Reckoning with Jason Herbert

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. 

We talk a lot on the podcast about film as historical artifacts- depictions of moments in time that can tell us as much about the audience as the topics themselves. This week is no exception as we dive into 1982's Tootsie, starring Dustin Hoffman. However, what makes this episode unique is that we are joined by Justin Rawlins to talk about the craft of filmmaking, particularly method acting. We get into Hoffman's performance (as well as his legendary battles with director Sydney Pollack) as well as talk about other famous method actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert DeNiro, Natalie Portman, Jared Leto, and Christian Bale. We also get into the controversy surrounding Bradley Cooper's upcoming performance as Leonard Bernstein, and question if Tootsie could even be made in 2023.About our guest:Justin Rawlins is Associate Professor of Media Studies and Film Studies at the University of Tulsa. He has an upcoming book from the University of Texas Press called Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance, which you can find on preorder for 40% here: https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477328507/imagining-the-method/You can find his website at https://justinowenrawlins.com/ and on twitter at @j_o_rawlins 

I think a lot of us are familiar with stories of bomber pilots and fighter pilots during World War II. And we're probably familiar with the lives of many of the women who actually built those planes, made famous by Rosie the Riveter. But how many of us know about the Women's Air Service Pilots or about their fight for veteran recognition after the war was over? Sarah Myers joins in to talk about the film Memphis Belle and her new book, Earning Their Wings: The WASPs of World War II and the Fight for Veteran Recognition. I had never learned of the WASPs before knowing Sarah and this is such a cool talk. We get into Memphis Belle, her process of discovery, and what it was like to interview these intrepid women. Amazing stuff.About our guest:Sarah Myers is a historian of public history, gender history, and war and society. As a public historian, she has conducted numerous oral history interviews for her own research on female pilots in World War II and with Pennsylvanian veterans of various wars and conflicts. In her previous role as director of The Keirn Family World War II Museum, a museum she created and opened, she hosted living history events and museum exhibition openings. She has also conducted interviews with documentaries and local and national media outlets on women in aviation, the U.S. military, and the anniversary of historic events. She recently received a National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) grant to generate dialogue with female veterans at five institutions around the U.S.You can find her new book here: https://a.co/d/hbdy3uV

This week historian Leah Lagrone drops by the HATM studios to talk about 1990's Pretty Woman. We get into a ton of topics including the history of prostitution, sexual norms regarding its policing, the tropes behind books and films about the world's oldest profession, and whether or not Vivian and Richard are still together after all these years. We had a blast with this talk and I hope you dig the episode.About our guest: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.

1991's Black Robe is probably a movie you've never heard of, but maybe you should. It's one of the rare films that travel back to 17th Century New France to allow us to witness interactions between Indigenous communities and Jesuit missionaries. I watched this film in college and it made an impression on me. So I asked Michael Oberg to come on the pod to talk not only about this film but about how to teach this film as well as point out the complicated relationships between people during the era. This is maybe a bit more cerebral episode than some of the others, and I hope you like it.About our guest:Michael Leroy Oberg, the author of Native America, is Distinguished Professor of History at SUNY-Geneseo and founder of the Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History, which he directed from 2019 until 2022.  In addition to this textbook, he has written the following works:   Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585-1685 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Uncas: First of the Mohegans, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record: The Official Account of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005); The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians,  (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); the first edition of Native America; Professional Indian: Eleazer Williams’s American Odyssey, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); and Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).  He has published, as well, articles and reviews, and has worked as a historical consultant for native communities in New York and North Carolina, as well as for the Indian Resources Section of the United States Department of Justice.  He has won awards for his teaching and research in Montana and in New York, including the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

A lot of you love Legally Blonde. I mean really love Legally Blonde. So it was probably inevitable that two of my closest friends in the profession, Kristalyn Shefveland and Jennifer McCutchen, requested to do a pod on this film if only to torment me. This movie is so much more than I ever gave it credit for. We get into this film as a historical artifact, perhaps the last film of the 90s, it has so much to say about shattering glass ceilings, East Coast vs West Coast, fashion, performative perceptions, whether or not it's ok to be a fan of pop culture, and yes, why I seem to be drawn to attorneys. This pod is a blast and I hope you dig it.About our guests:Kristalyn Shefveland is an Associate Professor of American History at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville where she teaches classes on the American South, Indigenous and Settler relationships from the colonial era to the present, the American Revolution, and the Atlantic World. Her current research project is a book on historical memory of indigenous peoples in Florida, particularly the town of Vero Beach, on the Indian River. She is also working with students and communities on a local history project- River Cities Oral History- that seeks to capture stories and popular memory of the Ohio and Wabash River Valley settlements.Jennifer McCutchen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of St. Thomas. She specializes in Early American History and Native History, with a focus on the themes of gender, power, exchange, and diplomacy. Her current project is an ethnohistorical study of gunpowder in the late eighteenth-century Creek Confederacy.

Every now and then we get the chance to talk to a scholar with a little extra knowledge on a particular subject. In this case, Dr. Waitman Beorn drops in to talk about Brad Pitt's tank film, Fury. Waitman knows the film well, especially since he commanded a tank prior to becoming a historian. Listen in now to hear him talk not only about WWII, but his experiences serving in the Tank Corps and how the lessons learned transcended his time there.  It's a fun and fascinating talk.About our guest:Dr. Waitman Wade Beorn is an assistant professor in History at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK.  Dr. Beorn was previously the Director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, VA and the inaugural Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.  His first book, Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Harvard University Press) Dr. Beorn is also the author of The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) and has recently finished a book on the Janowska concentration camp outside of Lviv, Ukraine, tentatively entitled Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv.  His next research project is The Revenants: The Postwar Lives of Nazi Perpetrators. Dr. Beorn has published work in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Central European History, German Studies Review, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Politics and Governance, and the Geographical Review in addition to chapters in several edited volumes.  He has been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and Claims Conference fellowships. He is also active in the digital humanities.  As a public-facing scholar, Dr. Beorn has published pieces in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Forward.  He has also appeared on MSNBC, CNN, Richard French Live on WRNN, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and TRT. He is an active contributor to public history and engagement on Twitter as well. Dr. Beorn teaches courses in Holocaust History, Comparative Genocide, German history, Eastern European history, Antisemitism, Modern European history, Public history, and Digital history. 

1994’s Legends of the Fall was one of a string of new age American western epics, featuring an ascendant Brad Pitt alongside Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn, Henry Thomas, and a stunning Julia Ormond. It’s not a perfect film, but like a lot helmed by Edward Zwick, gives us a ton to talk about: American wars Indigenous people, the Gilded Age & Progressive Era, WWI, PTSD, Prohibition, and the West. There’s a lot to unpack and that’s why I invited Edward O’Donnell onboard to talk it all out. About our guest:Frequently appearing in historical documentaries on the History Channel, PBS, and Curiosity Stream. O’Donnell is also a podcaster and professor at Holy Cross College in Worcester, MA.