Anti-Social Studies

Appreciate good content? Show your support with a one-time donation below or join me for extra episodes on Patreon! Real talk: Theresa May and I are exhausted. I’ve been researching this episode on Brexit for one month and every time I think I’m ready to record and move on with my life, something dramatically shifts. …

Appreciate good content? Show your support with a one-time donation below or join me for extra episodes on Patreon! Happy Spring Break! Oh what’s that? You have to go into work over spring break? That sucks. Well, at least you have summer to look forward to. What?! Normal adults just work in July?! That’s unfathomable …

Appreciate good content? Show your support with a one-time donation below or join me for extra episodes on Patreon! As we speak, 10 women are going on trial for advocating their right to drive cars. Yeah, to drive cars. That thing that we do instead of walking ½ a mile to the bagel shop around …

Appreciate good content? Show your support with a one-time donation below or join me for extra episodes on Patreon! So this episode is specifically for my US History students. They are off on a weeklong class trip to New Orleans and I promised them I would teach them a little history before they went. Then, …

Appreciate good content? Show your support with a one-time donation below or join me for extra episodes on Patreon! I had planned this big dramatic intro where I would go over all of the juicy details about the most recent U.S.-North Korea summit in Vietnam. I postponed this episode for a month just so that …

Emily was lucky enough to present at SXSW EDU 2019 with her friend and coworker, Emily Pool. We’ve made an episode of us talking through our presentation, “Teaching in the Era of Fake News“. We go over media literacy, fake news, and strategies for teaching current events in the classroom. If you weren’t able to …

As I record this, the US Congress has just begun its 116th session and is, in theory, getting to work. Although, I don’t know who they got to swear in the new members because the government is shut down. I guess the guy reading the oaths is an “essential employee”… How does one “shut down” …

Fair warning: I’ve given myself a challenge this episode. I’m going to try to teach you a story from American history without cynicism. I’ve realized that my US history class has become a Who’s Who of land stealers, exploiters, and politicians and, while I’m confident that I’m teaching our history the right way; it can …

They’re coming… Can you feel it?… Their footsteps reverberating across Mexico… all along the border American troops and border patrol stand guard, gazing into the distance, waiting for them to arrive… The caravan. Even though the election is over, so – mysteriously – politicians aren’t talking about this enormous threat anymore, that doesn’t mean the …

Hey! I don’t know if y’all have heard but, there’s an election going on. I know! Thankfully 3,000 of my Facebook friends have been posting about it nonstop over the last two years so I remembered to vote. But maybe you haven’t heard. So, if I’m the first person to tell you this, then let …

I hope everyone had a great Columbus Day weekend! I did not because I’m from Austin and as of last year, we don’t celebrate Columbus Day. So I had a fantastic Indigenous Peoples’ Day! Take that, Columbus! There’s some Montezuma’s Revenge for you – 500 years too late. This is my second episode in a …

Two months ago, I traveled around Peru with twelve teenagers. We visited churches and underground crypts filled with artistic displays of human bones. We got altitude sickness and chewed a lot of coca leaves.

Early in the morning on September 16, 1810, a priest was warned that he would soon be arrested by Spanish officials. His brother and a band of followers took immediate action. They went to the local jail and freed dozens of prisoners,

As my husband continues to remind me, we are only a few days away from the start of a new football season. And usually I’m wholly uninterested in what goes on on the field. And I still am. But I am now highly interested in what goes on off the field.

Y’all. I just got home from seeing Black Klansman and it’s necessary viewing. Set in the 70s, this movie is not a period piece – it’s not meant to depict a different time. It’s clear that Spike Lee sees parallels between the black experience in the pas...

In 1223, Genghis Khan’s army invaded the territory of the Kievan Rus. They established the Khanate of the Golden Horde and most of eastern Europe fell under Mongol control. It was under this oppressive regime that one principality rose to unite the peo...

Friends, we’ve done it. We’ve reached the final episode of Season 1: The Big Picture of World History. Let me tell you, my original plan was to make six episodes. Six. One for each era in world history. But it turns out that a lot of things have happen...

Think about the Middle East. They’ve been controlled by Persia, Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Caliphates, the Ottoman Empire, and now the European mandate system. The last 60 years have been the first opportunity various ethnic and religious gro...

Today we’re going back to the 20th century and Decolonization, or as I like to call it, “Don’t Let the Door Hit You On The Way Out”.So remember about how WWII discredited the idea of empire? The Allies spent the war fighting against the Nazi empire in ...

Today, let’s look back through that same time period in Latin America. This is a region where the Cold War heavily influenced their politics and attempts at true independence. Latin America was a collection of Spanish colonies that gained independence ...

Today, we’ll look at the new global system that gets set up in the wake up European empires. The U.S. gets obsessed with containing things, we go to space (allegedly), China gets Mao-ed, and *spoiler alert* the U.S. wins the Cold War!

Today, we’ll talk about the war that was directly caused by the War to End All Wars. Talk about irony. The world gets depressed, Hitler rises, and everything falls apart. Act 1: The Depression Act 2: The Rise of Hitler Act 3: The War Act 4: The Holocau...

Today we’re going to look at World War I, or “The War To Cause All Wars!” There will be acronyms, accidental hijinks that get an archduke killed, trench foot, and a really pissed off Germany. That can’t be good.

Last time we explored the Age of Imperialism in Africa, India and the Pacific. The West was able to successfully conquer most of the world through its advanced technology and ruthless superiority complex. But now they’re going to attempt to crack open ...

Today we’re going back to the Age of Imperialism, or as I like to call it, “Allow me to ruin the Jungle Book for you.”. To be clear, this is going on at the same time as the political and industrial revolutions from last episode.