The AskHistorians Podcast

Tyler Alderson talks with Dr. Bea Lewkowicz and Daisy Abboudi from Sephardi Voices UK, records the oral histories of the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East, North Africa and Iran who settled in the UK. While narratives of history often paint with a wide brush, individual oral histories create a stunning portrait of everyday life amid the upheavals of the 20th century. The episode also includes clips from various interviews in the Sephardi Voices UK archives. 91 minutes.

This panel seeks to disrupt historically dominant narratives about the imperial systems of religion, settler colonialism, slavery, and the documentation of the populace. Spanning across time and regions, from colonial era Britain to the nineteenth-century United States, our panelists give voice to historical actors who disrupted systems of oppression while simultaneously utilizing digital quantitative data analysis to complicate the traditional archive itself. How can we repurpose quantitative data to re-humanize historically marginalized groups? How do we combat systemic erasure that quantitative data can produce? What do we make of historical resistance where there are scant sources available? Historical Experts: Laura Brannan - "Mobility in Slavery and Freedom: Mapping Paths of Escape, Enslavement, and Freedom in the U.S., 1830-1850" Georgia Farrell - "Running From Cultural Genocide: Carlisle Indian Boarding School Runaways and Hidden Resistance, 1890-1900" Caitlin Gale - "Mapping Itinerancy: George Fox's Journal" Janine Hubai  - "Revelation and Erasure: IPUMS USA Datasets and New Mexico’s Population 1850-1920" ​ This panel was moderated by Dan Howlett (/u/dhowlett1692)

In this episode, Juan Sebastián Lewin interviews Gaby Berman, who's focusing her Master thesis research on the presence of Sassanian male hufu clothing in the Tang Dynasty in China and its usage by elite women of the period, in her paper called "Tang Elite Women and Hufu Clothing: Persian Garments and the Artistic Rendering of Power". We explore topics relating to textiles, social class and female gender roles in the Tang Dynasty, and the intercultural exchanges between the Tang Dynasty and the Sasanian Dynasty.

The panelists aimed to explore different historiographical perspectives relating to: the current political climate in Brazil and the challenges the Bolsonaro administration poses for historians and scholars of the humanities; outlining essential considerations when designing universally accessible academic resources and archives; introducing an open-source, peer-reviewed collection of digital resources pertaining to the history of the LBGTQIA+ community; and producing an oral history collection that showcases student and faculty experiences in learning and teaching during the COVID19 pandemic. Historical Experts: Kirsteen MacKenzie - "The Importance of Universal Access Principles in Digital History" Brian Watson - "Building an LGBTQIA+ archive" (More info at https://histsex.org/) Mário Rezende - "Writing History in a country that chases historians" Summer Cherland - "More and More Every Day: An Oral History Collection of Teaching and Learning in the COVID19 Era" (More info at https://southphoenixoralhistory.com/more-and-more-every-day/) The roundtable was moderated by Juan Sebastián Lewin.

Tyler Alderson interviews Dr. Sally Foster about an overlooked group of objects: replicas. Far from being just a copy of an original object, replicas can have their own lives and value. Dr. Foster discusses her research and new book on the St. John's Cross replica on the Scottish island of Iona, as well as a set of principles and guidance she has helped prepare for working with replicas. 61 minutes.

Tyler Alderson interviews Seb Lewin about a region of the world often overlooked when it comes to classical music: Latin America. The interview covers the lives and music of several important composers, discussing how their music is a reflection of musical and societal trends in their countries. 77 minutes

In this episode, Johannes Breit interviews historian Daniel Lee about his new book “The SS-Officer’s Armchair”. In his book Lee, a specialist on the history of Jews in France and North Africa, follows the trail of several documents found sewn into an armchair. Weaving together historical work with his own process of uncovering information about Robert Giesinger, mid-level German bureaucrat and owner of the papers, Lee crafts a gripping account about both the nature of Nazi perpetrators as well as a historian’s hunt for answers.

In this episode, u/EnclavedMicrostate interviews Michael Bonner on the subject of the Sasanian Empire, which ruled Iran and its environs from the fall of the Arsacid (Parthian) empire in the early 3rd century AD to the rise of Islam in the 7th century. This covers the politics of the empire, its religious landscape, and the geopolitics of Eurasia in Late Antiquity, with discussion of connections and conflicts with Rome, Armenia, the steppe, and China.

In this episode, P.H. Jones and Johannes Breit discuss their research on the death of Adolf Hitler in 1945. Although Hitler’s suicide and subsequent cremation has always been widely accepted within the historical community, it nevertheless spawned numerous conspiracy theories about his survival and escape. Backdropped against the tensions of the Cold War, and internal distrust between Soviet intelligence groups, Jones and Breit trace the origins of these rumors, and the developing historiography concerning Hitler’s final day.

In this episode, u/EnclavedMicrostate interviews Brian Dott about the history of the chile pepper in China. This covers the pepper's introduction and spread, its integration into existing Chinese cuisine and understandings of culinary theory, its use as a medicine, as a cultural metaphor, and as a marker of regional identities.