In Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (U Nebraska Press, 2023), University of Colorado poet and English professor Julie Carr uses family legend and lore to tell a history of the American West at the turn of the twentieth century. By tracking the story of her larger-than-life great-grandfather, the late nineteenth century People's Party politician and Nebraska settler Omer Kem, Carr explains her family's ties to systems and trends critical to underst...
Jul 14, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 136
Scouting has been called pro baseball’s personalized way of renewing itself from year to year and a pathway to the game’s past. It takes a very special person to be a baseball scout: normal family life is out of the question because travel is a constant companion. Yet for those with the genuine calling for it, there could be no other life. Hearing the special thwack off the bat that indicates a raw prospect may be the real deal is the dream that keeps true scouts going. Scouts have the difficult...
Jun 11, 2023•53 min•Ep. 249
In From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969 (U Nebraska Press, 2020), Alicia Gutierrez-Romine examines the history of criminal abortion in California and the role abortion providers played in exposing and exploiting the faults in California’s anti-abortion statute throughout the twentieth century. Focused on the patients who used this underground network and the physicians who facilitated it, Gutierrez-Romine provides insight into the world of illegal abortion fr...
May 21, 2023•55 min•Ep. 54
Throughout the twenty-first century, genocide denial has evolved and adapted with new strategies to augment and complement established modes of denial. In addition to outright negation, denial of genocide encompasses a range of techniques, including disputes over numbers, contestation of legal definitions, blaming the victim, and various modes of intimidation, such as threats of legal action. Arguably the most effective strategy has been denial through the purposeful creation of misinformation. ...
May 12, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 186
In the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the French Third Republic sought to rebuild its strength to avenge its defeat and secure itself as a major world power. To help achieve these ends, the first professional intelligence services were created to help secure French interests against all possible enemies - both foreign and internal. This gripping story of French intelligence during the late nineteenth century is the subject of Deborah Bauer's Marianne Is Watching: Intell...
May 01, 2023•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 108
In Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (U Nebraska Press, 2023) renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nat...
Apr 23, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 127
In Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946–1975 (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), Giusi Russo focuses on the first decades of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to examine gender politics in the postwar period. The Commission was comprised of a diverse group of women whose ideas about equality often clashed. Shaped by Cold War politics and the process of decolonization, the CSW’s work grappled with issues like polygamy, family planning, FGM, and ...
Mar 18, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 49
The story of water in the United States is one of ecosystemic disruption and social injustice. From the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and Flint, Michigan, to the Appalachian coal and gas fields and the Gulf Coast, low-income communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color face the disproportionate effects of floods, droughts, sea level rise, and water contamination. In Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and a Just Transition (U Nebraska Press, 2023) Matthew S. Henry ...
Feb 15, 2023•54 min•Ep. 87
In 1990, though no one knew it then, a fearless group of players changed the sport of soccer in the United States forever. Young, bronzed, and mulleted, they were America’s finest athletes in a sport that America loved to hate. Even sportswriters rooted against them. Yet this team defied massive odds and qualified for the World Cup, and made making possible America’s current obsession with the world’s most popular game. In this era the U.S. Soccer Federation’s preceding head coach had a better-p...
Feb 05, 2023•55 min•Ep. 236
Spencer Segalla’s Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 (U Nebraska Press, 2021) explores natural and anthropogenic disasters during the years of decolonization and Cold War. Four disasters make up the core of the book: the 1954 earthquake in Algeria’s Chélif Valley, just weeks before the onset of the Algerian Revolution; a mass poisoning in Morocco in 1959 caused by toxic substances from an American military base; t...
Feb 04, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 1295
When late eighteenth-century New Spanish viceregal administrators installed public lamps in the streets of central Mexico City, they illuminated the bodies of Indigenous, Afro-descended, and plebeian Spanish urbanites. The urban patrolmen, known as guarda faroleros, or “lantern guards,” maintained the streetlamps and attempted to clear the streets of plebeian sexuality, embodiment, and sociability, all while enforcing late colonial racial policies amid frequent violent resistance from the popula...
Jan 31, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 179
The US military didn't just conquer its way across the US West and the Pacific - it also collected and categorized across these spaces too. In Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers (U Nebraska Press, 2023), Colorado College's Amy Kohout examines the role of soldiers in the construction of imperial knowledge. By examining how soldiers interpreted the people and places they encountered in the West and in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, Kohout ex...
Jan 22, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 120
After the turn of the twentieth century, schools played a pivotal role in the construction of French West Africa. But as this dynamic, deeply researched study reveals, the expanding school system also became the site of escalating conflicts. As French authorities worked to develop truncated schools for colonial "subjects," many African students and young elites framed educational projects of their own. Weaving together a complex narrative and rich variety of voices, Harry Gamble explores the hig...
Jan 17, 2023•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 156
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has always been globally situated, argues Montana State history professor Amanda Hendrix-Komoto in Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific (U Nebraska, 2022). Through mission work, polygamous marriage, and extensive kinship networks, LDS members sought to create Zions - holy Mormon spaces - throughout the world through relationships with Indigenous people from the Intermountain West to Tahiti and the Hawai'ia...
Jan 03, 2023•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 119
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner’s frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome. T...
Dec 21, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 117
In 1870 several hundred settlers arrived at a patch of land at the confluence of the South Platte and Cache la Poudre Rivers in Colorado Territory. Their planned agricultural community, which they named Greeley, was centered around small landholdings, shared irrigation, and a variety of market crops. One hundred years later, Greeley was the home of the world’s largest concentrated cattle-feeding operation, with the resources of an entire region directed toward manufacturing beef. How did that tr...
Dec 17, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 116
Most of what people think they know about Texas history is wrong, argues Bucknell University history professor Paul Barba in Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery in the Texas Borderlands (U Nebraska Press, 2021). Setting out to write a book on Texas history that didn't mention The Alamo, Barba instead views the region's past through the lenses of borderlands analysis, slavery and captivity, and anti-Blackness, to paint a very different picture than the Texas of popular memory. From the ...
Nov 22, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 113
In Aquaman and the War against Oceans (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), Ryan Poll explores ways the New 52 reimagining of Aquaman--a massive overhaul and rebranding of all DC Comics--transformed the character from a joke to an important figure of ecological justice. In this series, Aquaman becomes an accessible figure for charting environmental violences endemic to global capitalism and for developing a progressive and popular ecological imagination. Poll argues that The New 52 Aquaman shoul...
Nov 14, 2022•43 min•Ep. 136
Franz Boas is remembered today as one of the most important figures in the history of anthropology. In the United States, he is widely created with creating the modern field of anthropology or at least being one of the key people involved in its creation. And yet despite this fact, no biography of the life of Franz Boas has ever been written -- until now. In the first volume of what will be a two-volume work, Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt tracks Boas's life from his birth in 1858 to his permanent appoin...
Sep 27, 2022•56 min•Ep. 188
In Imagining Seattle: Social Values in Urban Governance (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), the geographer Serin Houston complicates Seattle’s liberal and progressive reputation through a close ethnographic study of its urban governance. She sheds light on the institutional classism and racism and market-orientated thinking that pervades the decisions and practices of environmentalism and economic growth in the city. Houston’s finds three major social values--social justice, sustainability, an...
Sep 22, 2022•45 min•Ep. 41
Edited by Ellie D. Hernandez, Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., and Magda García, Transmovimientos: Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Space (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) focuses on queer, trans, and gender nonconforming communities of immigrants and social dissidents who reflect on and write about diaspora and migratory movements while navigating geographical and embodied spaces across gendered and racialized contexts. It forms a nuanced conversation between scholarship and social activism t...
Sep 13, 2022•39 min•Ep. 211
Before 1973's landmark Roe v. Wade decision, abortion in California was illegal for both doctors performing and women seeking the procedure. In From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969 (U Nebraska Press, 2020), Dr. Alicia Gutierrez-Romine, an associate professor of history at La Sierra University, examines the experiences of doctors and patients in southern California during the mid-twentieth century. For doctors, performing abortions carried a good deal of risk,...
Aug 24, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 105
How well do we understand our relationship to sex? According to Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, authors of the new book Hatred of Sex (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), we tend to overlook the “unpleasurable pleasures” that are integral to sex. Sex undoes us, destabilizes us, takes us out of ourselves. Many of our 21st century cultural products—Queer Theory, traumatology, intersectional studies—secretly “hate” sex for these very reasons and build such hatred into their ideas. In our interview, Dav...
Aug 11, 2022•49 min•Ep. 178
oday I talked to Rabbi Wayne Allen about his book Thinking about Good and Evil: Jewish Views from Antiquity to Modernity (U Nebraska Press, 2021). Starting with the Bible and Apocrypha, Rabbi Allen takes us through the Talmud; medieval Jewish philosophers and Jewish mystical sources; the Ba’al Shem Tov and his disciples; early modern thinkers such as Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Luzzatto; and, finally, modern thinkers such as Cohen, Buber, Kaplan, and Plaskow. Each chapter analyzes individual think...
Aug 03, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 306
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many African Americans moved westward as Greater Reconstruction came to a close. Though, along with Euro-Americans, Black settlers appropriated the land of Native Americans, sometimes even contributing to ongoing violence against Indigenous people, this migration often defied the goals of settler states in the American West. In Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877-1930 (U Nebraska Press, 2021), Anthony W. Wood e...
Jul 14, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 311
Childbirth defines families, communities, and nations. In Birthing the West, Jennifer J. Hill fills the silences around historical reproduction with copious new evidence and an enticing narrative, describing a process of settlement in the American West that depended on the nurturing connections of reproductive caregivers and the authority of mothers over birth. Economic and cultural development depended on childbirth. Hill’s expanded vision suggests that the mantra of cattle drives and military ...
Jul 11, 2022•50 min•Ep. 102
In less than half a century, the American West changed dramatically from a region of dynamic borders, politics, and identities to a more fixed zone of borders and demarcations. This is the argument made by Sarah Deutsch, professor of history at Duke University, in Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898-1940 (U Nebraska Press, 2022), a major new synthetic work and part of Nebraska’s History of the American West series. In this wide ranging and transnati...
Jun 13, 2022•56 min•Ep. 99
For centuries Comanches have captivated imaginations. Yet their story in popular accounts abruptly stops in 1875, when the last free Comanches entered a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. In Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands (U Nebraska Press, 2022), the first tribal-specific history of Comanches in film and media, Quanah Parker descendant Dustin Tahmahkera examines how Comanches represent themselves and are represented by others in recent media. Telling a story of...
Jun 07, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 112
In Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Dr. Ashley M. Williard demonstrates how problematics of gender played a central role in defining colonial others, male and female, at the moment when slavery was first introduced in the French-controlled Antilles. The book argues that seventeenth-century French Caribbean reconstructions of masculinity and femininity helped sustain and justify occupation, slavery, and ...
May 30, 2022•49 min•Ep. 83
Ask you average high school student or undergraduate about nineteenth century US history and if nothing else, they likely know the phrase "manifest destiny." The idea that the United States was destined, even pre-ordained, to construct a continent-spanning nation is widely assumed to have been a motivating force in American political life in during the pre-Civil War era, and is similarly thought to have largely come to fruition. Not so, argues Dr. Daniel Joseph Burge, research coordinator and as...
May 30, 2022•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 98
