Reckoning with Jason Herbert

This week Kate Carpenter drops in to talk about the new film Twisters along with her research on the history of modern-day storm chasing. We get into what they got right, what liberties they took, the role of climate change in the spread of tornado alley, and exactly how crazy are tornado chasers anyway. If you feel it, ride it. About our guest:Kate Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science at Princeton University. Before that, she earned a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Master of Arts in History (with an emphasis in public history) from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In between, she has been a writer, copy editor, designer, screenprinter, farmers’ market volunteer and communications officer, and occasional history consultant. When she’s not hosting and producing Drafting the Past, she is working on a dissertation about the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the second half of the twentieth century.

This week Kate Sheppard drops in to talk about the movie that made everyone bisexual: 1999's The Mummy starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. We get into why this is such a perfect summer movie and dive deep into the history of archaeology itself. Kate also shares with us the findings from her new book Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, available now. This is an awesome conversation with one of my favorite people in the profession. I hope you like it.About our guest:Dr. Kathleen Sheppard earned her PhD in History of Science from the University of Oklahoma in 2010. After a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at the American University in Cairo, she arrived at Missouri S&T in the fall of 2011. She teaches mainly survey courses on modern Western Civilizations, which is arguably one of the most important courses students in 21st century America can take. Her main focus is on the history of science from the ancient Near East to present day Europe, United States, and Latin America. She has taught courses on the history of European science and Latin American science, as well as a seminar on women in the history of science.Sheppard’s research focuses on 19th and 20th century Egyptology and women in the field. Her first book was a scientific biography of Margaret Alice Murray, the first woman to become a university-trained Egyptologist in Britain (Lexington, 2013). Murray’s career spanned 70 years and over 40 publications. Sheppard is also the editor of a collection of letters between Caroline Ransom Williams, the first university-trained American Egyptologist, and James Breasted from the University of Chicago (Archaeopress, 2018). Sheppard’s most recent monograph, Tea on the Terrace, is about hotels in Egypt as sites of knowledge creation in Egyptology during the discipline’s “Golden Age,” around 1880 to 1930.

Happy 6th birthday to HATM! This week we have something special for you: the film that started it all! And as a bonus, we asked the screenwriters of National Treasure, Cormac and Marianne Wibberley to join me and Joanne Freeman to talk about the creation of the film, what it has to say about history, and the movie's legacy. This is a fun time.About our guests:Cormac and Marianne Wibberley are a screenwriting team with multiple credits to their name including National Treasure, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and Bad Boyz II.Joanne Freeman is is Professor of History at Yale University and specializes in the politics and political culture of the revolutionary and early national periods of American History.  She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia.  Her most recent book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press), won the Best Book award from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and her edited volume, Alexander Hamilton: Writings (Library of America) was one of the Atlantic Monthly’s “best books” of 2001.  Her current project, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America, explores physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830 and the Civil War, and what it suggests about the institution of Congress, the nature of American sectionalism, the challenges of a young nation’s developing democracy, and the longstanding roots of the Civil War.

This week Megan Kate Nelson and Kate Carpenter drop in to talk about Kevin Costner's new American epic, Horizon. Our reviews (and our drinks) are mixed but this is such a fun episode as we talk not only about where Horizon succeeds and fails but also about what Costner's career has to say about The West in general. This one is fun.About our guests:Megan Kate Nelson is a writer, historian, road cyclist, and cocktail enthusiast.And starting in September, she will be the 2024-2025 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th-Century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. While she is there, she will be finishing her new book, “The Westerners: The Creation of America’s Most Iconic Region.” She is the author of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which was a Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History.Her most recent book, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America was published by Scribner on March 1, 2022, the 150th anniversary of the Yellowstone Act, which created the first national park in the world. Saving Yellowstone has won the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Nonfiction, and is one of Smithsonian Magazine‘s Top Ten Books in History for 2022. She is an expert in the history of the American Civil War, the U.S. West, and popular culture, and have written articles about these topics for The New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, Slate, and Smithsonian Magazine.Kate Carpenter is a PhD candidate in History of Science at Princeton University whose research focuses on the intersection of environmental history and history of science. Her dissertation is a social and scientific history of storm chasing in the United States since the 1950s. It draws on archival sources, scientific publications, photographs and videos created by storm chasers, popular culture, and oral histories to examine how both professional meteorologists and weather enthusiasts created a community that became central both to our understanding of severe storms and to the cultural identity of the Great Plains.Kate holds a 2023-2024 Charlotte Elizabeth Proctor Honorific Fellowship from Princeton University. From 2022-2023, her work was supported by the Graduate Fellowship in the History of Science from the American Meteorological Society, and in 2021-2022 she held the Taylor-Wei Dissertation Research Fellowship in the History of Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma History of Science. She has also been awarded travel fellowships including the Andrew W. Mellon Travel Fellowship from the University of Oklahoma, the Summer Dissertation Grant from the Princeton American Studies program, and two awards with outstanding merit from the University of Missouri-Kansas City Women’s Council Graduate Assistance Fund.

The trailer for Gladiator II is out and we are here for it. Craig Bruce Smith joins in to talk about what we are expecting, the first film's legacy, and Denzel Washington. Let's go.

This week Kevin Levine, Waitman Beorn, and Rich Condon drop in to talk about the most famous battle of the Civil War. We jump into Ted Turner's 1993 production, asking if it is an apologist film, talk about the events surrounding the battle, and talk about our favorite Civil War books and films.About our guests:Waitman 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. That book Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv will be released in August 2024 from Nebraska University Press.Kevin Levin is an experienced and award-winning educator, author, and historian with expertise in high school and college classroom instruction, historic site tours, collaborations with museums, and history teacher training. His research and writing are focused primarily on the history and legacy of the Civil War era. He is the author and editor of three books, including most recently, Searching For Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (2019), Remembering The Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (2012) and Interpreting the Civil War at Museums and Historic Sites (2017). He is currently at work on A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, which is under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press as well as editing the collected wartime and postwar correspondence of Captain John Christopher Winsmith.Rich Condon is a public historian from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of Shepherd University. For over a decade, he has worked with a multitude of sites and organizations, including The Battle of Franklin Trust, Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum, and the National Park Service. Rich has written for Civil War Times Magazine, The Civil War Monitor, American Battlefield Trust, as well as Emerging Civil War, and operates the Civil War Pittsburgh blog. He currently lives in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

This week Kevin Rusnak, Tyler Peterson, and Michael Bazemore drop into talk about the Cold War, daredevils, and the birth of the Space Program.  We have a lot of fun talking about the men and women who made NASA and maybe the coolest movie poster of all time. 

This week poet and screenwriter Jimmy Santiago Baca joins Jimmy Patiño and me to talk about his 1993 epic Blood In Blood Out. We talk about Jimmy's life story, the challenges facing Chicanos in the 70s & 80s and the film's legacy today. This is a special pod. Hope you like it.About our guests:Jimmy Santiago Baca is a poet and activist of Chicano and Apache descent and author of Martin and Meditations on the South Valley (1987), which received the 1988 Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 1989. In addition to over a dozen books of poetry, he has published memoirs, essays, stories, and a screenplay, Blood In Blood Out (aka Bound by Honor) (1993), which was  directed by Taylor Hackford.Jimmy Patiño seeks to critically excavate alternative imaginings of democratic practice among aggrieved communities in the midst of global capitalism. Concentrating on Mexican-origin and broader Latino/a/x communities at the U.S. Mexico Border and in major U.S. urban settings, his work attempts to dialog about the ways that concepts of race, gender and nation create hegemonic class disparities AND formulate an array of identities that mobilize social movements and initiate class struggles on multiple fronts. His first book, Raza Sí, Migra No: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego asserts that important contingents of Mexican-origin activists in the U.S. engaged, across generations, the crisis over the “illegal alien“ through attempts at organizing the Mexican-origin community across differences of national affiliation and citizenship status. Focusing on San Diego due to its vital positioning as both urban and border space where consistent migration and race-based border policing has occurred, the project illuminates a serious challenge to deportation-oriented immigration policies between 1968 and 1986 through the ideological prism of Chicano self-determination. He is now working on a number of other projects, including a study that investigates the conceptualization and historical practice of solidarity primarily through the lens of African American, Chicana/o/x, and Puerto Rican sites of struggle in the twentieth century. Important to this investigation are the ways regional differences and geo-historical contexts facilitated articulations of Black-Brown/Afro-Latinx diasporic solidarities and how these articulations led to counter hegemonic activities and theories of revolution across local, national and transnational boundaries. Through a relational and comparative framework, the study will ground these analyses in historical activities in the Midwest, Texas, California and New York in the burgeoning Black and Brown Power movements at the mid to late 20th century. His broader research and teaching interests include Comparative Ethnic Studies, Chicano/a-Latino/a History, diaspora/transnationalism/borderlands, social movements and political mobilizations, and Cultural Studies.

This week Greg Eghigian drops in to talk about Steven Spielberg's first extraterrestrial film and his new book charting the global history of UFO sightings. We get into the histories behind the sightings, how the Cold War affected how we think about space aliens, and whether or not one should put gravy on Devil's Tower.About our guest:Greg is a professor of history and bioethics at Penn State University. A historian of both the human sciences and modern Europe, he is particularly interested in how societies grapple with the questions and problems associated with modernity through the vehicles of science, technology, and medicine. His research has largely focused on the nature of power and the relationship between the state, science, and medicine in understanding and managing things such as disability, deviance, criminality, mental illness, and security. He regularly writes articles and present papers on the general history of madness and psychiatry. In recent years, however, his interests have moved into studying the history of supernatural and paranormal phenomena. 

This week Jamie Goodall joins #HATM regulars John Wyatt Greenlee and Leah Lagrone to get to the bottom of a serious question: to which generation does The Goonies belong. We are up to no good in this episode and even through in some pirate history to boot. HATM never says die.About our guests:Dr. 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 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. Dr. Jamie L.H. Goodall is a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C. All views expressed on my website are my own and are not reflective of my employer, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense. She also teaches part-time at Southern New Hampshire University in their College of Online & Continuing Education. She is the author of Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2020), National Geographic’s Pirates: Shipwrecks, Conquests, and their Lasting Legacy (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2021), Pirates and Privateers from Long Island Sound to Delaware Bay (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2022), and The Daring Exploits of Black Sam Bellamy: From Cape Cod to the Caribbean (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2023).