History Against the Grain

Where do hidden things get found, where does the margin become the center, and where does the light shine in the dark? In Episode 45 that’s where! From Tulsa to Tiananmen, from Timbuktu to Trinidad, your HAG history team has got the good, the bad, everything. So throw on your favorite  I❤️Diouboye t-shirt, grab some popcorn, and settle in as we lay down the history gauntlet to all the memory...

During a week when a murder trial featuring a notorious police officer as defendant rendered its verdict, another broader verdict hung in the balance over the American justice system itself. Like all governing institutions, America’s policing and justice systems are products of a historical evolution , one that has defined the ongoing development of centralized states since the dawn of human gover...

Once again bigotry is in vogue, and red state minions without shame are tripping all over one another to pass shamefaced voter suppression laws. Even Major League Baseball, no slouch itself in the annals of Jim Crow, has taken action in protest of Georgia’s recent effort to disenfranchise Black voters. Un-ironically, all of this plays out as the George Floyd murder trial is held in Minnesota, whic...

In March of 2020, a year ago, we started a podcast, intending to capture and build upon a discussion of history we’d been having for years. It was a discussion mostly in short bursts, often in passing, outside our classrooms, in the doorways of our offices, and frequently in the hallways and stairwells of the building where we teach. Our intent was to use the calmer space afforded us by a podcast...

"And how does one tell impossible stories?” A question well placed for our time, and one confronted by the scholar Saidiya Hartman, who has journeyed through the heart of darkness of slavery’s archives in search of Black lives past. Yet in their efforts to recover those stories, scholars like Hartman and professional historians compete in a broader marketplace of historical knowledge, where our pu...

It’s angry. It’s fragile. It’s toxic. And it’s trending. Like history itself was trademarked. That’s why we here at HAG call it: History ™ When is history not about the past? When it becomes a toxic brand. This toxic history brand comes straight from the syrup factory and it seems to be everywhere these days, from rural backwaters like Harrison, Arkansas to leafy suburbs like North Ogden, Utah; fr...

‘Father, father We don't need to escalate You see, war is not the answer For only love can conquer hate You know we've got to find a way To bring some lovin' here today’ Marvin Gaye had it right, but too many who are invoking historical fathers lately sound more like the racist apostles of white nationalism from the salad days of Nazism and Fascism a century ago. Join us for Episode 36 Fatherlands...

It goes like this: mostly you stand on a level platform and the history lays out before you like a Bierstadt mountain landscape, cool, daunting, and full of color. But on the rare occasion the history blows right up your back, hot and gnarly like a Santa Ana wind. The level platform turns over as you watch your hat blow away in the dust. You forget which part is the history and which part was your...

Hate to say we told you so, but.... On Wednesday, January 6 the coup plotters from the firm of Trump, Hawley, Giuliani, and Cruz made their bid, and like a scene from a horror movie, sent a horde of angry villagers up the hill to attack the castle. Adrenalized by a go-get-em speech from America’s grifter-in-chief, the MAGA maulers might have pulled it off, might have prevented the transfer of powe...

On a day when the U.S. capitol plays host to an armed standoff with insurrectionists relentlessly egged on by the criminal-in-chief, it pays to remember that the whole world is watching. When modern liberal capitalist systems fracture, all pretense and condescension goes out the window. And the reality of force and violence that has so long been visited upon the disenfranchised peoples of the worl...

Have you been feeling a little hollowed out lately? Listless? Not much appetite? Everything starting to taste like a badly overcooked Trump steak marinated in yesterday’s bathtub water? Well, you might just have a case of occidentosis. But not to worry friends, the semester is almost over and the saucy boys are making a history house call. Our diagnosis? You’re just a little queasy from the rollic...

Still sleepy from their socially distanced tryptophan turkey fiesta, the Saucy Boys awaken in Episode 31 to the lies, damn lies, and sketchy statistics of capitalism’s pandemic chicanery. Essential workers may keep us fed in the time of COVID, but cold hearted capitalism won’t budge a federal minimum wage off its 2007 level of $7.50/hour. Starvation wages for essential workers. What gives? Is it r...

Join us as we celebrate HAG’s pearl milestone: Episode 30, with a chorus of global voices. We are a podcast born of pandemic, now eight months into the deep, fired by an ongoing interrogation of the history outside our windows. True to our promise, HAG has jettisoned the borders, and explored the wider world, both the roads less traveled and with the main thoroughfares revisited. With Episode 30 w...

The results are in, the car horns have all honked, and by the width of a pencil thin mustache, the competent stewards of a failed system have defeated the real estate grifter and his racist minions. Sort of. On November 3, voters said the name: Rumpelstiltskin! all right, but to no one’s surprise, that short-fingered vulgarian refuses to leave the Tower, and instead soils the presidential bedsheet...

Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded slave? Ouch! No, say the saucy boys, you wanna get hitched? Go to Reno and the Silver Bells Wedding Chappel, but under no circumstances should anyone get married on an Old South plantation. As a wedding destination, a former slave labor camp just has no merit! And speaking of merit, Josh explains that when it comes to so-called meritocracies, the d...

This week join the HAG team and their very special guest, University of Pittsburgh historian and Pernille Røge, as we take a look at what was cookin’ in empire’s crazy kitchen known as the Early Modern era. This history moves in mysterious ways, but it’s all right, because the saucy boys offer a polyrhythmic take on modernity, and ask the question: can you really fix a system that never worked in...

Was Mulan even Chinese? Has Tr**p ever read a book? Does the Apocalypse got ya down? Never fear, the saucy boys are back and we’re throwing haymakers straight to the jaw of every history zombie. Josh has got his groove in a synchronous fall semester season, and he’s asking students to question every premise. Howard Zinn drops by with a plea for the people, as we pull backthe  curtain on the b...

Join us this week for an all Haiti episode. Rather than go postal on the blah blah blah of corporate conventions and platitudinous political campaigning, the saucy boys turn up the volume on voices that matter. Our special guest is André Juste, a Brooklyn- based Haitian native, artist, writer, and global observer of all things vital. In a wide ranging discussion with Josh, Andre expounds on his ow...

It’s back to school time for the saucy boys as we spotlight a new school year, pandemic edition. Coronavirus politics seem to infect everything, including the school reopenings in Georgia, where craven meets crazy as admin and parents conspire to keep the masks off and the kids in the crowded classrooms. With infection rates up, it’s all part of the real time biology lab experiment known as Covid-...

We welcome Josh back from his errand in the wilderness and catch up with the drunken frat party known as America. The frat prez took a cognitive test and couldn’t pronounce Yosemite. While frat brother Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas, initiated pledge week hazing with a bill to ban history teachers from discussing slavery. If you wanna pledge this frat, bro Tom will make you sing the song of Ame...

Sovereignty makes its own claims, enforces its own reality, and as we learn in this week’s episode, writes its own history. Our special guest, Professor Ali Anooshahr of UC Davis joins us to discuss his research on the history claims made by the great sovereign empires of Eurasia. He explains how Persian, Indian, and Turkish chroniclers invented genealogies for the ruling dynasties they served, to...

America’s Fourth of July holiday left the H A G team feeling flat, but not to worry, you’ll find all your favorite fireworks lighting up this episode. The saucy boys take a roman candle to the patriotic nonsense of a president’s July 4th speech, and place firecrackers under the feet of a corporate media still playing the awful charade of both side-sides-ism. And with a huge assist from Frantz Fano...

After a stop in St. Louis to discuss everyone's new favorite muzzle-challenged avatars of racial panic, the saucy boys turn to the main topic of the week: the "Karen Phenomenon". First, Chris interviews educator -- and partner-in-quarantine -- Jenny Padgett about the necessity of self-reflection, education,  and listening for those who wish to de-Karenize themselves and then Josh attempts to...

As the history of now adds fresh new pages with each passing day, your H A G team hosts new voices and shares historical insights to help make sense of it all. For episode 14, Josh and Chris welcome to the podcast Sacramento educator and activist, Jordan McGowan. With great relevance for the unfolding drama of our day, Jordan discusses the decolonizing of the classroom and the need to liberate edu...

Statues are falling like bowling pins and the saucy boys are here to pick up the pieces. The past is a living breathing thing so why should we mark it with static icons of Confederates, slave dealers, and imperialists? Tear them all down we say. Continuing on, we ruminate on the recent emergence of the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle leading into a broader discussion of alternative social...