There is something quintessentially American about the idea of the west. Though the time of western expansion has long since passed, stories about cowboys on horses and pioneers panning for gold resonate with us to this day, living on in our books, our movies, and our in cultural imaginations. Through these stories, the west has come to represent values like stoicism, self-reliance, and rugged individualism. For many who call it home, the west also represents a heritage, a tradition, and a way o...
Dec 30, 2020•42 min•Ep. 159
Behind the braided wigs, buckskins, and excess bronzer that typified the mid-century "filmic Indian" lies a far richer, deeper history of Indigenous labor, survival, and agency. This history takes center stage in historian Liza Black's new book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which looks at Indigenous peoples' experiences in the American film industry that so often relied upon and reproduced racialized stereotypes of "authentic Indian...
Nov 20, 2020•39 min•Ep. 99
For many of its participants, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) offered them an opportunity to change their lives, yet few were as transformed as that of Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez. As Kat D. Williams details in Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban-American Baseball Star (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), playing in the league gave her the chance for a new start in a different country. Williams highlights the role Lefty’s mother María played in encoura...
Nov 16, 2020•46 min•Ep. 190
Before the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana became one of the state’s top private employers—with its vast landholdings and economic enterprises—they lived well below the poverty line and lacked any clear legal status. After settling in the Bayou Blue in 1884, they forged friendships with their neighbors, sparked local tourism, and struck strategic alliances with civic and business leaders, aid groups, legislators, and other tribes. Coushattas also engaged the public with stories about the tribe’s cu...
Oct 02, 2020•49 min•Ep. 98
In Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma (University of Nebraska Press), Laura Westengard examines the intersection of queerness and the gothic. Westengard’s scope is broad enough to encompass Lady Gaga’s meat dress, lesbian pulp fiction, Dracula, queer literature, and sadomasochistic performance art. What brings these diverse cultural objects together is the way they re-appropriate tropes of the gothic that have been used to marginalize queer and gend...
Sep 10, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 27
The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was in many ways the crowning event of the nineteenth century United States. Held in Chicago, the metropolis of the West, and visited by tens of millions of people from around the world, it showcased America’s past, present, and future. And Indigenous people were there at center stage. In Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), David R. M. Beck, professor of Native American St...
Aug 19, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 52
In Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State, Mia Fischer traces how media and state actors collude in the violent disciplining of trans women, exposing the traps of visibility by illustrating that dominant representations of trans people as deceptive, deviant, and threatening are integral to justifying, normalizing, and reinforcing the state-sanctioned violence enacted against them. Bringing together transgender, queer, critical race, l...
Jul 08, 2020•53 min•Ep. 126
In this episode, Jana Byars talks to Josh Cerretti, Associate Professor of History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Western Washington University about his new book, Abuses of the Erotic: Militarizing Sexuality in the Post-Cold War United States (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). In Cerretti’s own words, “In Abuses of the Erotic, I argue that the connections between sexuality and militarism apparent in the wake of September 11, 2001, are best understood in reference to the decade t...
Jun 26, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 742
Today we are joined by John Harney, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Asian Studies Department at Centre College, and author of Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895-1968 (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of baseball in Taiwan, the role of baseball in the Japanese imperial system, and the complicated nature of Taiwanese national identity. In Empire of Infields, Harney engages with the historiography of b...
Jun 22, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 165
Today we are joined by Dr. Mitchell Nathanson, author of the book Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). Nathanson, a professor of law at the Jeffrey S. Moorad Center for the Study of Sports at Villanova University, examines the life of Jim Bouton, a journeyman pitcher whose 1970 book, “Ball Four,” was a lightning rod for controversy and became one of the best sports books of all time. Nathanson examines the dynamics behind the crafting and publishing of “B...
May 25, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 161
Today we are joined by David Block, author of Pastime Lost: The Humble, Original and Now Completely Forgotten Game of English Baseball (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Block is a baseball historian whose research has focused on the origins of the game. Pastime Lost was a finalist for the 2020 Seymour Medal, awarded by the Society for American Baseball Research to the best book of baseball history or biography published the preceding year. His previous book, Baseball before We Knew It: A Sea...
Apr 15, 2020•55 min•Ep. 160
For a year, B. J. Hollars traveled the Midwest, or Flyover country as he refers to it, in search of monsters, aliens, and oddities. Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) documents his encounters with the weird and wonderful. Hollars examines aliens who share pancakes with a plumber, Mothman, Hodag, and other strange creatures and experiences in small town America. In Midwestern Strange, Hollars shares his visits with...
Mar 13, 2020•43 min•Ep. 66
Today we are joined by Roger Gilles, Director of the Honors College and Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University, and author of Women on the Move: The Forgotten Era of Women’s Bicycle Racing (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the rise of women’s velodrome racing in the American Midwest in the 1890s, the business of six-day cycling, and the gender politics of women’s racing. In Women on the Move, Gilles recovers the history of women’s cycle racing...
Feb 11, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 154
Today we are joined by Brad Balukjian, author of the book The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife (University of Nebraska, 2020). A combination of Charles Kuralt and Lawrence Ritter, Balukjian’s work examines 14 baseball players pulled from a pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards. Balukjian takes the reader on a cross-country tour to meet these now-retired players, who have dealt with being out of the spotlight in different ways. Some stories have a melancholy tone, while ot...
Feb 06, 2020•37 min•Ep. 153
With his new book Back to America: Identity, Political Culture, and the Tea Party Movement (University of Nebraska, 2019), Professor William Westermeyer explores the once-powerful Tea Party Movement and the changing nature of political culture in the contemporary United States. Through extended fieldwork with local Tea Party groups, he documents the distinctive cultural world of the Tea Party Movement and the personal journeys that drew participants to it. He identifies feelings of political dis...
Dec 18, 2019•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 151
Katya Cengel’s From Chernobyl with Love: Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) is an engaging memoir of a Western newspaper reporter’s youthful experiences in Latvia and Ukraine, in the turbulent years from the late 1990’s through the early 2000’s. Interspersed with lively anecdotes, the author brings a unique perspective on the struggles of the post-Soviet era, from the day-to-day vicissitudes of “getting by,” to the broader struggles and dynamics tha...
Dec 11, 2019•58 min•Ep. 109
Katya Cengel’s From Chernobyl with Love: Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) is an engaging memoir of a Western newspaper reporter’s youthful experiences in Latvia and Ukraine, in the turbulent years from the late 1990’s through the early 2000’s. Interspersed with lively anecdotes, the author brings a unique perspective on the struggles of the post-Soviet era, from the day-to-day vicissitudes of “getting by,” to the broader struggles and dynamics tha...
Dec 11, 2019•58 min•Ep. 109
All aficionados of baseball are familiar with the pathbreaking role of Jackie Robinson in reintegrating the game back in 1947. What many fans are less familiar with are the issues that Latinos of color endured both in the minor leagues and the Majors starting back in the 1950s. How difficult was it for a mulato, a person who had never endured (or even heard of) Jim Crow, to come to grips with the “peculiarities” of life in the United States, while simultaneously trying to learn a new language as...
Nov 26, 2019•56 min•Ep. 145
The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Winner of the 2017 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (University of Nebraska Press, 2015; paperback edition, 2018), delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology’s academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnography and ethnol...
Nov 11, 2019•1 hr 43 min•Ep. 650
In his new book, The Investigator: Demons of the Balkan War (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Vladimir Dzuro, a retired Czech police commissioner, provides a first-hand look at the establishment of the International Crime Tribunal for Yugoslavia to prosecute Balkan war criminals. In contrast to the Nuremberg trials, these trials relied upon the traditional work of police detectives to provide the evidence and witnesses for the trials in the Hague. Through his thoughtful yet tantalizing narra...
Oct 22, 2019•56 min•Ep. 103
Elena Jackson Albarrán’s book Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) explores the changing politics of childhood during the period 1920-1940, in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. That conflict, a civil war which brought down an authoritarian regime, came with new political ideas about social justice that would elevate workers and peasants as quintessential revolutionary citizens. In the context of state formation and natio...
Oct 16, 2019•49 min•Ep. 60
One. Two. Three. That’s as long as it took to sear the souls of a dozen young American men, thanks to the craziest, most controversial finish in the history of the Olympics—the 1972 gold-medal basketball contest between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s two superpowers at the time. The U.S. team, whose unbeaten Olympic streak dated back to when Adolf Hitler reigned over the Berlin Games, believed it had won the gold medal that September in Muni...
Sep 24, 2019•38 min•Ep. 142
May ’68 marked a watershed moment in French society, culture, and political life. The feminist movement was no exception. Women took to the streets and meeting halls around the country, challenging outdated sexual standards, fighting for reproductive freedom, and articulating women’s oppression in radically new ways. In Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Dr. Lisa Greenwald offers a refreshingly new perspective o...
Aug 15, 2019•53 min•Ep. 572
Dr. Joseph U. Lenti’s Redeeming the Revolution: The State and Organized Labor in Post-Tlatelolco Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) focuses on state-labor relations in the decade directly following the massacre of peacefully protesting students in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the the Tlatelolco district of Mexico on October 2, 1968. The massacre was a turning point in twentieth-century Mexican social and political history, and as Lenti demonstrates, it pushed Mexican political lead...
Aug 13, 2019•51 min•Ep. 57
The “Dust Bowl” remains a mainstay in American history textbooks. When dust storms swept over the southern plains in the 1930s, they upended farming communities and left thousands of migrants in search of brighter horizons in the “Dirty Thirties.” The historian Douglas Sheflin takes a closer look at the Dust Bowl’s long-term legacy in the often overlooked Colorado plains that border Kansas and Oklahoma. His book, Legacies of Dust: Land Use and Labor on the Colorado Plains (University of Nebraska...
Jul 10, 2019•52 min•Ep. 33
Lina del Castillo’s book explores scientific, geographic, and historiographic inventions in nineteenth-century Colombia. In this fascinating book, well-known figures of Colombia’s history (such as Francisco José de Caldas, and José María Samper) are cast under new light, while unexplored institutions such as the Instituto Caldas and the Colegio Militar are analyzed in-depth and with striking clarity. By bring such wide array of historical actors and institutions, del Castillo provides a nuanced ...
Jul 09, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 199
Chris Donnelly's new book Doc, Donnie, The Kid and Billy Brawl: How the 1985 Mets and Yankees Fought For New York’s Baseball Soul (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) focuses on the 1985 New York baseball season, a season like no other since the Mets came to town in 1962. Never before had both the Yankees and the Mets been in contention for the playoffs so late in the same season. For months New York fans dreamed of the first Subway Series in nearly thirty years, and the Mets and the Yankees vie...
Jun 18, 2019•48 min•Ep. 133
In Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Sandra C. Mendiola García analyzes independent union activism among street vendors facing state repression and the displacing forces of neoliberalism. Set in Puebla, Mexico’s fourth largest city, Street Democracy traces how these informal workers were politicized in the 1960s and 1970s and collaborated with working-class, leftwing student activists. After forming the Un...
May 23, 2019•56 min•Ep. 42
In Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet(University of Nebraska Press, 2017), author Rosalyn LaPier, an associate professor in environmental studies at the University of Montana, complicates several narratives about Native people and the nonhuman world. Rather than “living in harmony with nature,” as stereotyped by the ecological Indian mythos, the Blackfeet people of the northern plains believed they could marshal supernatural forces to bend t...
May 16, 2019•59 min
Kathleen Keller’s new book, Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) is teeming with mysterious persons, foreigners, misfits, and the surveillance of numerous figures who appeared to threaten the stability of empire. In this detailed and compelling study of what the author has termed the “culture of suspicion” of the years between the world wars, readers are exposed to a range of colonial personalities, ...
Apr 01, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 63
