Yael Sternhell is Professor in the Department of History and Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University. This interview is based on her new book, War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War...
Remembering our fallen heroes:...
Drew Swanson is Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Distinguished Professor of Southern History at Georgia Southern University. This interview is based on his new book, A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North...
At age 85, writer Joyce Carol Oates has “so many ideas.” Check out David Marchese’s interview with Oates at The New York Times. Here is a taste: How does support for the idea that diverse voices should be given primacy...
Hajar Yazdiha is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. This interview is based on her new book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement (Princeton University Press,...
Is the United States in the midst of a moral breakdown? Should we support candidates who want to take us back to a golden age? Why do we want to “Make America Great Again” (Trump) or believe that “America is...
Benjamin Jenkins is Associate Professor of History and University Archivist at the University of La Verne. This interview is based on his new book, Octopus’s Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California (University Press of Kansas, 2023). JF: What...
Matthew Dennis is Professor Emeritus of History and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. This interview is based on his new book, American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023). JF: What led you to...
“The Mandela Effect” is a term to describe a strange cultural phenomenon. Sometimes there is something which a big number of people seem to remember, only it apparently never happened, or it was different than we remember. The classic example...
Travis A. Rountree is Assistant Professor of English at Western Carolina University. This interview is based on his new book, Hillsville Remembered: Public Memory, Historical Silence, and Appalachia’s Most Notorious Shoot-Out (University Press of Kentucky, 2023). JF: What led you...
Everyone wants to claim Lincoln. Even socialists. Here is University of Arkansas history professor Matthew Stanley at Jacobin: Would Lincoln’s sincere hatred of the Slave Power have translated after the war to a critique of the Money Power and other...
Paul Hardin Kapp is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This interview is based on his new book, Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South (University Press of Mississippi, 2022). JF: What...
Philip Levy is Professor of History at the University of South Florida. This interview is based on his new book, The Permanent Resident: Excavations and Explorations of George Washington’s Life (University of Virginia Press, 2022). JF: What led you to...
Peter Boag is Professor and Columbia Chair in the History of the American West at Washington State University. This interview is based on his new book, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon (University of Washington Press, 2022)....
Sarah Purcell is L.F. Parker Professor of History at Grinnell College. This interview is based on her new book, Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). JF: What led...
Using America’s obsession with Washington’s hair as his window, historian Keith Beutler examines how “physicality,” or the use of the material objects, was the most important way early Americans (1790-1840)–museum founders, African Americans, evangelicals, and school teachers– remembered the nation’s...
Regular readers of the blog know that I am very interested in the way Putin uses a particular view of the past to justify his invasion of Ukraine. I talked with historian Bruce Berglund about this in Episode 96 of...
Our guest in this episode is Gettysburg College historian Jill Ogline Titus. Her new book, Gettysburg 1963, tells the story of the centennial celebration of the Civil War in the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. Through an examination of the experiences of political...
Wendy Bellion, an art historian at the University of Delaware, has an interesting piece at Smithsonian Magazine on the patriots’ toppling of this statue and a New York Historical Society exhibit on monuments. Here is a taste: A monument to...
Marita Sturken is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University Steinhardt. This interview is based on her new book, Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era (NYU Press, 2022). JF: What led...
