Reckoning with Jason Herbert

This week begins our first episode covering the new series on Apple TV, FRANKLIN, starring Michael Douglas. Each week we'll recap the episode, fill in with historical backstory, and offer plenty of snark. We have a permanent cohost for the series in Kelsa Pelletiere, one of the foremost Franklin scholars in the world. And we'll rotate in new guests each week to provide fresh thoughts and perspective on what we are seeing onscreen. This is gonna be fun.About our guests:Kelsa Pelletiere is the guest host for the duration of the Franklin podcast miniseries. I sought out someone who is an absolute expert on the man and his life and seemingly everyone came back with Kelsa. She is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Mississippi. Her research focuses on early diplomatic history in the United States, specifically Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution. Her teaching interests include eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century American history; Revolutionary America; U.S. diplomacy; and the Atlantic world.Craig Bruce Smith is an associate professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norfolk, VA. He authored American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era and co-authored George Washington’s Lessons in Ethical Leadership. He specializes in American Revolutionary and early American history, specifically focusing on George Washington, honor, ethics, war, the founders, transnational ideas, and national identity. In addition, he has broader interests in colonial America, the early republic, leadership, and early American cultural, intellectual, and political history.

This week Drew McKevitt returns to talk about Robocop (1987). We get into depictions of Detroit as a failed city and of Robocop as both the commercial answer to the Terminator and maybe the antithesis of Dirty Harry. And we dive deep into Drew’s new book to talk about the rise of the gun culture in the United States. Hanging with Drew is always a blast- he’s one of the smartest and funniest historians you’re gonna meet. About our guest:Drew McKevitt is an associate professor of history at Louisiana Tech University. He recently published a book called Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America. His new book is Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America. His next project examines U.S. workers in foreign-owned manufacturing facilities in the United States since the 1970s. You can find him on twitter at @drewmckevitt or his website, https://andrewcmckevitt.com/

This week the pod welcomes back Thomas Lecaque and John Wyatt Greenlee along with #HATM newcomer Anna Waymack to talk about maybe the best medieval movie ever made: A Knight's Tale. We talk Chaucer, romance, Heath Ledger, the Black Prince, and that fucking soundtrack. Let's go.About our guests:Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence. He has written for the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Foreign Policy and The Bulwark, among others. Follow him on Twitter: @tlecaque.John Wyatt Greenlee is  a medievalist and a cartographic historian.His academic research is primarily driven by questions of how people perceive and reproduce their spaces:  how movement through the world — both experiential and imagined — becomes codified in visual and written maps. You can find him on twitter at @greenleejw Anna Waymack, is a Ph.D. candidate in Cornell's Medieval Studies Program, and was selected as a fellow in Olin Library's Summer Graduate Fellowship for Digital Humanities in 2016. As part of that fellowship, Anna developed digital humanities expertise and produced a public website focused on an aspect of her research, Geoffrey Chaucer and the charge of raptus brought forth by Cecily Chaumpaigne.

This week Jeff Melnick and Erik Baker jump in to talk about Steven Spielberg's Munich. We talk about the history behind the attacks in 1972, why they were relevant in 2005, and why they remain relevant today. And yes, we absolutely discuss the warfare and attempted genocide in Palestine today. This is a really important conversation and I hope that it helps to illustrate how movies can be part of historical dialogue. I learned a lot from these guys and I hope you will too.About our guests:Jeffrey Melnick is a professor at University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of 9/11 Culture: America Under Construction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Black-Jewish Relations on Trial (University Press of Mississippi, 2000), and A Right to Sing the Blues (Harvard University Press, 1999). You can find him on twitter at @melnickjeffrey1Erik Baker is currently a Lecturer in the History of Science at Harvard University and oversee the senior thesis program for undergraduates. As an associate editor at The Drift, I've been involved since its inception. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in May 2022, and my dissertation won the 2023 Leo P. Ribuffo Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.His research delves into the modern U.S. work culture and the impact of scientific expertise on workers' self-perception. In his forthcoming book, Make Your Own Job: The Entrepreneurial Work Ethic in Modern America, he explores how social scientists and management intellectuals reshaped the American work ethic during the turbulence of twentieth-century U.S. capitalism. He has contributed articles on labor, politics, and American history to publications such as Harper’s, n+1, The Baffler, Jewish Currents, Jacobin, and The Drift, where he has been an editor since its inception.

This week Christina Abreu drops in to discuss Cuban-American history, Cuban music, and the representation of Cubans in film. We explore the origins and characteristics of Cuban music, as well as the migration of Cubans to the United States in the 1950s. We also discuss the relationship between Cuban-Americans and other Latino groups, as well as the integration and segregation within Cuban-American communities. This is a fun podcast and deep dive into Cuban American history. I hope you dig it.About our guest:Christina Abreu is associate professor of history and director of the Center for Latino/Latin American Studies at Northern Illinois University. Her research focuses on the role of race, nationalism, and migration in the Cuban and Spanish Caribbean diasporic communities of the United States with a particular emphasis on popular culture.  Her first book, Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Cuban New York City and Miami, 1940-1960, examined the relationship between black and white Cuban musicians and the Cuban and broader Latinx communities of New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s. In her second book, Patria over Profits: The Story of Afro-Cuban Boxing Champion Teófilo Stevenson, she offers a cultural history of the life and times of Afro-Cuban boxing champion Teófilo Stevenson, winner of three heavyweight boxing Olympic gold medals in 1972, 1976, and 1980. In detailing Stevenson’s triumphs in the ring, another more complex and interconnected story emerges about revolutionary Cuba and the island’s Afro-Caribbean connections, race and black athletic activism, Cuban exile culture and politics, and international sports celebrity. Patria over Profits is under contract with the Sport and Society series at the University of Illinois Press.

We've reached the end of the mission here at Historians At The Movies. This week Sarah, Colin, Luke and I talk about the final thrust of the air war in Germany, POW camps and escape attempts, Rosie's legacy, and the melancholy of leaving the war behind. We also give our final thoughts about the series, where to place it alongside Band of Brothers and The Pacific and what series we'd like to see next. Hope you've enjoyed this ride as much as we did.

This week Karen L. Cox swings by to talk about the South, the 70s, and why Burt Reynolds was so damn cool. This is probably the first time you’ve heard Smokey and the Bandit on a history podcast, but that’s what we are here for. This one is fun. 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.

This week Sarah, Colin, and Luke drop in to talk about the penultimate episode of Masters of the Air. We've a lot to talk about in this episode- inlcuding the air war in Italy and Romania, which highlighs the strategic and tactical operations of the 15th Air Force and the role of the Tuskegee Airmen. We also revist the prison camp storyline, to talk about the tensions and fraying relationships among the POWs. This leads to discussions on the themes of racism and prejudice in World War II, the importance of training and race relations, the need for prioritizing storylines and themes, the ineffectiveness of the spy plot, the need for a comprehensive air war series, unresolved plotlines and character arcs, the problem of multiple plots and poor character development, and our speculations on the final episode of the series. This is easily the best episode we've done on this series. Hope you like it.

Mary Hicks, an expert on the Portuguese imperial world and the African diaspora, joins Margari Hill, co-founder of Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, for an engaging discussion on Dune: Part Two. They explore historical influences, from the Ottoman Empire to Indigenous communities, and the portrayal of whiteness and women's agency in the film. Delving into themes of colonialism and representation, they critique character roles while highlighting the film’s connection to real-world issues. Their insights make for a riveting conversation that's both entertaining and thought-provoking.

This week Sarah, Luke, Colin, and I continue to follow the Bloody Hundredth in what amounted to a tonal shift for the series. We talk about life inside German POW camps, the Great Escape, the Battle of Berlin, and Black Monday. We dive into the Red Cross and also compare the experiences of American prisoners in Europe and the Pacific, along with those of German prisoners in the United States. We also talk about Crosby's affair with Landra, as well as the arrival of the P-51 Mustang over the skies of Europe in 1944. And maybe you hear my Bill Clinton impression for the very first time. This is our best pod on this series yet.