Reckoning with Jason Herbert

With Napoleon hitting the big screen this past week, we decided it was time for our first emergency podcast. This week we recruited French history scholars Corinne Gressang and Laura O'Brien onboard to talk about what the film did right, what it did wrong, and why exactly can't we seem to get Bonaparte right onscreen.About our guests:Dr. Corinne Gressang began as an Assistant Professor of History at Slippery Rock University in the Fall of 2023. She specializes in the history of the French Revolution, but she teaches various courses on Early Modern and Modern European History. She grew up in Western Pennsylvania and received her undergraduate degree in History with a minor in Legal Studies from Grove City College in 2013. From there, she received her MA and Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 2015 and 2020, respectively. She spent three years teaching at Erskine College in Due West, SC as an Assistant Professor before moving back home to Western Pennsylvania to teach at Slippery Rock.Her dissertation topic developed after reading an editorial in a short-lived Catholic newspaper called L’Ange Gabriel (1799). The editor argued that the French nuns had suffered expulsion from their convents, and they were the most unfortunate victims of the Revolutionary decade. Dr. Gressang’s curiosity about what became of these women became the focus of her dissertation which she is currently revising for publication.She is a member of the American Historical Association, the Western Society for French History, the Society for French Historical Studies, Phi Alpha Theta, and the American Catholic Historical Association. Dr. Gressang currently serves as an Assistant Digital Coordinator for the Society for French Historical Studies and is a member of the executive council for the Western Society for French History. She has won numerous teaching awards including the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the University of Kentucky in 2018-2019 and the Younts Excellence in Teaching Award in 2021-2022 from Erskine College.Dr. Laura O'Brien joined Northumbria University  in September 2015, having previously taught at University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and the University of Sunderland. She completed her PhD at University College Dublin, where she held an Irish Research Council ‘Government of Ireland’ Postgraduate Scholarship, and was a doctoral fellow at the UCD Humanities Institute. Between 2010 and 2013 Laura was an Irish Research Council/Marie Curie Actions COFUND Fellow, based at Trinity College Dublin and the Centre de recherches en histoire du XIXe siècle, Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne).

In honor of Thanksgiving and Season 2 of High on the Hog, we thought it might be fun to bring back another older episode of the Historians At The Movies Podcast during our two week break. Leftovers, if you will. This episode features two of my food history scholars in Adrian E. Miller and Mark Johnson, talking about African American culinary traditions, gender roles in the kitchen, and some of their favorite recipes. I hope you're coming back for seconds on this.About our guests:Adrian Miller is a food writer, James Beard Award winner, attorney, and certified barbecue judge who lives in Denver, Colorado. Adrian received an A.B in International Relations from Stanford University in 1991, and a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1995.  From 1999 to 2001, Miller served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton with his Initiative for One America – the first free-standing office in the White House to address issues of racial, religious and ethnic reconciliation. Miller went on to serve as a senior policy analyst for Colorado Governor Bill Ritter Jr. From 2004 to 2010, he served on the board for the Southern Foodways Alliance. In June 2019, Adrian lectured in the Masters of Gastronomy program at the Università di Scienze Gastronomiche (nicknamed the “Slow Food University”) in Pollenzo, Italy. He is currently the executive director of the Colorado Council of Churches and, as such, is the first African American, and the first layperson, to hold that position. Mark Johnson is an assistant professor in history at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. He specializes in the history of the United States and, specifically, the U.S. South and African American History. In 2017, he published An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue: From Wood Pit to White Sauce. In 2021, he published Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932 came out with University Press of Mississippi. He previously published articles in Southern Cultures and Louisiana History. Currently, he’s working on a cultural history of bacon in the United States tentatively titled American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon with University of Georgia Press.

This week HATM Podcast is on hiatus so we thought we'd rerelease an older episode for those of you who maybe haven't had the opportunity to explore the back catalog yet. This week's guest is my great friend Brett Rushforth and we are talking about both his favorite film- Up in the Air - and his work in 17th century New France. Looking back, this is one of the more interesting conversations I've ever been part of.  This episode is also one of the first we ever recorded (a testament to Brett's belief in this pod) so you'll hear some differences between how we did the show when we started and where we are now, so kind of a cool little archive. We'll also be livetweeting this film on Sunday, November 19th, so listen in before and see how that affects what you see. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the show. Again.About our guest:Brett Rushforth is a scholar of the early modern Atlantic world whose research focuses on comparative slavery, Native North America, and French colonialism and empire.His first book, Colonial North America and the Atlantic World: A History in Documents (co-edited with Paul W. Mapp), uses primary documents to trace the history of North America in its Atlantic context from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries.His second book, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, examined the enslavement of American Indians by French colonists and their Native allies, tracing the dynamic interplay between Native systems of captivity and slavery and French plantation-based racial slavery. In 2013, Bonds of Alliance was named the best book on American social history by the Organization of American Historians (Curti Award), the best book on French colonialism before 1848 by the French Colonial Historical Society (Boucher Prize), the best book on the history of European expansion by the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI Biennial Book Prize), and the best book on French history and culture by the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University (Wylie Prize). It was also one of three nominated finalists for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the best book on the history of slavery.He recently completed, with Christopher Hodson, a book titled Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution, which explores the relationships between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans across four centuries, from roughly 1400 through Haitian independence in 1804. It will be published by Oxford University Press in 2024.Professor Rushforth works with graduate students in the fields of comparative slavery, early America, early modern Atlantic world, African diaspora, legal history, and Native American history. Before joining the faculty at the University of Oregon, he taught for a decade at the College of William and Mary and was senior academic staff at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. From 2013 to 2017 he was the book review editor of the William and Mary Quarterly.

This is HATM's 50th episode and I wanted to do something special. This week we are joined by military historian Wayne E. Lee from the University of North Carolina to talk about The Last of the Mohicans and his new book, The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800. We talk about historical misconceptions of Indigenous warfare, how warfare in the Americas compares to conflict in other parts of the globe, the beauty of North Carolina, and that waterfall scene. About our guest:Wayne Lee specializes in early modern military history, with a particular focus on North America and the Atlantic World, but he teaches military history from a full global perspective at the undergraduate and graduate level. He also teaches courses on violence as well as on the early English exploration of the Atlantic. As a kind of additional career, he works with archaeology projects in the Balkans and has numerous publications in that field. You can find him on twitter at @MilHist_Lee

It's spooky season and that means I have something a little different planned for you. This week HATM is joined by emergency physician Dr. N.J. Gallegos to talk about Flatliners (1990). We also talk about her new book The Broken Heart, med school, her work as a physician, and because we are both nerds, Star Wars. It's a rolling and fun episode with one of my favorite people on the planet.About our guest:N.J. Gallegos is an Emergency Medicine Physician who enjoys horror, medicine, and wicked women looking for revenge. Put all three together? Now we're talking! She lives in Illinois with her wife and two cats. In her spare time, she enjoys binging reality trash tv, brewing beer, and running while listening to EDM so she can drink said brewed beer.You can find her on twitter at @DrSpooky_ERHer debut novel, The Broken Heart, is available here: https://a.co/d/1CzVX4T 

This week Thomas Lecaque and John Wyatt Greenlee drop in to talk about the most historically accurate film of all-time: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Ok, it's nowhere near accurate but that doesn't mean we can't love it all the same. We talk about when and where the myth of Robin Hood emerges, our favorite portrayals of the character, the score and the soundtrack, and yes, the accent. This one is fun. Jump in.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 

This week Historians At The Movies dives into one of the sharpest historical films of the 1980s- Dirty Dancing. No, we're not kidding either. Guests Leah Lagrone, Lauren MacIvor Thompson, and Lauren Lassabe Shepherd tackle the memory of the 60s from the 80s, young love, issues of labor and class, dancing, AIDS, the Reagan era, abortion, whether or not Baby and Johnny are still together, and of course, that soundtrack. Prepare for the time of your lives.About our guests:Dr. Leah LaGrone is an assistant professor of history and public history director. She graduated from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, with a PhD in history focused on borderlands, labor, and gender studies in early 20th century. Her research examines state legislation and the discourse on minimum wages for women, specifically the connections of sex work with low wages. Her current book project, “A Woman’s Worth: How Race and Respectability Politics Influenced Minimum Wage Policies,” demonstrates that the politics around race and the minimum wage for women drove conversations among labor, politicians, and progressive reformers about the future of white supremacy in Texas. She has contributed an essay to the anthology "Impeached: The Removal of Texas Governor James E. Ferguson" as well as articles to The Washington Post and NursingClio. She has worked on several public history projects, including "The Civil War Documentary," "Civil Rights in Black and Brown," and the Texas State Historical Association's "Handbook of Texas Women." Dr. LaGrone will teach the public history classes and supervise the public history internships.Lauren MacIvor Thompson (Ph.D. '16) is a historian of early-twentieth-century women’s rights and public health. She serves as the faculty research fellow at the Georgia State University College of Law’s Center for Law, Health & Society. She is also part of the faculty at Kennesaw State University as a jointly-appointed Assistant Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies. Thompson’s current research focuses on the intersections of medical authority and expertise, women’s health, and public health policy in the birth control and reproductive health movements. She is working on a book manuscript, Battle for Birth Control: Mary Dennett, Margaret Sanger, and the Rivalry That Shaped a Movement, forthcoming with Rutgers University Press. She has published numerous articles and op-eds including work in Law and History Review, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Society for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, among others. Thompson is also a frequent public speaker including presentations at the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the American Society for Legal History, and the American Association for the History of Medicine, as well as national and international symposiums on suffrage and legal rights, reproduction, health, and medicine. She is a member of the national Scholars Strategy Network.Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd’s expertise is in the history of United States higher education from the 20th century to present, especially on the topic of conservatism in the academy. She is an instructor in the Department of Education and Human Development at the University of New Orleans and an IUPUI-Society for US Intellectual History Community Scholar.Shepherd’s first book, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars, is out now from the University of North Carolina Press. Her second book manuscript is a historical survey of colleges and universities in the United States since the 1960s.

Did you know where the largest collection of Sherlock Holmes ephemera is located? This answer is elementary, my dear listeners--or maybe not. It's actually the University of Minnesota Special Collections. And this week's guest is one of the foremost experts in all things Sherlock Holmes, my good friend Tim Johnson. We jump in on Guy Ritchie's 2009 adaption as well as talk about other film adapations (including the Great Mouse Detective, natch) as well as talk about the process of collecting and archiving such a magnificent collection. This is a really cool conversation.About our guest:Tim is one of the curators in the Archives and Special Collections Department and responsible for the University of Minnesota Libraries' main rare book collection and dozens of special collections. Half of his time is spent as curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collections, the largest gathering of such material in the world. Tim began his career as an instructional services librarian and has also served as a library director, director of archives, medical librarian, assistant and associate professor. In addition to his curatorial responsibilities, he served for ten years as an adjunct faculty member in the MLIS program at St. Catherine University, where he taught a graduate level course in preservation management. Tim is happy to answer questions and help out with matters related to "old books" or any other question people might have about special collections or rare materials. He also writes a blog that often highlights new acquisitions or other matters related to special and rare items--"Special & Rare On A Stick." You can also follow Tim on Twitter. His "handle" is @UMNBookworm.

When Charlie Pierce messages and asks to do a pod, you say yes. And that's exactly what happened. This week, one of the best and funniest political commentators in America drops by to talk about Deadline USA- the 1952 classic starring Humphrey Bogart as the editor of a newspaper trying to get out one last story before their lights are turned out for good.  This is such a revealing film and Charlie is such a cool hang. I hope you like this pod.About our Guest:Charles P. Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He's been the main political commentator for Esquire since 2011. He lives near Boston and has three children. He's awesome.

I don't usually shy away from asking guests to be on the podcast, but this week's guest is an exception. You know Alexis Coe from her two books, Alice+Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis and You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George of Washington. Or you've seen her on tv or on twitter or tiktok talking about presidential history. But today you get to hear her talk about Dave (1993) as we discuss the 90s, American presidencies, and a slew of other things. Alexis is awesome. So is this episode. Enjoy.  About our guest:Alexis Coe is an American presidential historian and fellow at New America, where she studies the presidency in anticipation of America's 250th. She is the New York Times bestselling author of You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George of Washington, now out in paperback. Alexis is the first woman historian to write a biography of Washington in over a hundred years and the only woman in over four decades. She served as a consulting producer on and appeared in Doris Kearns Goodwin's Washington series the History Channel. Her first book, the award-winning Alice+Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis, has been optioned. She is working on a third book on young John F. Kennedy for Crown. She frequently appears on live television and in documentaries on CNN, MSNBC,  CBS, History, BBC, and PBS. She hosted the podcast "No Man's Land"  and co-hosted "Presidents Are People, Too!" ​Alexis has contributed to the New Yorker, the New York Times' opinion section, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, the Paris Review, Glamour, and many others. Her work has been featured in The Best American Essays  and The Best American Travel Essays, and her essay on marriage and academia was one of the Atlantic's Great Debates of the Year. Thanks to a grant from Substack, launched Study Marry Kill, a newsletter. ​She is active on the lecture circuit and has appeared at West Point, Georgetown, the New York Historical Society, the National Constitution Center, the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, and many more. Alexis curated the ACLU'S 100 exhibitions. While in grad school, she was a project-based oral historian at the Brooklyn Historical Society. She went on to be a Research Curator in the Exhibitions Department at the New York Public Library in Bryant Park, where she co-curated the centennial exhibition. ​Alexis lives outside of New York City with her young daughter.