Reckoning with Jason Herbert

This week Historians At The Movies goes Down Under to talk about 1986's Crocodile Dundee and we are doing it with the founders of Historians At The Movies: Australia: Chelsea Barnett and Joel Barnes. This movie is everything HATM was designed for: taking something fun and then pointing out everything we can take from it. This was a blast to record.About our guests:Dr Chelsea Barnett is a gender and cultural historian whose work explores the representation of masculinities in Australian popular culture, in order to understand the complex and varied ways in which masculinity has made sense in particular historical contexts. Under this broad research aim she engages with feminist and queer theory, the history of sex and sexuality, twentieth-century Australian history, and the history in and of popular culture.Chelsea is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UTS, and is located in the Australian Centre for Public History. In her current project, she is exploring the cultural history of single men, focusing on how Australian film and magazines in the postwar world have represented and made sense of the relationship between men and the expectation of marriage. She is also the author of "Reel Men: Australian Masculinity at the Movies, 1949-1962" (Melbourne University Press, 2019). She has authored academic articles in leading journals including History Australia, Australian Historical Studies, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Chelsea is currently the ECR co-representative for the Australian Historical Association, and is the co-convenor of Historians at the Movies Australia (#HATMAus).Dr. Joel Barnes is a historian of the humanities, science, religion and universities. His present research examines the history of relations between evolutionary science and religious belief within Australian higher education, as part of the Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum project run by the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society. Before joining the University of Queensland, Joel was a Research Associate in the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney. His work at UTS was on an Australian Research Council-funded project on the history of humanities institutions in Australia since 1945, for which he is finalising a monograph on the humanities disciplines and the idea of the national interest.

This week Tyler Anbinder joins in to talk about his experiences advising on Gangs of New York as well as his work tracing the Irish diaspora.About our guest:Tyler Anbinder is a specialist in nineteenth-century America and the history of immigration and ethnicity in American life. His latest book, published in March 2024 by Little, Brown, is entitled Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York. That project's digital history component, created with research assistance from more than two dozen GW students, can be found at http://beyondragstoriches.org. His most recent book before Plentiful Country was City of Dreams (2016), a history of immigrant life in New York City from the early 1600s to the present.  And prior to that, in 2001, he published Five Points, a history of nineteenth-century America's most infamous immigrant neighborhood, focusing in particular on tenement life, inter-ethnic relations, and ethnic politics.  His first book, Nativism and Slavery (1992), analyzed the role of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know Nothing party in the political crisis that led to the Civil War. Professor Anbinder has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and held the Fulbright Thomas Jefferson Chair in American History at the University of Utrecht. He has received awards for his scholarship from the Organization of American Historians, the Columbia University School of Journalism, and the journal Civil War History. He also served as a historical consultant to Martin Scorsese for the making of The Gangs of New York.

Today my friend, Dr. Eric Becklin, defended his dissertation. And around here, we celebrate the wins. I talk about the process of graduate school and how important friends are to getting you to the finish line.

Dr. Karen Cox drops in to talk about the Trump Administration's plans to reinstall two former Confederate monuments, along with the Lost Cause mythology, and how we think about the Civil War.About our guest:Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.  She is the author of four books, the editor or co-editor of two volumes on southern history and has written numerous essays and articles, including an essay for the New York Times best seller Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Her books include Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, and most recently, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, which was published in April 2021 and won the Michael V.R. Thomason book prize from the Gulf South Historical Association.A successful public intellectual, Dr. Cox has written op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, TIME magazine, Publishers Weekly, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Huffington Post. She has given dozens of media interviews in the U.S. and around the globe, especially on the topic of Confederate monuments. She appeared in Henry Louis Gates’s PBS documentary Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, Lucy Worsley’s American History’s Biggest Fibs for the BBC, and the Emmy-nominated documentary The Neutral Ground, which examines the underlying history of Confederate monuments.Cox is a professor emerita of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she taught from 2002-2024. She is currently writing a book that explores themes of the Great Migration, the Black press, and early Chicago jazz through the forgotten tragedy of the Rhythm Club fire, which took the lives of more than 200 African Americans in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1940.You can follow her on Bluesky @DrKarenLCox.bsky.social

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