Tonlé Sap is one of Southeast Asia’s, if not one of the world’s, natural wonders. Between the dry and wet seasons, the lake expands almost six times in size to cover an area the size of Kuwait. The flows are so strong that the Tonlé Sap river actually reverses course, with water from the lake flowing into the Mekong river. And that means the lake is one of the most biodiverse in the world, with fish populations that have sustained fishing communities for generations. But the lake is currently st...
May 12, 2022•40 min•Ep. 82
The Life of the Afterlife in the Big Sky State: A History of Montana's Cemeteries (U Nebraska Press, 2021) is a groundbreaking history of death in Montana. It offers a unique, reflective, and sensitive perspective on the evolution of customs and burial grounds. Beginning with Montana’s first known burial site, Ellen Baumler considers the archaeological records of early interments in rock ledges, under cairns, in trees, and on open-air scaffolds. Contact with Europeans at trading posts and missio...
Mar 28, 2022•55 min•Ep. 90
Josefa Velasquez lived a long and full life. When Josefa wasn't co-running a tamale factory and cantina just outside of Wastonville, she was hosting friends and family at her saloon, where "drinking, dancing, and eating tomales" abounded. Josefa's friend, Maria Ascenciόn Solόrsano, was surprised she lived so long: "this woman lived like a rich woman, she ate of the best and drank of the best, and in spite of that she lasted long." "Surely," deduced Maria, Josefa "must have taken after her ancest...
Mar 09, 2022•53 min
In Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Rockies (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Molly P. Rozum explores the two related concepts of regional identity and sense of place by examining a single North American ecological region: the U.S. Great Plains and the Canadian Prairie Provinces. All or parts of modern-day Alberta, Montana, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Manitoba form the center of this transnational region. As children, the first postc...
Feb 11, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 86
On this episode I spoke to Dr. Susie Porter, Professor in History and in Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She is the author Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879-1931 published in 2003, and in today's podcast we will be talking about her more recent book From Angel to Office Worker: Middle-Class Identity and Female Consciousness in Mexico, 1890–1950, which is part of The Mexican Experience Series of the University of Nebraska Press. In late ninete...
Feb 08, 2022•56 min•Ep. 21
The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere (U Nebraska Press, 2021) is a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic. Paulette F. C. Steeves mines evidence from archaeology sites and Paleolithic environments, landscapes, and mammalian and human migrations to make the case that people have been in the Western Hemisphere not only just prior to Clovis sites (10,200 years ago) but for more than 60,000 years, and likely more than...
Jan 27, 2022•42 min•Ep. 303
The Salton Sea is a kaleidoscope. To some people, it's a waste land, a place of death only suitable for a dumping ground. For others, it's a clarion call, a warning for what humanity faces in our anthropogenically climate changed future. For still others, it's simply home. In The Settler Sea: California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (U Nebraska Press, 2021) Dr. Traci Brynne Voyles, associate professor of women's and gender studies at the University of Oklahoma, argues that the...
Jan 19, 2022•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 83
Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the rel...
Dec 23, 2021•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 108
More than one million Indian soldiers were deployed during World War I, serving in the Indian army as part of Britain's imperial war effort. These men fought in France and Belgium, Egypt and East Africa, and at Gallipoli, in Palestine, and in Mesopotamia. While Indian contributions to the war have long been recognized (unlike other colonial contributions), it has long been disparaged and lacked significant scholarly attention, especially in the western academy. In Indian Soldiers in World War I:...
Dec 01, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 1109
In Asphalt: A History (U Nebraska Press, 2021), Kenneth O’Reilly provides a history of this everyday substance. By tracing the history of asphalt—in both its natural and processed forms—from ancient times to the present, O’Reilly sets out to identify its importance within various contexts of human society and culture. Although O’Reilly argues that asphalt creates our environment, he believes it also eventually threatens it. Looking at its role in economics, politics, and global warming, O’Reilly...
Nov 22, 2021•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 88
In this episode, I interview David Barak-Gorodetzky about his new book, Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist (U Nebraska Press, 2021). This comprehensive intellectual biography of Judah Magnes—the Reform rabbi, American Zionist leader, and inaugural Hebrew University chancellor—offers novel analysis of how theology and politics intertwined to drive Magnes’s writings and activism—especially his championing of a binational state—against all odds. Like a prophet unable ...
Nov 18, 2021•43 min•Ep. 252
In Political Science, we are very familiar with the work of scholars who try to unpack why the ERA failed to get the required states. But Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920-1963 published by the University of Nebraska in 2021 interrogates how earlier debates on the ERA transcended traditional political divides and ultimately redefined the concept of citizenship in the United States. By using a rich collection of public and private sources, Dr. Rebec...
Oct 25, 2021•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 555
Chronicling the retreat of mobile pastoralization from Mediterranean coastlines, Andrea Duffy's Nomad's Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World (U Nebraska Press, 2019) investigates a mystery: where did the sheep go? Duffy seeks the answer by exploring the relationship between forestry policy and pasteurization by comparing and contrasting the implementation of French Forestry in France's Provence, French colonial Algeria, and Ottoman Anato...
Oct 25, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 82
In Mexico environmental struggles have been fought since the nineteenth century in such places as Zacatecas, where United States and European mining interests have come into open conflict with rural and city residents over water access, environmental health concerns, and disease compensation. In Silver Veins, Dusty Lungs: Mining, Water, and Public Health in Zacatecas, 1835-1946 (U Nebraska Press, 2020), Rocio Gomez examines the detrimental effects of the silver mining industry on water resources...
Oct 15, 2021•44 min•Ep. 134
The controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) made headlines around the world in 2016. Supporters called the pipeline key to safely transporting American oil from the Bakken oil fields of the northern plains to markets nationwide, essential to both national security and prosperity. Native activists named it the "black snake," referring to an ancient prophecy about a terrible snake that would one day devour the earth. Activists rallied near the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota for mont...
Sep 01, 2021•47 min•Ep. 71
Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During the Jim Crow Era (Nebraska, 2020) is about the places where the past and future meet. Throughout the early twentieth century, African Americans moved to California for jobs, for the beautiful weather and landscapes, and to start futures for themselves and their families. Like their white neighbors, they found sites of play and fun across the Southern California environment, from lakes to beaches to country clubs. Dr. Alison Rose ...
Aug 09, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 69
Today we are joined by Greg Larson, author of Clubbie: A Minor League Baseball Memoir (University of Nebraska, 2021). In Clubbie, Larson shares his unique perspective from his two-year stint as clubhouse attendant for the Aberdeen IronBirds, a Class A short-season affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles. Larson’s starry-eyed perceptions about the game were quickly erased by the reality of a job that was time-consuming and thankless. Larson brings the reader into the minor-league clubhouse, showing ho...
Aug 03, 2021•40 min•Ep. 193
In Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity (U Nebraska Press, 2019), Simon Ferdinand analyzes diverse map-based works of painting, collage, film, walking performance, and digital drawing, made in Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, arguing that together they challenge the dominant modern view of the world as a measurable and malleable geometrical space.
Jul 27, 2021•42 min•Ep. 38
Why has the United States, the world’s premier military and economic power, struggled recently to achieve its foreign policy desiderata? How might America’s leaders reconsider the application of power for a world of asymmetric and unconventional threats? In his new book, Power and Complacency: American Survival in an Age of International Competition (Potomac Books, 2021), American Enterprise Institute Visiting Fellow Philip Lohaus explores the roots of America’s “efficacy deficit” and offers rec...
Jul 21, 2021•42 min•Ep. 90
A city of modest size, Providence, Rhode Island, had the third-largest Native American population in the United States by the first decade of the nineteenth century. Patricia E. Rubertone's Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) tells their stories at this historical moment and in the decades before and after, a time when European Americans claimed that Northeast Natives had mostly vanished. Denied their rightful place in modern...
Jun 28, 2021•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 103
Today I talked to Edward G. Longacre about his new book Unsung Hero of Gettysburg: The Story of Union General David McMurtrie Gregg (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). On the 3rd day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Union cavalry officer David Gregg ensured that Jeb Stuart’s Confederate cavalry troops didn’t succeed. Stuart’s orders were to attack the right flank of the Army of the Potomac and create a pincer movement by attacking from behind while Pickett’s forces made their disastrous frontal at...
Jun 24, 2021•33 min•Ep. 202
Shake and Bake is the story of Archie Clark, one of the top playmaking guards in the 1970s pre-merger NBA. While not one of the game’s most recognized superstars, Clark was a seminal player in NBA history who staggered defenders with the game’s greatest crossover dribble (“shake and bake”) and is credited by his peers as the originator of today’s popular step-back move. Signed as the Lakers third-round draft pick in 1966, Clark worked his way into the starting lineup in his rookie year. But Clar...
Jun 14, 2021•53 min•Ep. 189
Twelve companies of American missionaries were sent to the Hawaiian Islands between 1819 and 1848 with the goal of spreading American Christianity and New England values. By the 1850s American missionary families in the islands had birthed more than 250 white children, considered Hawaiian subjects by the indigenous monarchy and U.S. citizens by missionary parents. In Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U. S. Colonialism in the Pacific (University of Nebraska Press, 2...
Jun 11, 2021•57 min•Ep. 1007
Frank Ruda's book Abolishing Freedom. A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism (University of Nebraska Press 2016) presents a compelling reading of authors diverse as Martin Luther, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Freud. They grapple with the limits of human freedom, and obviously so. Because we understand freedom - at least since Aristotle - as a capacity or a capability to choose freely between different options. Expressed with a formulation of Harry Frankfurt: "An action is free only if the agen...
Apr 12, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 214
In the Nahuatl language, nepantla refers to the ancient Mesoamerican “philosophy that views the world through motion-change,” binding past, present and potential futures together in creative tension (p. xvii). In Nepantla Squared: Transgender Mestiz@ Histories in Times of Global Shift (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), Prof. Linda Heidenreich relies on this concept to reflect expansively about identity, subjectivity, and the research process in this volume, mapping potential connections and u...
Mar 17, 2021•44 min•Ep. 938
Today I interview Patrick Madden, an essayist. Now, for most of us, an essay—that thing we were assigned to write in high school or maybe that thing we stayed up all night writing in college—doesn't immediately evoke feelings of joy and excitement or associations of pleasure and profundity. No, an essay isn't something we usually chose to do. And we can take that view of the essay even further. I'm guessing most of us didn't grow up hoping to be an essayist. In fact, we might be surprised to rec...
Mar 12, 2021•59 min•Ep. 167
Today I interview Patrick Madden, an essayist. Now, for most of us, an essay—that thing we were assigned to write in high school or maybe that thing we stayed up all night writing in college—doesn't immediately evoke feelings of joy and excitement or associations of pleasure and profundity. No, an essay isn't something we usually chose to do. And we can take that view of the essay even further. I'm guessing most of us didn't grow up hoping to be an essayist. In fact, we might be surprised to rec...
Mar 12, 2021•59 min•Ep. 167
Today the salary cap is an NBA institution, something fans take for granted as part of the fabric of the league or an obstacle to their favorite team’s chances to win a championship. In the early 1980s, however, a salary cap was not only novel but nonexistent. The Cap: How Larry Fleisher and David Stern Built the Modern NBA (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) tells the fascinating, behind-the-scenes story of the deal between the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association that created t...
Feb 02, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 183
Professor Andrew Grant Wood’s new edited volume, The Business of Leisure: Tourism History in Latin America and the Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), explores the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of tourism in the region and its relationship to nationalism, imperialism, development, and many other themes. The volume also provides a new way of understanding the relationship between the United States and Latin America during the twentieth century, showing how Latin America...
Jan 27, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 68
The story of Manifest Destiny and the role of expansion in American slavery is dominated by the history of Western migration. In A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), Claire M. Wolnisty shows that the South had a long history of looking not just West, but South to protect the future of a proslavery southern system. In the antebellum era, multiple groups of southerners built connections in Lat...
Jan 05, 2021•50 min•Ep. 887
