Reckoning with Jason Herbert

This week Sarah Keyes and Josh Garrett-Davis drop in to talk about settlers, Native Americans, the Overland Trail, and yes, dysentery via Taylor Sheridan's 1883. We also talk about the West on film, how the West has been portrayed in movies, books, tv, and video games, as well as question why the West is in a pop culture revival in current moment. This is a really fun conversation. Hope you dig it. About our guests:Sarah Keyes is a historian of the United States. She specializes in the 19th century and the history of the U.S. West with a focus on the environment and intercultural interactions between Indigenous peoples and Euro-Americans. Her current work explores these topics along the overland trails to Oregon and California in the mid-19th century. Her first book, American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in October 2023. Keyes has also begun work on her second project, a regional and transnational study of suffrage in the U.S. West, for which she was recently awarded a Mellon-Schlesinger Summer Research Grant from the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.Josh Garrett-Davis is a writer, historian, and curator. His work focuses on the American West, Indigenous histories, and art/media history. He is the author of two books: What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), which won the Outstanding Western Book award from the Center for the Study of the American West; and Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains (Little, Brown, 2012), a personal geography of his home region. His article “The Intertribal Drum of Radio: The Indians for Indians Hour and Native American Media, 1941–1951” appeared in Western Historical Quarterly in 2018 and won the Oscar O. Winther Award. He has written for numerous other publications.

This week George Dehner drops in to talk about 12 Monkeys (1995) and the history of epidemic diseases. We talk not only about the possibilities of a dystopian world caused by global contagion, but about how the fields of both environmental history and disease history evolved in the latter half of the 20th century. George is one of my former professors and it was awesome to sit down and talk to him. This is a cool conversation with one of the most influential scholars in my life. Hope you like it.About our guest:George Dehner is a world environmental historian who examines the intersection of humans and disease in the modern era. His first book Influenza: A Century of Science and Public Health was published in April 2012 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His second book Global Flu and You: A History of Influenza was published in December 2012 by Reaktion Press. His article “WHO Knows Best? National and International Responses to Pandemic Threats and the ‘Lessons’ of 1976” published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences received the 2011 Margaret T. Lane/Virginia F. Saunders Memorial Research Award by the American Library Association Government Documents Roundtable. He is currently beginning a research project on Legionnaires’ Disease.

This week environmental historian Sara Dant drops in to talk about a new history of the West, wolf reintroduction in Colorado, public land management, and Seth MacFarlane's homage to classic western films. This is a fun conversation about a silly movie that actually has a lot to say. I hope you like it.About our guest:Sara Dant is Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor and Chair of History at Weber State University whose work focuses on environmental politics in the United States with a particular emphasis on the creation and development of consensus and bipartisanism. Dr. Dant’s latest book is a new, completely revised and updated edition of Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (2023, University of Nebraska Press) with a foreword by Tom S. Udall. Dr. Dant is also an advisor and interviewee for Ken Burns' The American Buffalo documentary film (October 2023), the author of several prize-winning articles on western environmental politics, a precedent-setting Expert Witness Report and Testimony on Stream Navigability upheld by the Utah Supreme Court (2017), co-author of the two-volume Encyclopedia of American National Parks (2004) with Hal Rothman, and she has written chapters for three books on Utah: “Selling and Saving Utah, 1945-Present” in Utah History (forthcoming), “The ‘Lion of the Lord’ and the Land: Brigham Young's Environmental Ethic,” in The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays in Mormon Environmental History, ed. by Jedidiah Rogers and Matthew C. Godfrey (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019), 29-46, and “Going with the Flow: Navigating to Stream Access Consensus,” in Desert Water: The Future of Utah’s Water Resources (2014). Dr. Dant was the 2019-2020 John S. Hinckley Fellow at Weber State for excellence in scholarship, teaching, and service and was recognized as a Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor in 2020. She serves on PhD dissertation committees, regularly presents at scholarly conferences, works on cutting-edge conservation programs, and gives numerous public presentations. Dr. Dant teaches lower-division courses in American history and upper-division courses on the American West and US environmental history, as well as historical methods and the senior seminar.

This week we invite Scott Laderman to talk about Point Break (1991) and his book Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing. We talk about depictions of surfing in this film and others along with the origins of the pursuit, its commodification and commercialization, how surfers responded to genocide and apartheid in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the greatest surfing movies of all time, and greatest surfers of all time. This is a really fun and deep dive into surf and film history. I think you're gonna dig it.About our guest:Scott Laderman  broadly explores the various ways that Americans have encountered and ascribed meaning to the rest of the world. His first book, Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory (Duke University Press, 2009), examines issues of tourism and memory in postcolonial Vietnam. His second monograph, Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing (University of California Press, 2014), combines the passion for wave-riding he developed while growing up in California with his professional interest in the history of U.S. foreign relations. His most recent book, The “Silent Majority” Speech: Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and the Origins of the New Right (Routledge, 2019), uses Nixon’s most famous presidential address to probe the last years of the war in Vietnam and the rise of the modern right-wing political movement.With Edwin Martini, he co-edits the Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond book series for the University of Massachusetts Press, and he has written for numerous popular publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, South China Morning Post, and Star Tribune.

This week, I invited I invited on two absolute luminaries in the gaming world in Emily Friedman and Trevor Valle to talk not only about the film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, but about the world around D&D complete with the history of the game and the politics surrounding table top gaming. And folks, this is such a cool deep dive into D&D. This is an appropriately dragon-sized episode; my gift to you for the final HATM Podcast of 2023.About our guests:Emily C. Friedman is an Associate Professor of English at Auburn University and teaches courses on British literature, book history, and game narratives. Trained as a book historian, narratologist, and digital humanist, her work examines the history of cultural production outside of commercial mass media from the eighteenth century to today, from never-published manuscript fiction to emerging media. Now one of the senior scholars and public intellectuals in the field of "Actual Play," a new media form where roleplaying games are performed for audiences, her research on the topic has appeared in multiple academic books and journals, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and she is a regular contributor to Polygon. She is at work on two book projects on Actual Play: a field-defining history of the form online, as well as a multiauthored critical companion to major Actual Play Dimension 20.Trevor Valle  an American paleontologist and wildlife biologist. In addition to his extensive career in paleontology he has also served as personality on several notable paleontology and wildlife television programs and documentaries. He is also a professional TTRPG Dungeon Master. He has been a guest on numerous podcasts including Breaking Bio, the Science Enthusiast Podcast, and the Joe Rogan Experience. 

It's Christmas time and that means visiting an old classic. This week doctoral student Vaughn Joy joins in to talk about A Christmas Story and her work looking at how the American government exerted control over Christmas films as a way of influencing  the national narrative. We talk about all we love and hate with this movie, the history of Christmas films, and yes, continue to debate whether on not Die Hard is a Christmas movie. About our guest:Vaughn’s research interests lie in entertainment and social histories, particularly in the post-war period in the United States. For her PhD research project, Vaughn is exploring the extent of Hollywood’s reflection of and influence on the political and cultural climates of the early Cold War period through the propagandising of Christmas films from 1946 to 1961. By exploring the cinematic representations of Americans and their traditions during the Christmas season, the thesis argues that these sentimental films, and other innocuous media of the like, are not simply feel-good media, but rather provide commentary on the world around them. Before pursuing a research degree at UCL, Vaughn completed an MA in History at UCL and an MPhil in Classics at Trinity College Dublin with dissertation titles “Venus in Manhattan: A Study of Gender Relations in Post-WWII New York” and “Reproductive Demonesses: Mental Escapism from Reproductive Failures in the Ancient World,” respectively.Alongside bylines in The Washington Post and Red Pepper Magazine, Vaughn is an active public scholar with appearances on numerous podcasts and radio shows including NPR. Vaughn is also a researcher and co-host on the Impressions of America podcast which explores American politics, culture, and media in the latter 20th century, as well as creator, researcher, and host of the Joy of Star Wars podcast melding themes in American history with those in the Star Wars franchise.

This week guest Kate Jewell stops by to talk about one of the more interesting John Cusack performances in the film High Fidelity. This movie features some phenomenal performances by Cusack, Jack Black, Todd Louiso, and one very weird Tim Robbins. We also talk about Kate's new book Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio. This might be in your Top 5 favorite episodes ever.About our guest:Katherine Rye Jewell is Professor of History at Fitchburg State University, where she teaches modern U.S. history. She is a historian of the business and politics of culture in the twentieth-century United States. Her book, Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge Studies on the American South) (Cambridge University Press, 2017), explored the intersection of southern culture and politics through industrialists’ responses to the New DealShe turns attention to another kind of business in her new book, Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio,  from the University of North Carolina Press. Taking aim at the informal spaces that shaped the music industry since the 1970s, Jewell uncovers how college DJs confronted the politics of culture, higher education, and identity.

With Godzilla Minus One tearing up the American and global box office, it's time for another EMERGENCY PODCAST. This week we are joined by two amazing scholars of Japanese social and cultural history in Bill Tsutsui and Akiki Takenaka. We talk about our first impressions of the film, where it fits into Godzilla and WWII lore, and the history of Godzilla himself. This is such a cool conversation and I'm so excited to bring it to you.About our guests:Bill Tsutsui is an award-winning scholar and teacher, an experienced academic leader,and an outspoken supporter of the public humanities, international education,and more inclusive, accessible colleges and universities.  He researches, writes, and speaks widely on Japanese economic and environmental history, Japanese popular culture (especially the Godzilla movies), Japanese-American identity, and issues in higher education.  He is highly opinionated about BBQ, proud to have once driven the Zamboni at an NHL game, and slightly embarrassed to be Level 40 in Pokemon Go. Find him at https://www.billtsutsui.com/ Akiko Takenaka specializes in social and cultural history of modern Japan. Her research involves memory and historiography of the Asia-Pacific War, gender and peace activism, and history museums. Her teaching interests include gender, war and society, nationalism, memory studies, and visual culture. Prior to coming to UK, she has taught as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan.Professor Takenaka's first book, entitled Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan's Unending Postwar (University of Hawai'i Press, Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University), explores Yasukuni Shrine as a physical space, object of visual and spatial representation, and site of spatial practice in order to highlight the complexity of Yasukuni’s past and critique the official narratives that postwar debates have responded to. Her second book project Mothers Against War: Gender, Motherhood, and Peace Activism in Postwar Japan is under advance contract with the University of Hawai'i Press. Her research has been funded by long-term research fellowships by Fulbright and the Japan Foundation. Find her on twitter at @ata225

Ready for a deep dive on the Middle Ages? This week Patrick Wyman, host of Tides of History and The Pursuit of Dadliness and author of The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World stops by to talk about Ridley Scott's The Last Duel, the 2021 epic that closely follows one of the last judicial duels of the Middle Ages. The film, starring Matt Damon, Adam Driver, and Jodie Comer has picked up a following since its release. Our conversation talks about why Patrick thinks is one of the most accurate films he has seen, along with questions over social status, chivalry, warfare, religion, the Plague, and even the Ottoman Empire.  About our guest:Patrick Wyman holds a PhD in history from the University of Southern California. He previously worked as a sports journalist, covering mixed martial arts and boxing from 2013 to 2018. His work has been featured in Deadspin, The Washington Post, Bleacher Report, and others. He is currently host of the podcast, Tides of History, and previously the host of Fall of Rome. You can find him on twitter at @Patrick_Wyman 

This week we welcome Lindsay Chervinsky back to the pod to talk about 1995's The American President. We talk about just how revolutionary was the idea of a president, the history of presidential relationships, scandals in the White House, and even presidential pets. This was a lot of fun. I hope you like it.About our guest: Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a presidential historian. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, co-editor of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture, and the forthcoming book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic. She regularly writes for public audiences in the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Bulwark, Time Magazine, USA Today, CNN, and the Washington Post.