Stay ConnectedBob Crawford (The Avett Brothers) & Dr. Ben Sawyer (MTSU History) share conversations with great thinkers from a variety of backgrounds – historians, artists, legal scholars, political figures and more –who help us uncover the many roads that run between past and present.
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Jimmy Carter's Presidency is one few Americans remember fondly. In a 2013 ranking created by statistician Nate Silver, Carter took the #26 spot, right between William Howard Taft and Calvin Coolidge. The economic crises Carter inherited upon taking office in 1977 plagued his administration, and his perceived weakness in fighting the Cold War only added to the sense of unease created by America's loss in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. But is it possible that Americans' perceptions of Carter don't match the reality?
Dr. Nancy Mitchell says that's the case, and she joins Bob and Ben to explain why. She explains Jimmy Carter's Presidency through the lens of his foreign policy in Africa, and argues that Carter was not an ideologue, but a full-fledged Cold Warrior who was committed to maintaining US influence abroad. Nancy also discusses the legacy of Carter's Presidency today, and applies her expertise on US Foreign Policy to assess Barack Obama and Donald Trump's approach to diplomacy.
Dr. Nancy Mitchell is a Professor of US Diplomatic History at North Carolina State University. She has published extensively in her field of expertise, and her most recent book, Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War (Stanford University Press, 2016) recently won the American Academy of Diplomacy's Douglas Dillon Award for Distinction on the Practice of American Diplomacy.
More on this episode and The Road to Now is available at our website: www.theroadtonow.com
Tom Shadyac has probably made you laugh. He was the youngest ever staff joke writer for Bob Hope and he directed some of the biggest comedy films in recent memory, including Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Nutty Professor. A lot of people would say Tom has "made it." Tom would disagree.
Tom joins Ben and Bob for a conversation about his life and the path that led him to abandon the pursuit of fame and material abundance to focus on helping others. He tells of his 11 year period of unemployment as he struggled to find success in the Los Angeles comedy scene, his relationship with Jim Carrey, and how following his own passions led him to take a risk with Ace Ventura. Tom also talks of his approach to teaching film, and explains why he defines success as a state of mind.
You can find out more about Tom's story and philosophy in his book Life's Operating Manual and his documentary film I Am (which we highly recommend!).
More on this episode and The Road to Now podcast can be found at our website: www.theroadtonow.com
There's a good chance you don't appreciate how engrained professional wrestling is in American history and culture, and this episode is about to change that. We didn't know all this either until wrestling legend Jim Cornette was kind enough to spend an hour taking us from wrestling's origins in the late 19th century up to the sport as it exists today. Jim knows the sport like no other- he's been part of the professional wrestling scene since the 1970s, and currently hosts the tremendously popular podcast The Jim Cornette Experience. Jim has also been ringside (and sometimes in the ring) for some of wrestling's greatest moments, including the April 5, 1982 showdown between Andy Kaufman & Jerry "The King" Lawler (that was his first time on national television), and his storytelling is second-to-none.
This episode also features wrestling aficionado Jon Burr making a special appearance as guest co-host. Jon is the host of the NBA podcast Fastbreak Breakfast, the front man for the band How I Became the Bomb, and Ben's friend & neighbor.
More on this episode and The Road to Now can be found at our website: www.TheRoadToNow.com.
American politics has changed a lot in the last few decades. Jimmy Williams, has observed this from inside the beltway, and has made a few changes himself. When he first arrived in DC in 1992, he was a Republican working for the George H.W. Bush's reelection campaign. A few years later he was a Democrat working on the staff of Democratic Senator Dick Durban. Since then he has been a lobbyist, a contributor at MSNBC, the founder of his own online media outlet and, most recently, the host of the political podcast Decode DC.
In our interview, Jimmy tells Bob and Ben of the road that led him through all of these career changes, and the path that led him from a Republican to a self-professed "progressive Democrat who owns guns." Jimmy discusses his experience of coming out as gay in the 1990s and the ways his faith have informed his political views. We also discuss HB2 in North Carolina and the greater history of discrimination and inclusion in American politics.
Jimmy Williams is a political commentator and the host of the Decode DC podcast, which explains how politics in Washington, DC affects Americans' daily lives.
More on this episode and The Road to Now can be found at our website: www.TheRoadToNow.com
The 2016 election is over and many Americans are trying to understand how Donald Trump was able to defeat the political establishment and reveal major flaws in the ways experts assess public opinion. To help us understand this election, Bob and Ben speak with Dr. Brian Rosenwald about his research on the history of conservative talk radio. Brian traces the rise of Rush Limbaugh and other conservative radio hosts in the 1980s, and the ways they have both reflected and shaped their listeners' views. He also explains why there is truth to claims of liberal bias in the mainstream media, but not for the reasons most critics assume.
Our conversation with Brian also provided an excellent opportunity for Bob and Ben to discuss the 2016 election and our take on the best ways to move forward.
Dr. Brian Rosenwald is a fellow at the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently converting his doctoral dissertation, "Mount Rushmore: The Rise of Talk Radio and its Impact on Politics and Public Policy," into a book for Harvard University Press. Brian also conducts research for the Slate podcast Whistlestop.
For more on this and many other episodes of The Road to Now, check out our website: www.theroadtonow.com
The relationship between the United States and Russia was hotly debated in the 2016 election, and will likely be one of the most important issues in US foreign policy for years to come. To help us better understand how this relationship looks from the Russian perspective, we spoke with Dr. Arch Getty, Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA. Arch explains where Vladimir Putin fits within the greater history of Russian leaders, as well as the ways that history and geography have shaped Russians' understanding of their place in the world. He also shares his own story of living in Moscow in the last year of the Soviet Union, and the changes he's seen since he first visited Russia in the late 1970s.
Dr. J. Arch Getty is a Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA whose work focuses on the Stalin period of Russian history. Arch is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a Research Fellow of the Russian State Humanities University (Moscow), and has been Senior Fellow of the Harriman Institute (Columbia University), and the Davis Center (Harvard University.) His most recent book, Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition, was published by Yale University Press in 2013.
A special thanks to Roscoe and Lucy Strickland for the generous donation that supported Dr. Getty's visit to Middle Tennessee State University, and to the Department of History at MTSU for arranging this interview.
Links and more info on this and other episodes can be found at our website: www.theroadtonow.com
For the final installment in our election week series, we speak with Bruce Carlson, the creator and host of the podcast My History Can Beat Up Your Politics podcast, about the interesting moments and valuable lessons from the history of American Presidential Elections. Along the way we discuss party realignments, "October surprises," and other moments that shaped American politics. We also discuss the history of podcasting, and Bob reveals that he and Bruce went to college together at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (now Stockton University).
Bob and Ben highly recommend My History Can Beat Up Your Politics, which you can get anywhere you get The Road to Now (or you can click on the link below).
For more on The Road to Now: www.theroadtonow.com
For more on Bruce Carlson's My History Can Beat Up Your Politics: http://www.myhistorycanbeatupyourpolitics.com/
In the second installment of our election week series, Road to Now contributors Matt Negrin & Alex Trowbridge of Bloomberg Politics offer up another round of Path to the Present (the podcast inside a podcast) to explain the role that surrogates have played in Presidential Elections in the past and present. Through their own research and interviews with Donald Trump's Senior Advisor/Surrogate Boris Epshteyn & Hillary Clinton surrogate/US Congressman Gregory Meeks (D-NY), Matt & Alex discuss what motivates individuals to speak on behalf of a candidate, what we can learn from speaking with surrogates, and what makes a surrogate good (or bad) at their job.
For more on The Road to Now: www.theroadtonow.com
Dr. Charles Hughes of Rhodes College joins Ben and Bob to talk about his recent book Country Soul, which examines the history of music in the "Country Soul Triangle" studio towns of Memphis, Nashville, and Muscle Shoals. Charles explains how the working relationships between these three towns, and the musicians who performed in the studios, created the sound of Country Music and Soul Music in the second half of the 20th Century. The conversation also covers a variety of other topics, including the Civil Rights Movement, the history of professional wrestling, Elvis Presley, and the trends that led us from the "outlaw country" of the 1970s to the country music of today.
We're also happy to announce that our friend Ian Skotte has joined The Road to Now team as our producer. Ian joins us at the beginning to introduce himself to our listeners and talk about a few things we have in the works for the podcast in the upcoming months.
Dr. Charles Hughes is a historian and director of the Memphis Center at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. His most recent book, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South was named one of Rolling Stones' "10 Best Music Books of 2015." His current project looks at the history of Professional Wrestling and race in the United States.
Recorded October 6th, 2016 on the campus of Rhodes College in Memphis, TN.
More on The Road to Now and links to info on our guests can be found at our website: www.theroadtonow.com.
In 2009, Ben Sawyer read Jefferson Cowie's Capital Moves while studying for his doctoral exams, and he loved it. In 2016, Jeff joined the department of history at Vanderbilt, conveniently located about 5 miles from Ben's house in Nashville. Upon learning of Jeff's move, Ben quickly wrote to ask if he'd be a guest on The Road to Now. Jeff said yes, and we're happy to say he's as impressive in an interview as he is in print.
In our interview, Bob and Ben speak with Jeff about Capitol Moves as well as the books he's written since then, which have explored the history of the working class and American politics in the 20th Century. Jeff explains the central argument of his most recent book, The Great Exception: The New Deal & The Limits of American Politics, and why he thinks looking back to New Deal policies is unproductive in 21st Century America. The conversation also touches on several important topics including outsourcing, ObamaCare, Social Security, & workers' rights, and the ways history can help us make better decisions as we address these issues moving forward.
Dr. Jefferson Cowie holds the James G. Stahlman Chair in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University. Prior to moving to Vanderbilt in 2016, he taught at Cornell University for eighteen years.
Recorded October 8, 2016 at Vanderbilt University w/ Bob via video call.
For more on this episode and The Road to Now: www.theroadtonow.com
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