Reckoning with Jason Herbert

This week Historians At The Movies Podcasts welcomes Dr. Rob Thompson to the show to talk about Oliver Stone's Platoon, the legacy of the Vietnam War in the United States, and the best movies about the conflict. Rob's a cool dude and we had a great discussion.About our guest:Rob has  a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Southern Mississippi. He specializes in the study of the Vietnam War, with a focus on the confluence of conventional warfare and pacification at the province level. His research placed American strategy in the context of a single province—Phú Yên. He is also familiar with the history of American diplomacy and the history of Modern Europe. Before studying history in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, he completed an MA at Wilfrid Laurier University in lovely Waterloo, Ontario and my BA near the ocean at Virginia Wesleyan College, now University. He is presently a historian with the Films Team at Army University Press at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

This week we are joined by Robert Greene II and Eric Leonard to do a deep dive into Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. We'll get into what the film has to say about the end of the Cold War, the process of aging, and the rivalry between the OG and Next Generation crews. Plus, we rank the best and worst of all things Star Trek. Rob and Eric are two of the historians who know Star Trek better than almost anyone alive and this is an awesome podcast for anyone who is a fan of the series.About our guests:Robert Greene II is an assistant professor of history at Claflin University and publications chair for the Society of US Intellectual Historians and lead associate editor for Black Perspectives. You can find him at @robgreeneII on twitter.Eric Leonard Leonard has more than 25 years of National Park Service experience. You can find him at @frebodar on twitter.

This week guests Rachel Gunter and Nicole Gunter join me to talk about whether or not Carrie is a high school film, what Stephen King has to say about women, and whether or not the remake stands up to the original.About our guests:Rachel Michelle Gunter received her Ph.D. in history from Texas A&M University in 2017 and is a Professor of History at a community college in North Texas. Her research focuses on the woman suffrage movement and its effects on the voting rights of other groups including immigrants, servicemen, WWI veterans, Mexican Americans and African Americans. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Suffragists, Soldiers, and Immigrants: Drastic Changes to Voting Rights in the Progressive Era. Nicole Donawho is a Professor of History at a community college in North Texas. She specializes in dual credit and history pedagogy. Her main non-academic interests are Star Trek, tattoos, and dogs.

This week Drew McKevitt and I talk about Clint Eastwood's vigilante cop, Dirty Harry Callahan. We get into the rise of gun culture in the United States, Dirty Harry as a response to the counter culture revolution of the 1960s, and ultimately recast Dirty Harry for our current age. I haven't laughed this hard in a long time. 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. Currently he is working on two new book projects. The first explores the role of gun violence in U.S. foreign relations in the postwar era. The second 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/

Tons of news coming out of Star Wars Celebration in London today and I'm going to attempt to give some quick thoughts on where I see the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises going. We're talking Ahsohka, Dawn of the Jedi, the new film starring Daisy Ridley, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Did Rocky Balboa end the Cold War? More importantly, who won the war for 1980s hearts and minds between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone? We get into all of that with HATM Podcast veterans Craig Bruce Smith and Robert Greene II.About our guests: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.Robert Greene II Robert Greene II is an assistant professor of history at Claflin University and publications chair for the Society of US Intellectual Historians and lead associate editor for Black Perspectives.

This week, HATM Podcast tackles the Acadian Diaspora, the Great Depression, the Odyssey, the Old South, the West, and the greatest Coen Brothers films of all time. Seriously, is there anything we don't cover in this episode? About our guest:Christopher Hodson (PhD., Northwestern University, 2004) is a historian of early America and the early modern Atlantic world. He is the author of The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History (Oxford, 2012) and essays in the William and Mary Quarterly, French Historical Studies, Early American Studies, and numerous edited volumes. With Brett Rushforth of the University of Oregon, he has recently completed a book manuscript, also to be published by Oxford, on the intertwined histories of France, West Africa, and the Americas from the medieval period through the age of revolutions. With Manuel Covo of the University of California, Santa Barbara, he is currently producing a translated critical edition of a long-lost first-person account of the Haitian Revolution to be published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press. He has received fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society, and has taught as a visiting lecturer at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He has served on numerous editorial boards, conference planning committees, and awards committees, and has recently accepted a position on the College Board’s AP U.S. History Exam Development Committee. He is also a volunteer instructor at the Utah State Prison via the Utah Prison Education Project, and serves as an appointed member of Utah’s Higher Education and Corrections Council.

This is our first film review here at Historians At The Movies Podcast. I just got back from seeing John Wick Chapter 4 and give you my first impressions. Spoilers within the pod, so be warned. If you guys like this we’ll do more of them.

This week Historians At The Movies Podcast takes on 1955's Guys and Dolls. Special guest Sara Georgini jumps in to talk about the film at the pinnacle of the American musical scene, the tension between Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, and yes, gets me to list my favorite musicals of all time. About our guest:Sara Georgini earned her Ph.D. in History from Boston University in 2016. She is the Series Editor for The Papers of John Adams, part of The Adams Papers project at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2018). Committed to the preservation of and access to rare primary sources, she has worked on the selection, annotation, indexing, and book production of a dozen scholarly editions drawn from the Adams Papers (Harvard University Press, 2009— ), covering the history of American political life in the era ranging from the Declaration to disunion. Her research focuses on early American thought, culture, and religion. She is a co-founder and contributor to The Junto and the Society for U.S. Intellectual History blogs. She writes about American history, thought, and culture for Smithsonian and CNN.

This week Mary Hicks and I dig into life at sea with Master and Commander (2003). This is one of my favorite films and a movie I love to teach with. Mary is a scholar of the Black Atlantic and knows far more about the slave trade and life onboard these ships than I could ever hope to learn. We're talking about the Napoleonic Wars, Crowe and Bettany, and Mary's work focusing in on the experiences of enslaved and freed Africans in the Portuguese part of the transatlantic slave trade. About our guest:Mary Hicks is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.More broadly, she seeks to interrogate the multiplicity of connections between West Africa and Brazil through the lens of mutual cultural, technological, commercial, intellectual and environmental influences and redefine how historians understand experiences of enslavement and the middle passage. In addition to investigating the lives of African sailors, she also explores the cultural and religious sensibilities of enslaved and freed African women in living in 19th century Salvador da Bahia. Along these lines, her second book will detail the emergence and elaboration of new gendered and racialized subjectivities in the wake of Portugal’s initiation of trade with West Africa in the fifteenth century.