Episode 121: Eat, Pray, Love: Talking Good Food and Wicked Sex with Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves

Let’s talk about sex, baby. And food too. And while we’re at it, let’s talk with Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves about how conceptions of food and sex informed one another in the minds of Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. Plus, we get into the ideas of food tourism, appropriation vs. appreciation, and our favorite food scenes in movies. 

Hungry historian and novelist. Professor at the University of Victoria. 

Rachel Hope Cleves is the author of four award-winning works of history: Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex (2024), Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality (2020), Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (2014), and The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (2009).

In 2023, Cleves published her first novel, A Second Chance for Yesterday (2023), co-authored with her brother, the futurist Aram Sinnreich.

Her research has been featured in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, salon.com and brainpickings.org. She writes in a treehouse in Victoria, British Columbia.

Reckoning: Listen to Your Elders/My Time Working with Tribes

Thinking about the elders who have guided me in my life and career. 

Reckoning: Jimmy Carter: Rivers & Dreams with Jim Barger, Jr.

It's time for a critical reappraisal of President Carter. Joining me this week is Jim Barger, Jr., coauthor of the new book Jimmy Carter: River & Dreams, Rods, Reels, and Peace Deals, Plus the One that Got Away. Jim knew the late President and spoke about Jimmy Carter the angler, the environmentalist, and why he deserves another look. We also talk about Rosalynn, their relationship, and how fishing played into Carter's life in the White House and beyond. This is the conversation about a man sorely needed in the world right now.

Jim Barger, Jr. is a nationally recognized trial lawyer who handles complex government investigations, particularly qui tam whistleblower litigation under the False Claims Act.  Straight out of law school, Jim won a ground-breaking $2 million settlement against a major health insurance company employing a then-novel legal theory under the tort of outrage; two years later, he set the record for the largest qui tam case in Alabama history, winning $24.5 million from Southerncare.  Jim holds the records for the largest home health fraud case in U.S. history, securing $150 million from Amedisys in 2014, and the largest hospice fraud case in U.S. history, securing $75 million from Vitas in 2017.  Jim has served as lead trial counsel in more than 100 qui tam whistleblower cases across the country, has testified as a healthcare fraud expert in federal court, and regularly consults with companies on healthcare compliance issues.  He has been quoted by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, NPR, and CNN.

Reckoning: My Beef with Indiana

This morning I talk about why Hoosiers has been banned from HATM and why as a Kentuckian I am legally required to hate Indiana.

Episode 120: Monsters, Inc. and the Monstrous History of Humans with Dr. Surekha Davies

This week Dr. Surekha Davies joins in to talk about a different way of seeing human history--through monsters. According to her, Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. So our conversation reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. And to do so, we are talking about one of the very best Pixar films ever made: Monsters, Inc. This episode is so good that it's scary.

Dr. Surekha Davies is a British author, speaker, and historian of science, art, and ideas. Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human, won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. She has written essays and reviews about the histories of biology, anthropology, and monsters in the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, and Aeon.

Episode 119: Shakespeare in Love and the Queer World of William Shakespeare with Dr. Will Tosh

This week Dr. Will Tosh drops in to talk about the many complexities of Shakespeare's relationships, Shakespeare's role as a working writer, and the competitive landscape of playwrights of the time, along with Will's new book, Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare.

Dr. Will Tosh is interim Director of Education (Higher Education and Research) at Shakespeare’s Globe, where he is responsible for undergraduate and postgraduate course, events for adult learners, and the Globe’s scholarly research programme. Will researches and writes about the literature and culture of Shakespeare’s England, and his work at the Globe includes dramaturgy, new writing development, and public engagement in person, in the media and online.

Will holds degrees from the University of Oxford and Queen Mary University of London, and has worked at Shakespeare’s Globe since 2014. He developed the Research in Action format of public scholarly workshops, and helped to curate the Antiracist Shakespeare webinar series from 2021-24. He is the host of ‘That Is The Question’, the Globe’s award-winning YouTube series. Will is the co-director of the Shakespeare Centre London (based jointly at the Globe and King’s College London), and a mentor for the Early Modern Scholars of Colour network. He has served on the programme committee for the Shakespeare Association of America.

Will is the author of Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (2018), and Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England (2016), which revealed the intimate social circle of the Elizabethan spy Anthony Bacon. His most recent book is Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, which was published to wide acclaim in 2024. Will writes and reviews regularly for academic journals as well as the Times Literary Supplement and other news publications.

Emergency Pod: America's First Action Hero- Where Is Our George Washington Biopic? with Dr. Craig Bruce Smith

Happy birthday Mr. President! Today for George Washington's birthday we invited Washington scholar Craig Bruce Smith to talk about why we still don't have a biopic of the First American, plus Craig's top five presidents ever.

Craig Bruce Smith is 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, specifically focusing 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.

Episode 118: The Program and the End of College Football with Dr. Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Dr. Derek Silva

This week Dr. Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Dr. Derek Silva drop in to talk about 1993's The Program, starring James Caan, Omar Epps, and Halle Berry. This movie was way ahead of its time in its discussions of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL), concussions, and race and sexual dynamics on campus. We talk about all of this and the cost to college athletes to play the game. 

Nathan Kalman-Lamb's  scholarly work sits at the intersection of social theory and the sociology of sport, with a particular focus on labor, racism, and exploitation. His most recent book Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport, based on qualitative interviews with former professional hockey players and fans of the sport, uses Marxist-Feminist social reproduction theory to explore how the political economy of sports like hockey is predicated on an affective transfer from athletic workers to fans through the physical sacrifice that is fundamental to these 'games.'

Derek Silva's areas of interest include sociocultural studies of sport, critical sociology and criminology, labour, racism, and inequality. My work can be found in the peer-reviewed journals Critical Sociology, Punishment and Society, Crime, Media, Culture, Sociology of Sport Journal, Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Policing & Society, Annals of Leisure Research, Social Science & Medicine – Qualitative Research in Health, Sociological Forum, Race & Class, Educational Gerontology, and in media outlets such as TIME Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, The Chronicle of Higher Education, ​Jacobin Magazine, and The Baffler Magazine. 

Reckoning: The Race for a Forested Future with Dr. Lauren Oakes

Forester Dr. Lauren Oakes joins in today to talk about the urgent need for effective reforestation efforts and the complexities of understanding the state of the world's forests. Plus, we talk about the dual narrative of loss and growth in forest ecosystems, emphasizing the importance of preserving existing forests while also working on reforestation efforts. 

Dr. Lauren Oakes makes environmental science accessible to non-scientists. She writes about forests, climate, and our complex relationships with nature. Her craft blends science communications and reporting through narrative.

She earned her Ph.D. from the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program for Environment and Resources at Stanford University. By training, she is an ecologist and land change scientist, committed to facilitating more sustainable land use practices in communities across the world. She has always been intrigued by our human footprint on the natural world and concerned about the ways environmental degradation affects the lives of people and other species.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, Emergence Magazine, Nautilus and other media outlets. Her first book, In Search of the Canary Tree, was selected as one of Science Friday’s Best Science Books of 2018. In 2019, it won second place for the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award and was a finalist for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Communication Award. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation supported research and reporting for Treekeepers, her most recent book about the global reforestation movement.

Episode 117: Loving, the 14th Amendment, and Interracial Marriage in the South with Dr. Kathryn Schumaker

This week we dive headfirst into discussions over the Fourteenth Amendment, birthright citizenship, racial discrimination, families, hope, and love with Dr. Kathryn Schumaker as we talk about 2016's Loving and her new book Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South.

Dr. Kathryn Schumaker's scholarship is focused on intersections of race, gender, and American law. Her new book, Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South (Basic Books, January 2025), explores how interracial families survived in the hostile political, social, and legal environment of Jim Crow Mississippi. She is also the author of Troublemakers: Students’ Rights and Racial Justice in the Long Twentieth Century (NYU Press, 2019). She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation, the American Historical Association, and the American Society for Legal History. 

Reckoning: How We Are Changing How We Think About PTSD with Dr. George Bonanno

Columbia University clinical psychologist Dr. George Bonanno drops in to talk about his research on resilience, PTSD, the importance of understanding resilience in the face of trauma, the biological responses to traumatic events, and the misconceptions surrounding PTSD.

George Bonanno is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University's Teachers College and internationally recognized for his pioneering research on human resilience in the face of loss and potential trauma. He is recognized by the Web of Science as among the top one percent most cited scientists in the world, and has been honored with lifetime achievement awards by the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), and the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA). In addition to the books, The End of Trauma and The Other Side of Sadness, George has published hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific articles, many appearing in leading journals such as Nature, JAMA, American Psychologist, and the Annual Review of Psychology. He is also an avid painter (when he has time), reads widely, and loves music.

Episode 116: License to Ill: Beastie Boys and the History of Hip Hop with Jeff Melnick, Akrobatik, and Dart Adams

This week Jeff Melnick, Akrobatik, and Dart Adams join in to talk about Beastie Boys’ revolutionary debut album, License to Ill as well as explore the roots of hip hop, it’s tied to urban communities, the evolution of Beastie Boys as people, and the album’s legacy nearly 40 years later. 

Jeffrey Melnick's research interests include the global circulation of US culture, the culture industries, Black-Jewish relations, and immigration and migration culture studies.  

He teaches courses in American cultural history and comparative ethnicity. His interests further include the cultural history of Black-Jewish relations in the United States and the cultural impact of 9/11.

Dart Adams is a journalist, researcher, and a lecturer who lives in Boston. He is the host of the podcasts Dart Against Humanity and Boston Legends.

Akrobatik, is an American rapper from the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.He is also a part of the hip hop collective named The Perceptionists with Mr. Lif and DJ Fakts One, which released Black Dialogue in 2005.

Episode 115: Necessary Truths with Ed Zwick

Ed Zwick is the man behind many of the movies and tv series you know by heart: Glory, Legends of the Fall, The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond, Shakespeare in Love, thirtysomething, My So Called Life, and more. And this week, he stops in to talk about his 40+ years of working in Hollywood- the hits, the flops, and everything in between. We talk about our mutual love of history, as well as his thoughts on how history informs his storytelling. There's so much in this conversation and I am so excited to bring it to you.

Ed Zwick is an Academy Award– and Emmy Award–winning director, writer, and producer of film and television. A graduate of Harvard and the AFI Conservatory, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Liberty Godshall.

Reckoning: Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies with Dr. Michael Albertus

How is power tied to land? Who gets to have it and what do people do once they get it? What do we do about climate change and is there a way to preserve the globally lands across the spectrum? These are some of the questions we ask award winning political scientist Dr. Michael Albertus in this episode. 

Michael Albertus is professor of political science at the University of Chicago. The author of four previous books, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Episode 114: From the Vault: Is Chef the Best Food Porn Ever Made with Dr. Emily Contois and Dr. Zenia Kish

This week we return to the second podcast we ever released here at Historians At The Movies: 2014's CHEF starring Jon Favreau, Sophia Vergara, John Leguizamo, and Robert Downey, Jr. We talk not only about whether or not this is the best food movie ever made, but about the rise of social media and #foodporn.

Emily Contois, Ph.D., researches media within consumer culture, focusing on how identities are formed at the vital intersection of food, the body, and ideas about health. She is the author of “Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture” (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) and co-editor of “Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation” (University of Illinois Press, 2022). Her current book project explores how ideas about elite athleticism have infiltrated everyday American life. A richly interdisciplinary scholar, her academic work has been published in Advertising & Society Quarterly, American Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Gastronomica, and Fat Studies, among others.

Dr. Zenia Kish is an interdisciplinary scholar committed to publicly-engaged teaching and research that bridges the humanities and social sciences. Her work explores unconventional forms of media across global contexts, including the mediation of philanthropy and agriculture, and makes connections between digital media studies, strategic communication, critical finance studies, American studies, food and agriculture, and development. She is Associate Editor at the Journal of Cultural Economy, and serves on the boards of the Journal of Environmental Media and Communication and Race. Before joining Ontario Tech University, Zenia was Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, where she also served as the Associate Director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities.

Reckoning: How to Be An Academic and Still Find Time for the Gym with Dr. Vanessa Miller and Dr. Pat Wyman

We get a lot of requests around here about how to make time for the gym, how to get started, and what to do when you are there. So I asked Dr. Vanessa Miller and Dr. Pat Wyman to join me to talk about their varied experiences in weight training, still being academics, and what the gym means to them in their lives. 

Vanessa Miller (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Education Law at Indiana University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work is centered on exploring critical aspects of policing, surveillance, race, and crime situated within the education system. She uses legal and empirical methodologies to address systemic biases fixed at the intersection of criminal law, criminal procedure, and education. She is particularly interested in the experiences of Latina students impacted by the school-prison nexus and the broader criminal legal system.

Pat Wyman holds a PhD in history from the University of Southern California. He previously worked as a sports journalist, covering mixed martial arts and boxing from 2013 to 2018. His work has been featured in Deadspin, The Washington Post, Bleacher Report, and others. He is currently host of the podcast, Tides of History, and previously the host of Fall of Rome.

Episode 113 From the Vault: Lincoln with Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Dr. Megan Kate Nelson

Dr. Megan Kate Nelson is a writer, historian, road cyclist, and cocktail enthusiast. She is also 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.

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a presidential historian and the Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, co-editor of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture, and Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic. She regularly writes for public audiences in the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Bulwark, Time Magazine, USA Today, CNN, and the Washington Post.

Reckoning: Bridal Shop Confessions and the Realities of Writing Historical Fiction with Jillian Forsberg

This week author and bridal shop owner Jillian Forsberg drops in to talk about the stories behind helping people tie the knot, why Bridezillas don't exist, and her favorite memories from 17 years in the business. Plus, she reveals the process behind writing her latest historical fiction, The Rhino Keeper. This is a really fun conversation.

Kansas author Jillian holds a master’s degree in public history from Wichita State University and a bachelor’s degree in communication and history from McPherson College. Her research on little-known historical events led her to discover the true story behind her first novel, The Rhino Keeper. 

​Jillian is a regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and leads the Manuscript Matchup beta reader program through History Through Fiction. You can find Jillian gardening, browsing the closest antique mall, or reading every label at a museum. She'll most likely be wearing vintage dresses, except when she's at the zoo.

 Jillian owns a bridal store and has worked in bridal since 2007. She lives in Wichita, Kansas, with her husband, child, and pets. Jillian’s second novel is written and she's working on a third. She will always write animal stories.

Episode 112 From the Vault: Lo There Do I See A Podcast: The 13th Warrior with Dr. Thomas Lecaque and Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee

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.

John Wyatt Greenlee is a medievalist and a cartographic historian, as well as a historian of roads and pathways and pilgrimage. But he is best well known for my work on the role of eels in pre-modern England from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. He is heavily engaged in outreach and public engagement to make the eel history more widely known, and to raise awareness for the role of eels as an endangered species. His work with eels and eel history has been profiled in TIME, The Guardian, Atlas Obscura, Hakai Magazine, and The New Yorker  (click here for a full list of earned media)

He has kept up the public outreach part of my work, though, and he contines to write and talk about eels and eel history. He is (mostly) no longer an academic, however. The collapse of the academic job market and the advent of COVID just as he completed his  PhD saw to that. That saddens him; he believes we are at a point in time when we are badly in need of trained and thoughtful historians.

Reckoning: The Quest to Understand the Mysteries of the Cosmos with Dr. Kelsey Johnson

This week astrophysicist Dr. Kelsey Johnson and I talk about how we know what we know, the Big Bang, black holes, and turtles all the way down, all of which can be found in her new book Into the Unknown: The Quest to Understand the Mysteries of the Cosmos. This is a mind blowing conversation with a brilliant and wonderful human.

Dr. Kelsey Johnson teaches students both inside and outside of the classroom, using astronomy as a gateway science to nurture curiosity and support science literacy. As a child, Johnson spent countless nights outside under the stars, where she developed a love for "big picture" questions about the nature of reality and the universe.  Johnson's curiosity about the cosmos - and everything in it - has been the primary driver of her career, leading her to devote her life to learning, exploration, and teaching. 

She is a professor at the University of Virginia and founding director of the award-winning Dark Skies Bright Kids program. She has won numerous awards for her research, teaching, and promotion of science literacy. Her TED talk on the importance of dark skies has more than 2 million views, and her writing has appeared in nationwide publications, including the New York Times, Scientific American, and Washington Post. Her children’s book Constellations for Kids in consistently in the top 10 children’s astronomy books. Johnson is the past-president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and president-elect of the American Astronomical Society.

She earned her BA in physics from Carleton College, and her MS and PhD in astrophysics from the University of Colorado. She lives in rural Virginia with her family, including three cats and two very large dogs.

Her website: https://www.kelseyjohnson.com/
Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/profkelsey.bsky.social
Her book: https://amzn.to/3Z503zh