Making of a Historian

Latest Episodes:

Work And Play 6: Women, Households, Service and Emotional Labor Mar 26, 2020

Show notes

In this--another short episode!--we talk about a group of workers who are often written out of the story of the Industrial Revolution. The mostly female ranks of domestic servants, who cleaned houses, made food, educated children, made medicine, and generally made the home a homey place to be. When historians usually deal with servants, they treat them like holdovers of an old regime--their work never really gets mechanized, and they seem to slowly fade away over the 20th century. But I argue here that they are actually precociously modern: they do emotional labor, and so anticipate the modern service industry, where we not only have to WORK, but we have to evoke particular EMOTIONS. We're all servants now.

Work And Play 6: Vacations! Mar 25, 2020

Show notes

A tired Brendan talks about the history of vacations, briefly! We discuss how Romantic poets helped make the wilderness beautiful, rather than scary, and about how capitalist entrepreneurs got rich off of a new consumer society devoted to vacationing.

Work And Play 5: The Decline Of Work Time Mar 24, 2020

Show notes

We're been on a bit of a hiatus in this series. Who knew it'd be hard to juggle teaching, raising a kid, and writing a dissertation? But given the shelter in place of COVID-19, I thought it would be a good time to resume the podcast and try to get through the rest of the episodes in this series. Warning: I'm joined in this podcast by a special guest, my three month old daughter Bina! She has a lot of opinions in the early minutes of this episode, and kinda gets her dad off of his game a little bit. This episode we talk about how in general people in Britain over the second half of the 19th century worked LESS, and how we can use this to understand some of the different ways that historians understand what moves history forward.

Work and Play 4: Hands and Minds Feb 11, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, we talk sleepily about two parts of labor in the Industrial Revolution that tend not to get a ton of love: craft labor and the professions. We usually think of the image of the factory, but only a very small portion of work was factory work. Many more people worked with their hands. At the same time, there was an expansion in the number of professions. That's it!

Work and Play in the Industrial Revolution 3: The Times They Are A'Changing Feb 05, 2020

Show notes

This episode we talk about the history of the experience of time. Yes, even our experience of time itself changed during the Industrial Revolution. The big change we can think of as a change from task-orientation—where we think of our days as devoted to particular things—to time-orientation—where we think of our days as cut up into particular buckets like work-time, play-time and sleep-time. We talk about this change, and how our current experience of time might be changing yet again as new technologies bring work back into the home, and new kinds of surveillance allow for ever greater control of work-time. Check out full show notes at historian.live

Work And Play 2: The Industrial Revolution Jan 27, 2020

Show notes

For the seven-hundreth time, we talk about the Industrial Revolution.

Work and Play In The Industrial Revolution 1: Merrie England? Jan 22, 2020

Show notes

In this new season, we will be following along with the class I am teaching this semester on Work and Play in the Industrial Revolution. In this episode, we go through the rationale for the course, and we talk about the before part of the story: the popular culture of the long 18th century, filled with drinking, maypoles, and seasonal work. Check out the website at historian.live for images and book-lists!

Episode 137: On Friendship, with Professor Joshua Fogel Dec 10, 2019

Show notes

For more detailed shownotes, go to our website at historian.live This episode is a co-production with the Journal of History of Ideas Blog’s podcast, In Theory. If you like this show’s format, you’ll love In Theory. Also be sure to check out the JHI Blog itself, which consistently produces some of the best academic writing for a general audience out there. If you dig through the archives, you might even find some of my essays! This episode I’m joined by Joshua Fogel, Professor at York University in Canada to talk about his new book, A Friend In Deed. A Friend In Deed talks about the unlikely friendship between on of 20th Century China’s most important writers, Lu Xun, and a Japanese bookstore maven in Shanghai during the interwar period, Uchiyama Kanzo. It’s a fantastic book that does what few history books can do—it really shows you a rich human relationship. In talking about the book, we discuss Chinese-Japanese relations in the interwar period, the cosmopolitain city of Shanghai, and the nature of friendship itself. It’s a really fantastic interview with a truly generous scholar.

Episode 136: Neoliberalism and Deindustrialisation with Christopher Lawson Oct 08, 2019

Show notes

We're back after an extended break with a great episode. In this episode I walk with my colleague Christopher Lawson about two really big things that happen in the 20th century: deindustrialisation and neoliberalism. These are hard topics to deal with on their own, and Christopher tells the story of how they both interact by telling the story of Scottish steel plants. The big question: should Britain's industry be efficient and globally competitive? or should it build local communities? We talk about so much more! And a programming note: I'm going to try to keep up with the episode a week schedule, but sometime in December, we're going to abruptly stop because our family is expanding! My wife is expecting a kid, due in December, so the podcast will probably go on the back burner at that time.

135: Chinese Political Culture With Shoufu Yin May 24, 2019

Show notes

In this episode I speak with PhD Candidate Soufu Yin about Chinese political culture. If you're anything like me, your idea of China is pretty monolithic: politics is all about emperors, bureaucrats, and the civil service examination. But Shoufu argues that much of this is a trick of perspective, and that when we look at Chinese political culture we find lots of examples of a very different kind of politics. In this episode we talk about medieval public opinion polls, and female military commanders.

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