Episode 85: Horizon and The West According to Kevin Costner with Dr. Megan Kate Nelson and Kate Carpenter
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.
Dr. Megan Kate Nelson 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.
Her new book, The Westerners: Myth-Making and Belonging on the American Frontier, will be published with Scribner in April 2026.
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.
An elected member of the Society of American Historians, I am also a regular guest on radio shows and TV documentaries about western history and popular culture.
Before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014, she taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She earned her BA in History and Literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa.
Kate Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in History of Science at Princeton University. She earned an MA in History (emphasis in Public History) from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia. My research focuses on histories of the environment and technology, and asks questions about how humans make meaning of their surroundings. Her current project is a history of the scientific and social culture of storm chasing.
She is dedicated to making relevant connections between scholarship and public understanding using a variety of tools: digital humanities, exhibit design, writing, and more. She is also the producer and host of Drafting the Past, a podcast devoted to the craft of writing history.