota. Williams is an associate professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Transnationalism.

Richard Read talks about the troubled life of the Coast Guard's sole heavy icebreaker, Polar Star. Read is the Bureau Chief of the Los Angeles Times in Seattle. He is the winner of two Pulitzer prizes for his investigations on the Asian Financial Crisis and abuses by U.S. immigration officials. His article on the Polar Star was published in the August 2nd edition of the Los Angeles Times.

Helen Rozwadowski talks about the history of the oceans and how these oceans have shaped human history in profound ways. Rozwadowski is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut Avery Point. She is the author of Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans (Reaktion, 2018). 

Elizabeth Leane talks about Sidney Jeffryes, radio operator for Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition in 1913. Jeffryes’ struggle with mental illness challenged Mawson’s expedition party as well as the way Mawson tried to present his expedition to audiences back home. Leane is a professor of English at the University of Tasmania and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She’s also the co-author (along with Ben Maddison and Kimberley Norris) of “Beyond the Heroic Stereotype: Sidney Jeffryes and the Mythologising of Australian Antarctic History.”

Artist Chiadikobi Nwaubani talks about his efforts to find, restore, and publish photographs from the colonial archives of West Africa. He also talks about his work re-interpreting these photographs using art and photo-manipulation.

Andrea Wulf’s book the The Invention of Nature tells the story of Alexander von Humboldt, one of the world’s most important nineteenth-century explorers. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra talks about some of the problems of the book, specifically how Wulf’s view of Humboldt divorces him from the intellectual traditions of Central and South American scholars who helped Humboldt imagine the Americas for European and North American readers. Cañizares-Esguerra is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of many books including How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

Matthew James talks about the 1905 Galapagos Expedition organized by the California Academy of Sciences. James is a professor of geology at Sonoma State University. He is the author of Collecting Evolution: The Galapagos Expedition that Vindicated Darwin.

Jordan Bimm talks about early experiments in space medicine involving subjects who did not resemble the white male test pilots who would become America's first astronauts. Bimm is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University. He’s the author of Anticipating the Astronaut which is under contract to MIT Press, expected in Spring 2021.

Andrew Denning talks about the Nazi cult of mobility, a set of ideas and practices that were crucial to its racist ideology. Denning is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He is the author the essay “'Life is Movement, Movement is life!' Mobility Politics and the Circulatory State in Nazi Germany,” published in the American Historical Review.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel speaks to Jessica Nabongo about her quest to be the first black woman to travel to all of the countries of the world. Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Nabongo is a writer, entrepreneur, and the founder of Jet Black, a boutique luxury travel company that promotes tourism to Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.