Reckoning with Jason Herbert

This week Dr. Jacob Lee joins in to talk about the real Jeremiah Johnson—and why Redford’s version may be a fantasy. About our guest:Jacob Lee is a historian of early America and the American West, focusing on colonialism and borderlands. His first book, Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi (Harvard University Press, 2019), embedded intertwined Native and imperial histories in the physical landscape of Middle America, a vast region encompassing much of the central Mississippi River valley. In the centuries between the collapse of the ancient metropolis of Cahokia around A.D. 1300 and the rise of the U.S. empire in the early 1800s, power flowed through the kinship-based alliances and social networks that controlled travel and communication along the many rivers of the midcontinent. Drawing on a range of English-, French-, Spanish-, and Illinois-language sources, as well as archaeology, oral history, and environmental science, Masters of the Middle Watersemphasized the power of personal relationships and the environment to shape the course of empires and nations.He is currently working on a history of the everyday operation of legal jurisdiction in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma and Kansas) from the 1820s through the 1850s. Tentatively-titled The Laws of Nations: Legal Jurisdiction and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Indian Territory, this project examines the ways that Indigenous nations, especially Cherokee Nation and Osage Nation, effected sovereignty over people and land through the assertion and exercise of jurisdiction over crimes committed within their borders. In adjudicating crimes ranging from murder to theft to bootlegging, Native nations repaired harms, defined citizenship, and exercised authority in the face of the efforts of U.S. federal and state governments to usurp and undermine Indigenous governance.

Jason and Thomas recap their voyages to destinations unknown: San Diego and Minnesota's Boundary Waters, plus Thomas and Jason discuss the excitement of fall semesters on campus.

This week we return to the vault to bring you Ridley Scott's unexpected western masterpiece: Thelma and Louise.

This week Craig Bruce Smith and Robert Greene II join in to talk about our favorite dystopian films, why this film slips under the radar, and what it was like when Craign recently met Arnold himself.

This week John Wyatt Greenlee, Colin Colbourn, and Alan Malfavon flyover to talk about James Gunn’s Superman, the need for heroes in everyday lives, and casting the rest of the DCU.About our guests:Alan Malfavon is Assistant Professor of History at California State University San Marcos.  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. It argues how Afro-Mexicans facilitated, complicated, and participated in multiple socio-political processes that reshaped Veracruz and its borderlands. Colin Colbourn holds a Ph.D in U.S. History from the University of Southern Mississippi. His expertise includes mass communication and assisting in research efforts for unresolved casualties from past conflicts. Since 2007 he has published articles on Marine Corps history in Leatherneck: Magazine of the Marines, and was Associate Editor for the West Point History of Warfare. John Wyatt Greenlee is a medievalist and a cartographic historian, as well as a historian of roads and pathways and pilgrimage. But he is best well known for his work on the role of eels in pre-modern England from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. He is heavily engaged in outreach and public engagement to make the eel history more widely known, and to raise awareness for the role of eels as an endangered species. His work with eels and eel history has been profiled in TIME, The Guardian, Atlas Obscura, Hakai Magazine, and The New Yorker  (click here for a full list of earned media) 

This week social anthropologist Dr. Judith Scheele joins in from France to talk about her decades of research into the diverse and fascinating peoples and places of the Sahara Desert.About our guest:Judith Scheele is professor of social anthropology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, EHESS). She has spent almost two decades living in and researching Saharan societies. The author of three previous books, she now lives in Marseille, France.Find her book: https://amzn.to/3U8X19Y 

Looking back at the last seven years of HATM, along with my plans for the future.

This week, two of my favorite people in the world join in to talk about Brad Pitt’s new film, F1  while they try to convert me into a Formula One racing fan. Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s start our engines.  

We're enjoying the holiday this week so we thought we'd bring one back from the vault. This week Dr. Craig Bruce Smith and Dr. Robert Greene II and I talk about Mel Gibson's The Patriot, the role of constructed memory in national identity, and the ethics of making historical dramas.

This week military historian Dr. Jonathan Carroll drops in to talk about Black Hawk Down and his new book Beyond Black Hawk Down: Intervention, Nation-Building, and Insurgency in Somalia, 1992-1995.About our guest:Jonathan Carroll is a former officer in the Irish Defence Forces who earned a PhD from Texas A&M University. He is an associate professor of military history at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.