Reckoning with Jason Herbert

This week we're dipping into Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise (1991). This is such a powerhouse film and we can use it to talk about a ton of issues related to the early '90s and all the way to today. And this movie is just awesome. So watch it as soon as you can. Currently available on Amazon Prime.About our guests:Dr. Lauren MacIvor Thompson is a historian of early-twentieth-century women’s rights, medicine, law, and public health. She is an Assistant Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies at Kennesaw State University and serves as the faculty fellow at the Georgia State University College of Law’s Center for Law, Health & Society. Her book, Rivals and Rights: Mary Dennett, Margaret Sanger, and the Making of the American Birth Control Movement is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press.Jacqueline Antonovich is a historian of health, medicine, and politics in the United States. She is an Assistant Professor in History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, where she also directs the Shankweiler Scholars Medical Humanities Honors Program. She is currently working on a book with Rutgers University Press on women physicians and medical imperialism in the turn-of-the-century American West.Don't forget to like and subscribe and share the pod with your friends!

We're joined this week by my good friend and fellow University of Minnesota alum Dr. Adam Blackler to talk about Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. Folks, I'd never seen this film before watching it for the pod so listening to Adam dissect it is a thing of beauty. But stay on, because he'll talk about his work in German colonial Africa as well as German cinema and how it informs the present. It's good stuff.About Adam: Adam A. Blackler is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wyoming. He is a historian of modern Germany and southern Africa, whose research emphasizes the transnational dimensions of imperial occupation and settler-colonial violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His scholarly and teaching interests also include the political and social dynamics of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the interdisciplinary fields of holocaust & genocide Studies and international human rights. Dr. Blackler’s  book, entitled An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa, is in the Pennsylvania State University Press’s series “Germans Beyond Europe” sponsored by the Max Kade Research Institute. His most recent publications include a co-edited anthology, entitled After the Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies, and a chapter in the multi-volume collection, A Cultural History of Genocide. Dr. Blackler is presently researching a book project that explores the vibrant topography of Berlin’s parks, market squares, streets, and municipal districts before and during the Weimar Republic.

What is it about time travel movies that entices us all? I guarantee if you start thinking about your favorite films there's a time travel movie in there somewhere. Besides, isn't history a way of traveling to the past and thinking about what we would've done in those circumstances? This week, we're getting medieval on the HATM Podcast with two historians who are rethinking the Middle Ages. They've got a new book, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, and they picked one crazy movie to talk about: Time Bandits. Buckle up.About our guests:David M. Perry is a journalist and historian. He is the co-author of The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, out now from Harper Collins. Perry was a professor of Medieval History at Dominican University from 2006-2017. His scholarly work focuses on Venice, the Crusades, and the Mediterranean World. He’s the author of Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (Penn State University Press, 2015). Now he works for the University of Minnesota, convincing students that studying history is good for them and good for their careers (it is!).Matthew Gabriele's research and teaching focus on religion, violence, nostalgia, and  apocalypse (in various combinations), whether manifested in the Middle  Ages or modern world. This includes events and ideas such as the  Crusades, the so-called “Terrors of the Year 1000,” and  medieval religious and political life more generally. He also has  presented and published on modern medievalism, such as recent white  supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages and pop culture phenomena  like Game of Thrones or video games.And these guys have a new book on the way next year: Oathbreakers: The Carolingian Civil War and the Collapse of an Empire in the Middle Ages. These dudes are awesome. Give it a listen.

There are few films that can be considered as perfect movies. But 1974's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three may be on that list. We're joined this week by Eric Rauchway, a professor at UC Davis and specialist of The New Deal. We break down what this movie has to say about American politics coming out of  World War II, the meaning of the subway to the people of New York City, and whether or not Walter Matthau is the first American action hero. You're going to like where this takes us.About Eric Rauchway:The author most recently of Why the New Deal Matters (Yale University Press, 2021), he writes about U.S. history with a focus on the period from 1933-1945. He is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and has written seven books of history, as well as a novel. I’ve been on National Public Radio, BBC Radio 4, C-SPAN, and the Black News Channel, among other media, and has written for the Times Literary Supplement, as well as Dissent, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and a variety of other publications.You can find him on twitter at @rauchway

We all know Die Hard is a Christmas movie, but is it a history movie? This week we're talking to two of the most prominent historians of the Early American Republic to get to the bottom of the debates. You're gonna love where this goes. Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. Gordon-Reed won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008). In addition to articles and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (UVA Press, 1997), Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, a collaboration with Vernon Jordan (PublicAffairs, 2001), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002), a volume of essays that she edited, Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010) and, with Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016). Her most recent book is On Juneteenth (Liveright Publishing, 2021). Gordon-Reed was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queens College) 2014-2015. Between 2010 and 2015, she was the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  She was the 2018-2019 President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She is the current President of the Ames Foundation.  A selected list of her honors includes a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Gordon-Reed served as a member of the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College from 2010 to 2018.  She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and was a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019, she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.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. Smith earned his PhD in American history from Brandeis University. Previously, he was an associate professor of military history at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), an assistant professor of history and the director of the history program at William Woods University, and he has taught at additional colleges, including Tufts University. He specializes in American Revolutionary and early American history, with a specific focus 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.

When I was a graduate student studying slavery in the Americas, there were a host of books you had to read. Among them was and is this dude, Brett Rushforth. Brett has since become a friend of mine and what you'll find when listening is that this guy is not only one of the smartest people working the field, he's a giving human being and I'm so flattered that he chose to sit down and talk about one of our mutual favorite films: Up in the Air. This episode is gonna surprise you when you see where it goes.About Brett: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 is currently completing, with Christopher Hodson, a book titled Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Age of Discovery to the Age of Revolutions, which explores the relationships between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans across four centuries, from roughly 1400 through Haitian independence in 1804.

This episode is for all of you who can't stop taking pictures of your food. I'm joined by Emily Contois (@emilycontois) and Zenia Kish (@zeniakish) to talk about Jon Favreau's Chef. This is an awesome episode and you're gonna love it.About our guests:Dr. Emily Contois is a scholar and teacher of media, food, health, and identity. Her book, Diners, Dudes & Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media & Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) demonstrates how the food, marketing, and media industries manipulated the concept of "the dude" in order to sell feminized food phenomena to men post-2000. She considers examples such as cookbooks, food TV, yogurts, and weight loss programs. She is also co-editor with Dr. Zenia Kish of Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (University of Illinois Press, 2022).Dr. Zenia Kish is an assistant professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa and the assistant director of The Oklahoma Center for the Humanities. With Emily Contois she is co-editor of Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (University of Illinois Press, 2022).

So here it  is. The very first Historians At The Movies Podcast. If you're new to #HATM, we're (allegedly) the longest running watch party on the internet. Every week for over four and a half years, scholars and lovers of movies and history have joined together every Sunday night to watch and livetweet a movie together. It's been an amazing experience and one that has built a community around the globe. This podcast is the next evolutionary step in Historians At The Movies. Each week we'll bring you top scholars to talk about the films that interest them and the work that they do. Sure, there's some myth busting and maybe a few times where we'll be poking holes in a film for accuracy, but it is more than that. The HATM podcast uses a larger love of  film to talk about history and the ways in which our perceptions of the past are shaped by popular culture and how we in turn are shaped by those perceptions. It's a new way of thinking about both film and history, and I hope you'll dig it. Our first guest isn't by accident. Walter Greason is a longtime supporter of Historians At The Movies and a guy who I consider a trusted friend. I've learned a ton from him over the last few years and when I thought about who should be on the podcast first, he was the only choice there was.Walter  is among the most prominent historians, educators, and urbanists in the United States. He has spent the past 30 years speaking to audiences in dozens of states, on over 100 college and high school campuses, at dozens of professional and academic conferences, and to community groups across the country. His work is available every day on Twitter, @walterdgreason.He has also lectured internationally, in the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, and has trained corporate, government, entertainment, media, law enforcement, military, and medical industry professionals on strategies for dismantling racism in their institutions. Dr. Greason has provided anti-racism training to educators and administrators nationwide. Dr. Greason is the author of six books, including his two latest, Industrial Segregation and Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (both Kendall-Hunt Publishers). Walter's digital humanities projects, “The Wakanda Syllabus” and “The Racial Violence Syllabus”, produced global responses in the last three years. In the wake of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, “The Racial Violence Syllabus” attracted over 4 million individual uses, was translated into seven languages, and inspired projects like the Oscar-winning film “BlackKklansman.” The 2016 “Wakanda Syllabus” defined Afrofuturism as one of the core themes of media convergence and was a crucial element in the public acclaim that supported Marvel Studios’ Oscar-winning feature film, “Black Panther.”So that's it! Check it out. This podcast will grow and change as we move along, but I hope you dig it. Like it, subscribe to it, and please do give us your feedback.