Reckoning with Jason Herbert

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Episode 114: From the Vault: Is Chef the Best Food Porn Ever Made with Dr. Emily Contois and Dr. Zenia Kish Jan 22, 2025

Show notes

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.
About our guests:
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 Jan 18, 2025

Show notes

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.
About our guests:
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 Jan 15, 2025

Show notes

This week we return to one of the first HATM Podcasts about one of the first films we ever did on the Historians At The Movies watch party: Lincoln. Joining us are two of the most dynamic historians working today: Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Dr. Megan Kate Nelson. We get into Lincoln's presidency, the role of his cabinet, as well as somehow ranking the hottest presidents. This one is a ride.
About our guests:
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.
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.

Reckoning: Bridal Shop Confessions and the Realities of Writing Historical Fiction with Jillian Forsberg Jan 12, 2025

Show notes

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.
About our guest: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 Jan 07, 2025

Show notes

This week we return to the Vault and have only one question: IS THERE A CAVE?
Two scholars ready to get medieval on us all: Thomas Lecaque and John Wyatt Greenlee. We're celebrating the great epic that wasn't: The 13th Warrior. This movie is so good and so bad at the same time that it's hard to quantify. But we're gonna do it anyway. We're talking Vikings, the Abassid Empire, man-bears, and maybe the greatest language scene in film history. Grab some mead, because it's made from honey, just like this podcast.
About our guests:
Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence. He has written for the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Foreign Policy and The Bulwark, among others.
John Wyatt Greenlee is a medievalist and a cartographic historian.His academic research is primarily driven by questions of how people perceive and reproduce their spaces: how movement through the world — both experiential and imagined — becomes codified in visual and written maps.

Reckoning: The Quest to Understand the Mysteries of the Cosmos with Dr. Kelsey Johnson Jan 05, 2025

Show notes

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.
About our guest:
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

Episode 111: From the Vault: "They Mean to Take Us as a Prize": Master and Commander with Dr. Mary Hicks Jan 01, 2025

Show notes

This week we reach back into the archive for our first visit from Dr. Mary Hicks to talk about the brilliance of Master and Commander and to talk with Mary about her research into African Mariners in the South Atlantic.
About our guest:
Mary Hicks is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.

Episode 110: From the Vault: Die Hard Is More Than A Christmas Movie with Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed and Dr. Craig Bruce Smith Dec 24, 2024

Show notes

This week we venture back to one of our earliest podcast episodes to talk about Die Hard with Annette Gordon-Reed and Craig Bruce Smith. We know Die Hard is a Christmas movie, but is it the quintessential 80s film? Find out when you listen in.

Episode 109: How A Charlie Brown Christmas Almost Didn’t Happen with Dr. Blake Scott Ball Dec 18, 2024

Show notes

A Charlie Brown Christmas is undoubtedly in the pantheon of holiday tv shows. This week pop culture historian Blake Scott Ball drops in to talk about how that almost didn’t happen, as well as the politics of Peanuts in the 20th century.

Episode 108: James Bond Is A Monk: The Name of the Rose with David Perry, Matthew Gabriele, and John Wyatt Greenlee Dec 11, 2024

Show notes

First the first time ever, HATM has a guest host! This week John Wyatt Greenlee steps on the other side of the mic to talk with David Perry and Matthew Gabriele about Sean Connery, Medieval detectives, and their new book, Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe.

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