Episode 191: Rewriting the West: Megan Kate Nelson and the Myths We Still Believe
Episode 191: Rewriting the West: Megan Kate Nelson and the Myths We Still Believe
In this episode of Reckoning with Jason Herbert, I’m joined by historian Megan Kate Nelson to talk about her new book The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier—and why the frontier myth refuses to die.
We dig into the stories of seven people who lived the West in real time—Indigenous women, Black frontiersmen, Chinese migrants, and white settlers—and how their lives complicate the familiar narrative of pioneers and progress.
Along the way, we explore:
The origins of the frontier myth and why it still shapes American identity
Figures like Sacagawea and Jim Beckwourth—and the messy, human realities behind the legends
Why cities like Denver were central to the making of the West
How race, gender, and power determined who got written into history—and who didn’t
What these stories reveal about land, belonging, and conflict in America today
This is a conversation about myth, memory, and the stories we choose to tell—and the ones we’ve ignored for far too long.
If you think you know the West, this episode might change your mind.
Megan Kate Nelson is a historian, cocktail enthusiast, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the author of five books.
Her forthcoming book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier tells two richly detailed and interwoven stories.
The first reveals the captivating lives of women and men moving through the American West — Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Canadian and Asian immigrants—in the nineteenth century.
The second tracks the attempts of many Americans to remove these westerners from history, through a frontier myth that lionized individualism and conquest and celebrated white settlers traveling west in search of prosperity.
The Westerners is one of LitHub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026!
Megan is also the author of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, which was a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist in History, and Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Non-Fiction, as well as Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American CIvil War, and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp.
A fellow of the prestigious Society of American Historians, Megan is also a regular guest on radio shows and TV documentaries about U.S. Western history and popular culture. She has recently become a podcast host, interviewing book authors as part of the “Historians and their Histories” podcast for the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Megan also writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, and TIME.
Before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014, Megan taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She earned her BA magna cum laude in History and Literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa.
Born and raised in Colorado, Megan now lives in Boston with her husband and two cats.
Episode 190: Timecop with John Wyatt Greenlee and Robert Greene II
What if time travel wasn’t about discovery—but control?
In this episode of Reckoning with Jason Herbert, we dive into the 1994 sci-fi action film Timecop—a quintessential 90s blockbuster starring Jean-Claude Van Damme that blends time travel, political corruption, and high-octane action into something far more revealing than it first appears.
Joining me are Reckoning stalwarts and my great friends, historians Robert Greene II and John Wyatt Greenlee. Together, we explore what Timecop tells us about the 1990s—an era shaped by anxieties over government power, deregulation, and the growing sense that the past itself could be weaponized.
We talk about:
How Timecop reflects 90s fears of political corruption and unchecked authority
The idea of “policing time” and who gets to control history
Where Van Damme fits in the action hero pantheon
Why a film built on spectacle still raises meaningful historical questions
This episode is part of our ongoing Historians At The Movies series, where we use film as a lens to think more deeply about history, culture, and the stories we tell ourselves about both.
🎧 If you enjoy conversations that bring together history, film, and sharp cultural insight, make sure to follow, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts—it helps more people find the conversation.
Episode 189: Breaking Away with James Longhurst
In this episode, I sit down with historian James Longhurst, author of Bike Battles, to break down the 1979 film Breaking Away and what it reveals about cycling and American life. We talk about why this coming-of-age sports movie still resonates, how it captures class and masculinity, and what it says about the 1970s bike boom. Along the way, we dig into the history of bicycling in America, the politics of the road, and how debates over bike infrastructure, cities, and transportation continue today. From Greg LeMond to Lance Armstrong to the rise of e-bikes, this is a conversation about film, history, and who gets to belong on the American road.
James Longhurst is a historian of urban and environmental policy at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, with a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. The author of the book Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road, he volunteers his time for a variety of active transportation policy projects. He was named “Advocate of the Year” by the Wisconsin Bicycle Federation in 2016, and is a member of the board of directors of the advocacy group 1000 Friends of Wisconsin.
He is an everyday cyclist, slow roadie, reformed triathlete, social rider, gravel grinder, amateur mechanic and shop intern.
Bike Battles (University of Washington Press, 2015) has been reviewed in twenty-six scholarly and popular publications, ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the Journal of American History. The book was named one of the “Best New Bike Books” of 2015 by Momentum magazine, and is now in translation as Las Batallas de la Bici (Katakrak Press, 2019). Longhurst’s research seeks to understand how our past decisions have shaped the communities in which we live today; often leaving us social, environmental, and health problems that might not have been intended but are nevertheless ours to grapple with. He examines this history through legal and governmental records, but also in popular culture.
In addition to many scholarly presentations at conferences ranging from the Transportation Research Board to the Urban History Association and Walk/Bike/Place, he has spoken at libraries, club meetings and bike shops more than 45 times in locations including Milwaukee, Madison, Portland (Oregon), Missoula, Seattle, Washington (D.C.), Fairfax (Virginia), Minneapolis, Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), and Karlsruhe, Germany. He’s been interviewed or quoted in Popular Mechanics, Fast Company, Streetsblog.net, Seattle Magazine, Vox.com, and more. His opinion pieces have appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the New York Daily News, and The European magazine.
His first book, Citizen Environmentalists (2010), described the rise of local environmental organizing in Pittsburgh and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.
Episode 188: Kelly Ramsey--Life on the Fireline in the Burning American West
Wildfires are no longer rare disasters in the American West—they are a defining feature of the landscape. But very few people have seen them up close.
In this episode, Jason Herbert speaks with Kelly Ramsey, author of Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West. Ramsey spent multiple seasons on an elite wildland firefighting crew—known as hotshots—the teams sent to the most dangerous parts of massive fires.
Ramsey was also the only woman on her crew, navigating a demanding and deeply male-dominated culture while battling some of the largest fires in recent Western history.
Together we explore:
What it actually feels like to stand on the fireline
The intense culture and camaraderie of hotshot crews
The growing reality of megafires in the American West
Gender, belonging, and earning trust in one of the toughest jobs in America
What these fires reveal about the future of the Western landscape
Part adventure story, part personal reckoning, Wildfire Days offers a powerful look at life inside the fires that are reshaping the American West.
Kelly Ramsey was born in Frankfort, Kentucky. She studied poetry writing at the University of Virginia and earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Pittsburgh. She later moved to Northern California, where she worked for the U.S. Forest Service as a trail maintenance worker, wilderness ranger, and wildland firefighter on a hotshot crew. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Sierra, Electric Literature, Catapult, and the anthology Letter to a Stranger. She loves creeks, lakes, coffee, the ocean, punishing hikes, diner breakfasts, getting too much sun, and plants—even if their care remains a mystery. She lives in Bishop, California, with her partner, their daughter, and their dog, a lab mix who won’t swim named Rookie.
Episode 187: Who Built American Barbecue? with Adrian Miller
Barbecue is American history — but not the version most of us were taught.
In this episode, I talk with James Beard Award–winning historian Adrian Miller about the untold story behind his book Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue.
Who built American barbecue? How did enslaved pitmasters shape a national cuisine? Why have Black barbecue traditions been minimized in the stories we tell about Texas brisket, Memphis ribs, and Southern food culture?
We dive into Juneteenth celebrations, church barbecues, political gatherings, regional myths, and the fight over what counts as “authentic” barbecue.
If barbecue is America’s food, this conversation asks a bigger question:
What happens when we forget who built it?
Adrian Miller is an award-winning culinary author, professional speaker, certified barbecue judge, and recovering attorney. He previously served as a White House special assistant to President Bill Clinton, and as a senior policy analyst for Colorado Governor Bill Ritter Jr. Adrian is currently the Executive Director of the Colorado Council of Churches, and was also lead curator for the “Proclaiming Colorado’s Black History” exhibit, which was on view at the Museum of Boulder from summer of 2024 to September of 2025, and will reopen at the Pueblo History Museum in January of 2026.
Episode 186: Clue: Laughter, Paranoia, and the Politics of the 1980s with Julio Capó, Jr.
What if Clue isn’t just a cult comedy — but a sharp satire of the Cold War?
In this episode of Reckoning with Jason Herbert, historian Julio Capó Jr. joins me to unpack the surprisingly profound history lesson hidden inside the 1985 film Clue. Set in a 1950s mansion but released during the Reagan era, Clue plays with paranoia, anti-communism, class anxiety, and America’s nostalgic myths about the past — all while delivering rapid-fire jokes and multiple endings.
We explore how the film reflects Cold War politics, the cultural mood of the 1980s, and why its farcical dinner party still resonates today. Is Clue simply a beloved murder mystery comedy? Or is it a clever commentary on power, fear, and the stories Americans tell about themselves?
If you love film history, Cold War history, political satire, or cult classics, this conversation will make you see Clue in an entirely new light.
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Dr. Julio Capó, Jr. is a transnational historian whose research and teaching interests include modern U.S. history, especially the United States’s relationship to the Caribbean and Latin America. He addresses how gender and sexuality have historically intersected with constructions of ethnicity, race, class, nation, age, and ability. He teaches introductory and specialized courses on all these subjects, as well as courses on public history.
Capó’s first book, Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (UNC Press, 2017), highlights how transnational forces—including (im)migration, trade, and tourism—to and from the Caribbean shaped Miami’s queer past. The book has received six awards and honors, including the Charles S. Sydnor Award from the Southern Historical Association for the best book written on the U.S. South. His work has also appeared in several major journals, including the Journal of American History, Radical History Review,Diplomatic History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of American Ethnic History,Modern American History, GLQ, as well as several edited volumes.
Capó’s research and teaching interests extend to his commitment to civic engagement and public-facing work. He has curated several exhibitions, including “Queer Miami: A History of LGBTQ Communities” for HistoryMiami Museum; it won the 2019 Museum Excellent Award from the Florida Association of Museums. Other exhibitions include “Zorita Takes Miami” for the Stonewall National Museum and Archives, “Zorita’s World” for History Fort Lauderdale, and “Messages from a Pandemic: AIDS Graphic Communication” (with Shoshana Resnikoff) for The Wolfsonian—FIU.
Prior to entering academia, he worked as a broadcast news writer and producer; he has written several dozen pieces for mainstream publications, including The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, El Nuveo Día (Puerto Rico), and Time, where he also serves as an Associate Editor of its Made by History section. He has appeared as a commentator in several podcasts, documentaries, and media projects. Capó has contributed to several initiatives through the National Park Service, especially promoting and identifying historic LGBTQ sites, and has served for several years on the National Historic Landmarks Committee. He sits on the scholarly advisory board of two Smithsonian museums: the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of the American Latino. The Organization of American Historians has named him a Distinguished Lecturer and he recently served as Vizcaya Museum and Gardens’ inaugural Scholar-in-Residence.
Through his research and teaching, and now with his efforts at both the Public Humanities Lab (PHL) and the History Department at FIU, Capó has been working to build a “Miami Studies” initiative. This includes his role in several grant-funded projects, generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon Foundation, Florida Humanities, MonumentLab, and others.
Prior to coming to FIU, Capó worked as an Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has held distinguished fellowships at the University of Sydney in Australia and Yale University.
Episode 185: Creating The Gray House with Lori McCreary, Leslie Greif, and Roland Joffe
Today on the podcast, we’re stepping inside The Gray House—not just the story you see on screen, but the one behind it. This episode is a behind-the-scenes look at how this series came to life: how it was conceived, how it was built, and why it mattered enough to tell it this way.
I’m joined by executive producers Lori McCreary and Leslie Greif, along with director Roland Joffé. Together, they walk us through the creative choices, the production challenges, and the larger questions they were wrestling with as they made The Gray House. What did they want this series to say—not just about the past, but about the moment we’re living in now? And what do they hope stays with viewers long after the final scene fades to black?
This is a conversation about storytelling, history, collaboration, and intent—and about why some stories demand to be told as more than just entertainment. Let’s get into it
Lori McCreary is the CEO of Revelations Entertainment, a film and television production company she and actor Morgan Freeman founded in 1996 with a mission to produce entertainment that reveals truth. The duo first worked together on McCreary’s critically acclaimed Bopha! (Freeman’s directorial debut) in 1992.
McCreary’s producing credits include the upcoming Rendezvous with Rama to be directed by Dune’s Denis Villeneuve, the Award-winning Invictus, 5 Flights Up, the award-winning film about cancer, The C Word, and 120 episodes of the hit series Madam Secretary. She produced the highest-rated series in National Geographic history, The Story of God and Discovery’s Emmy-nominated series Through the Wormhole, exploring how science helps us understand the universe.
McCreary is a unique combination: part Producer, part UCLA-educated Computer Scientist. With her passion and deep knowledge of technology, McCreary teamed with the Intel corporation, and launched the first streaming service, ClickStar and was one of the first producers to have a day and date film (10 Items or Less) released simultaneously online and in theatres.
She is known for exploring innovative ways to incorporate cutting-edge technologies, such as virtual reality, AI, and immersive experiences, into the filmmaking process. This has earned her recognition as a visionary leader in the industry and a requested speaker on the current state of AI and the entertainment industry.
In 2023 McCreary joined forces with tech and media entrepreneur Todd Wagner as co-founder of FoodFight USA, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization with a mission to clean up America’s tainted food supply. FoodFight USA aims to reform every aspect of our broken food system from farm to table, focusing on legislative reform, consumer empowerment and the regenerative farming movement. Among other initiatives, McCreary is heading up the development of a system that will leverage AI to more efficiently and effectively evaluate the 10,000+ chemical additives in the U.S. food supply and prioritize those that pose the greatest risk to public health.
She is President Emeritus of the Producers Guild of America, founder of the PGA’s One Guild Committee and serves on the Board of Trustees for the American Film Institute, is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and IEEE.
Leslie Greif is an Emmy and Golden Globe nominated producer, creator, writer and director and is one of the most prolific figures in the entertainment industry. Leslie has a tremendous amount of versatility and production experience, and is a top creator of high quality entertainment content across a diverse range of both scripted and unscripted productions.
Les has hit various milestones over his career and produced various worldwide super-hits including: eight seasons of the classic crime drama Walker, Texas Ranger starring Chuck Norris; he produced and directed the highly acclaimed documentary, Brando, starring Al Pacino, Johnny Depp, Martin Scorsese, Sean Penn and Robert Duvall, which garnered him an Emmy nomination for his work. In addition, he executive produced seven seasons of the longest running celebrity docu-series, Gene Simmons Family Jewels; and the eminent mini-series Hatfields & McCoys, which received 16 Emmy nominations, garnering five wins and 2 Golden Globe nods, with Kevin Costner taking home the award for Best Actor in a Mini-Series. The mini-series was also awarded a WGA Award in the Long Form Original category.
Over the past 30 years Leslie has been at the forefront of the television industry having produced TV movies, scripted and unscripted series, mini-series and documentary specials for major networks including, HBO, ABC, CBS, FOX, TNT, A&E, Lifetime, Discovery and USA, just to name a few. In addition, to his television work he has produced and directed a number of feature film projects.
Roland Joffé directed movies like The Killing Fields (1974) with Sam Waterston and Haing Ngor, about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, The Mission (1986) with Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons, about Jesuit missionaries in 18th century South America, Fat Man and Little Boy (1985) with Paul Newman, about the building of the atom bomb during World War II, City of Joy (1992) with Patrick Swayze and Om Puri, The Scarlett Letter (1995) from the 1850 novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, with Demi Moore and Gary Oldman, There Be Dragons (2011) set during the Spanish Civil War about the founder of Opus Dei, The Forgiven (2017) with Forest Whitaker as Desmond Tutu.
Episode 184: Purple Rain and Prince’s Minneapolis with Rashad Shabazz
In this episode, I sit down with cultural geographer Rashad Shabazz to dissect the 1984 classic starring Prince — and ask the uncomfortable questions.
Is The Kid a tortured genius… or a young man replaying generational trauma?
Is the final performance redemption — or dominance?
And what does Minneapolis represent in a film about Black masculinity, ambition, and control?
We unpack race, space, violence, desire, artistic genius, and the myth of upward mobility — all through the lens of one of the most iconic soundtracks of the 1980s.
This is Purple Rain as you’ve never heard it discussed before.
Rashad Shabazz's academic expertise combines human geography, cultural studies, gender studies, and critical race studies. His research explores how race, gender, and cultural production are informed by geography. His first book, Spatializing Blackness (University of Illinois Press, 2015), examines how carceral power within the geographies of Black Chicagoans shaped urban planning, housing policy, architecture, policing practices, gang formation, high incarceration rates, masculinity, and health.
Professor Shabazz’s scholarship has appeared in Souls, The Spatial-Justice Journal, ACME, Gender, Place and Culture, Cultural Geography, and Occasions. In addition, Shabazz has also published several book chapters and book reviews. Professor Shabazz’s scholarship is also public-facing. He has published in Places and written several articles for The Conversation. He has also appeared on local, national, and international news programs, including the BBC, Time Magazine, and 20/20.
He recently completed his second book, Biography of a Sound—Prince, Place, and the Hidden History of the Minneapolis Sound (The University of North Carolina Press). The book uncovers Minneapolis Sound’s development from its mid-19th-century birth to the release of Prince’s magnum opus, Sign O’ The Times, in 1987. Dr. Shabazz is also working on a book about New York City’s built environment.
Episode 183: Heather Cox Richardson on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
In Episode 183 of Reckoning with Jason Herbert, historian Heather Cox Richardson joins the show for a lively and surprisingly sharp conversation about the film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter—and what it reveals about American mythmaking.
What happens when we place a fantastical, axe-wielding Abraham Lincoln alongside the real political crises of the 1860s—and our own? We explore the Civil War, Reconstruction, the endurance of the “Lost Cause,” and the power of storytelling in shaping national memory. Along the way, we ask whether some myths refuse to die… and whether that might be the point.
Smart, funny, and unexpectedly timely, this episode blends pop culture with serious history—reminding us that the stories we tell about the past often say more about the present than we realize.
Heather Cox Richardson is a political historian who uses facts and history to make observations about contemporary American politics. She has written about the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the American West in award-winning books whose subjects stretch from the European settlement of the North American continent to the history of the Republican Party through the Trump administration. She is the author, most recently, of the best-selling Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.
Episode 182: Contagion of Liberty: Smallpox, Freedom, and America's First Culture War with Andrew Wehrman
In this episode of Reckoning, historian Andrew Wehrman, author of Contagion of Liberty, explores how smallpox and inoculation shaped the American founding—and ignited some of the earliest debates over liberty, risk, and public health.
Long before COVID-19, Americans wrestled with questions of bodily autonomy, religious belief, communal obligation, and government authority, all in the shadow of a deadly disease and without modern medical knowledge. From local resistance to inoculation to George Washington’s controversial decision to mandate it in the Continental Army, this conversation places early American public health in its full moral and political context.
By looking closely at how Americans responded to smallpox, this episode shows why vaccine controversy is not a modern anomaly—but a recurring feature of American life—and what our past can (and cannot) teach us about navigating public health crises today.
Professor Andrew Wehrman specializes in the political and cultural history of Colonial America and the early United States with an emphasis on medicine and disease. Before joining the faculty at CMU in 2015, he was an assistant professor at Marietta College where he earned the John G. And Jeanne McCoy Professorship, the college’s highest honor for teaching. In 2023, Wehrman was named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.
He is the author of The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution, which was selected as one of the best books of the year by Havard Public Health Magazine, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was the winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society for the best book on Massachusetts and New England History.
His media appearances include op-eds and interviews in major print outlets (such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, NBCNews.com, and Voice of America), radio (NPR), television (CSPAN), and many podcasts (including Ben Franklin’s World, The Daily Stoic, This Podcast Will Kill You, and America Dissected).
Episode 181: Jack El-Hai on Nuremberg, “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” and the Limits of Understanding
In this episode of Reckoning, we speak with author and journalist Jack El-Hai about the new film Nuremberg and the deeper questions it raises about justice, memory, and moral responsibility.
Drawing on his book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, El-Hai examines the relationship between Hermann Göring and Dr. Douglas Kelley during the Nuremberg Trials, and what it reveals about psychology, power, and the human impulse to explain evil. The conversation considers how early efforts to diagnose Nazism continue to shape the way we understand perpetrators—and the limits of that understanding.
This episode asks what it means to reckon with history honestly, without turning the past into either monsters or myths.
Jack El-Hai is an author and journalist whose work explores psychology, history, and the moral complexities of the twentieth century. He is the author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, which examines the psychological interrogation of Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg Trials and the uneasy questions those encounters raised about evil, responsibility, and human nature.
El-Hai’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and other publications, and he is known for bringing rigorous historical research together with narrative clarity and ethical depth.
Episode 180: Julie Reed on Cherokee Land, Language, and the Power of Women
In this episode, I’m joined by Cherokee scholar and author Julie Reed to talk about her powerful book Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History.
We explore how Cherokee women have shaped—and continue to sustain—relationships to land, community, and language in the face of colonial violence and dispossession. Reed shows how land is not simply territory, language is not merely words, and women are not peripheral to history, but are instead central to cultural survival and meaning.
Our conversation moves between history, storytelling, gender, and Indigenous knowledge systems, asking what it really means to belong to a place—and what is lost when those relationships are broken. This is a conversation about memory, resistance, responsibility, and the enduring power of women to carry culture forward.
Julie L. Reed is an associate professor in history at the University of Tulsa. She is a historian of Native American history, with an emphasis on Southeastern Indians and Cherokee history, and American education. She is also a member of the Cherokee Nation.
Episode 179: Coyote America with Dan Flores
There is probably no historian working today more influential in shaping how we think about the way in which humans and animals engage with each other and the environment than Dan Flores. Today, Dan joins in to talk about his epic work, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History, on the eve of its 10th anniversary release, along with discussions on wolf reintroduction, bison on the plains, the American Serengeti, and his relationship with Steven Rinella and the crew over at Meateater.
New York Times best-selling author Dan Flores is one of America’s most celebrated historians, renowned for his deep explorations of the country’s landscapes and the remarkable figures who shaped them. While he has 11 acclaimed books to his name, Flores is first and foremost a teacher. He served as Professor Emeritus of Western History at the University of Montana. This year, Flores brings a lifetime of expertise and storytelling to the MeatEater Podcast Network with his new podcast, The American West with Dan Flores.
Episode 178: The Great Math War: When Math became a Battlefield with Jason Socrates Bardi
This week Jason Socrates Bardi joins in to talk about about the rivalry between three mathematicians that defined the fifty years surrounding World War I.
Jason Socrates Bardi is an award-winning journalist in DC who has written two books about the history of math: The Calculus Wars and The Fifth Postulate. He has published hundreds of articles about modern science and medicine in outlets including the San Francisco Chronicle, Good Morning America, US News & World Report, and The Lancet. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
Episode 177: The Quiet Crisis in America's Creeks with Dr. Zachary Graham
This week Dr. Zackary Graham drops in to talk about one of America's most important environmental stewards--the crawfish--and why their disappearance should worry us all.
Dr. Zackary A. Graham is an evolutionary and behavioral ecologist who studies crayfish diversity. The goal of his research is to untangle the ecological and evolutionary complexities that have led crayfishes to be amongst the most successful freshwater animals within the Eastern United States and beyond. He is the author of an upcoming popular science book (available 1/6/26) on crayfish entitled Crayfish, Crawfish, Crawdad: The Biology and Conservation of North America's Favorite Crustaceans published by UNC Press.
Episode 176: Multipass to the Past: The Wild Origins of The Fifth Element with Julia Troche and Matt Szafran
Egyptologists Dr. Julia Troche and Matt Szafran join in this week to talk about the history behind The Fifth Element and how the anxieties of the 90s are reflected in Luc Besson's campy space opera.
Dr. Julia Troche is an Egyptologist and Associate Professor of History. In 2022 she was awarded her university's highest teaching award followed by the Missouri Governor's Award for Education Excellence. She is committed to advocating for students, early career scholars, and contingent faculty, and fostering inclusive spaces for learning about the ancient world. She is dedicated to the university Public Affairs mission, evinced by her numerous Service-Learning courses, public lectures, and community engagements, such as co-curating with Bryan Brinkman and student input an exhibition of antiquities at the Springfield Art Museum (Ancient Artifacts Abroad, spring 2024).
Julia's areas of instruction and research include social history, religion, archaeology, digital humanities, and reception studies of antiquity. Julia received her PhD from Brown University's Department of in Egyptology & Assyriology in 2015, and her BA in History from UCLA in 2008. She serves as Committee Chair (2024-2027) for her field’s annual, international conference (the American Research Center in Egypt Annual Meeting) and as co-chair (2023-2026) for the Archaeology of Egypt sessions at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research.
Julia is an active member of her field, sitting on numerous international, national, and regional Boards and committees. Since 2022, she is a membership-elected Governor on the American Research Center in Egypt’s Board of Governors (a 501c3 non-profit, cultural institution in Egypt; www.arce.org). She co-founded both the ARCE, Missouri Chapter (Past President and Vice President, current Director focusing on Finance) and the annual Missouri Egyptological Symposium. She attended the HERS Leadership Institute in 2024 for women leaders in higher education (hersnetwork.org). She has served her campus community since arriving here in 2017 as a Bear Bridge mentor (2023, Outstanding Bear Bridge Faculty Mentor award), Safe-Zone Faculty Advisor, Advisor for the Ancient Worlds Club, Co-Advisor for History Club, and supporting her department through extensive service, including—at various times—chairing Undergraduate Committee and Personnel Committee, sitting on about three-dozen MA committees, serving on five search committees (chairing two), and serving as a past Faculty Senate and College Council department representative.
Matt Szafran is an independent researcher specialising in the study of ancient tools and technologies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Trustee of the Friends of the Petrie Museum. His current research focusses on the manufacture and use of stone palettes in Predynastic Egypt, using experimental archaeology and advanced imaging technologies, such as microscopy and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to complement textual studies. Matt has published and lectured on this topic, and is currently incorporating this research into a book discussing the design, manufacture, and possible uses of Predynastic palettes. His research interests also include the popular perception, reception, and representation of Egypt depicted in mass media, in particular late 20th and 21st century movies and television.
Episode 175: When Harry Met Sally with Kathleen Sheppard and Thomas Lecaque
This week Kate Sheppard and Thomas Lecaque drop in to talk about the greatest romcom of all time.
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 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.
Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age was published in July 2024. It has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and was a top 6 Reader’s Choice non-fiction book on Goodreads.
Dr. Thomas Lecaque is an Associate Professor of History at Grand View University. He has a Ph.D. in Pre-Modern European History from the University of Tennessee, an M.A. in English with a focus on Old English and Anglo-Norman literature from Truman State University, and a B.A. (also from Truman) in History with minors in Philosophy & Religion and English.
His dissertation, "The Count of Saint-Gilles and the Saints of the Apocalype: Occitanian Culture and Piety in the Time of the First Crusade," examined the importance of distinct regional identities in the performance of the First Crusade, focusing specifically on the territories controlled by and formative to Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse, Duke of Narbonne, and Marquis of Provence. The unique cultural, religious, and political aspects of Occitania shaped the way the Provencal contingent on the First Crusade went about organizing, performing, and understanding crusading; the difference between Occitanian regions also helps us to understand the way Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Raymond d'Aguiliers perceive their actions and the role of the Holy Lance. This work offers a new vision of the First Crusade, one where universal motivations are less important than the specific regional identities of each crusading contingent.
His research has moved on to looking at the same language of religious violence and apocalypticism and its impact on other time periods and events. His current project looks at the rhetoric of holy war across languages and denominations in the wars of empire between England and France and numerous Native polities in the northeastern section of the United States. He also works on expressions of these sentiments in contemporary America, largely via public essays in places like The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Bulwark, Religious Dispatches, and the History News Network.
Episode 174: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America with Dr. Rachel Gross
This week Dr. Rachel Gross drops in to explain the rise of outdoor goods manufacturers and how they sold us on going outside.
Rachel Gross is an environmental, cultural, and public historian specializing in the history of the modern U.S. Her research and teaching interests center on business, consumer culture, and gender, and she is especially interested in what seemingly ordinary consumer goods tell us about identity and power. She teaches courses on capitalism, commodities, women and gender, and public history.
Episode 173: Is Hamburger Hill the greatest war film we ever forgot? With John McManus and Waitman Beorn
This week historians John McManus and Waitman Beorn drop in to talk about the history behind Hamburger Hill, arguably the greatest war film we ever forgot.
John C. McManus is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of U.S. military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T). This professorship is bestowed by the University of Missouri Board of Curators on the most outstanding scholars in the University of Missouri system. McManus is the first ever Missouri S&T faculty member in the humanities to be named Curators’ Distinguished Professor. As one of the nation’s leading military historians, and the author of fifteen well received books on the topic, he is in frequent demand as a speaker and expert commentator. In addition to dozens of local and national radio programs, he has appeared on Cnn.com, Fox News, C-Span, the Military Channel, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, Netflix, the Smithsonian Network, the History Channel and PBS, among others. He also served as historical advisor for the bestselling book and documentary Salinger, the latter of which appeared nationwide in theaters and on PBS’s American Masters Series. During the 2018-2019 academic year, he was in residence at the U.S. Naval Academy as the Leo A. Shifrin Chair of Naval and Military History, a distinguished visiting professorship. His current project is a major three volume history of the U.S. Army in the Pacific/Asia theater during World War II. He is the host of two podcasts, Someone Talked! in tandem with the National D-Day Memorial, and We Have Ways of Making You Talk in the USA alongside Al Murray and James Holland.
Dr. Waitman Wade Beorn is an associate 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 was released in August 2024 from Nebraska University Press. Between the Wires was recognised as a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the United States.
He is currently on research leave thanks to an AHRC Research, Development, and Engagement Fellowship. This fellowship supports his work on a project entitled Visualizing Janowska: Creating a Digital Architectural Model of a Nazi Concentration Camp. This interdisciplinary project will build a digital reconstruction of the Janowska concentration camp based on historical sources as most of the site is gone today. Dr. Beorn is managing a team of architects and digital modellers to accomplish this and is partnered with the Holocaust Education Trust, the Wiener Holocaust Library, the Lviv Center for Urban History, the Duke Digital Art History and Visual Culture Lab, and the Holocaust Center North.
Dr. Beorn has published work in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Central European History, German Studie
Episode 172: The Making, Meaning, and Myths of Mount Rushmore with Matthew Davis
This week author Matthew Davis drops in to talk about the complex history and significance of Mount Rushmore, including its ties to the Lakota people, the role of Gutzon Borglum, and the evolving meaning of the monument in contemporary society. We also dig in on the misconceptions surrounding Rushmore, the importance of indigenous perspectives, and the future of the site in terms of stewardship and representation.
Matthew Davis is a writer who lives in Washington, D.C. He is the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale and the founder of the Cheuse Center for International Writers at George Mason University. His new book, A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore, is available everywhere.