Reckoning with Jason Herbert

This week guests Rachel Gunter and Nicole Gunter join me to talk about whether or not Carrie is a high school film, what Stephen King has to say about women, and whether or not the remake stands up to the original. About our guests: Rachel Michelle Gunter received her Ph. D. in history from Texas A&M University in 2017 and is a Professor of History at a community college in North Texas. Her re...

This week Drew McKevitt and I talk about Clint Eastwood's vigilante cop, Dirty Harry Callahan. We get into the rise of gun culture in the United States, Dirty Harry as a response to the counter culture revolution of the 1960s, and ultimately recast Dirty Harry for our current age. I haven't laughed this hard in a long time. About our guest: Drew McKevitt is an associate professor of hist...

Tons of news coming out of Star Wars Celebration in London today and I'm going to attempt to give some quick thoughts on where I see the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises going. We're talking Ahsohka, Dawn of the Jedi, the new film starring Daisy Ridley, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Did Rocky Balboa end the Cold War? More importantly, who won the war for 1980s hearts and minds between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone? We get into all of that with HATM Podcast veterans Craig Bruce Smith and Robert Greene II. About our guests: Craig Bruce Smith is an associate professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norf...

This week, HATM Podcast tackles the Acadian Diaspora, the Great Depression, the Odyssey, the Old South, the West, and the greatest Coen Brothers films of all time. Seriously, is there anything we don't cover in this episode? About our guest: Christopher Hodson (PhD., Northwestern University, 2004) is a historian of early America and the early modern Atlantic world. He is the author of The Aca...

This is our first film review here at Historians At The Movies Podcast. I just got back from seeing John Wick Chapter 4 and give you my first impressions. Spoilers within the pod, so be warned. If you guys like this we’ll do more of them.

This week Historians At The Movies Podcast takes on 1955's Guys and Dolls . Special guest Sara Georgini jumps in to talk about the film at the pinnacle of the American musical scene, the tension between Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, and yes, gets me to list my favorite musicals of all time. About our guest: Sara Georgini earned her Ph. D. in History from Boston University in 2016. She is t...

This week Mary Hicks and I dig into life at sea with Master and Commander (2003). This is one of my favorite films and a movie I love to teach with. Mary is a scholar of the Black Atlantic and knows far more about the slave trade and life onboard these ships than I could ever hope to learn. We're talking about the Napoleonic Wars, Crowe and Bettany, and Mary's work focusing in on the exp...

This week Jacob Lee joins Historians At The Movies to talk about the myth of the mountain man on film via 1972's Jeremiah Johnson and 2015's The Revenant. Basically, these films are beautifully shot and largely full of shit. But that doesn't mean we can't enjoy them. Jacob and I talk a lot about the borderlands, sexual representation on film, and the role movies like these have...

Here it is folks, the one that started them all: 1987's Predator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Sonny Landham, Jesse Ventura, and more catchphrases than any other film in history. This is actually the very first podcast we ever taped and it's still my favorite. In it, Craig, Rob, and I dig into this movie, talking about what Predator has to say about masculinity, geopolit...

This week Historians At The Movies goes Down Under to talk about 1986's Crocodile Dundee and we are doing it with the founders of Historians At The Movies: Australia: Chelsea Barnett and Joel Barnes. This movie is everything HATM was designed for: taking something fun and then pointing out everything we can take from it. This was a blast to record. About our guests: Dr Chelsea Barnett is a ge...

This week Historians At The Movies revisits what is obviously the most historically accurate film ever made: Mel Gibson's The Patriot (2000). Ok, so maybe the movie plays fast and loose with history, but does that mean we can't have fun with it? Craig Bruce Smith and Robert Greene II jump in to jump on The Patriot . About our guests: Craig Bruce Smith is an associate professor of history...

This week Historians At The Movies gets into Steven Spielberg's Lincoln . And I've got two of the best damn historians working today to talk about it. And yes, we're ranking the hottest presidents of all time. About our guests: Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and currently is a fellow at the Kluge C...

This week HATM  revisits 1997's Soul Food to talk about food history, the African diaspora in the United States, and gendered spaces in the house. To do so, I got two of the best damn scholars of food history in the United States: Adrian Miller and Mark Johnson. If you don't know their work, you soon will because they drop some absolute knowledge bombs in this podcast. And yes, we'r...

This episode is two of my favorite people talking about Star Wars and how it fits in discussing archival research and the North American borderlands. And yes, we rank the films, definitively. About our guests: Alejandra Dubcovsky is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She is also the inaugural fellow in the Program for the Advancement of the Humanities, a...

This week we're dipping into Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise (1991). This is such a powerhouse film and we can use it to talk about a ton of issues related to the early '90s and all the way to today. And this movie is just awesome. So watch it as soon as you can. Currently available on Amazon Prime. About our guests: Dr. Lauren MacIvor Thompson is a historian of early-twentieth-cen...

We're joined this week by my good friend and fellow University of Minnesota alum Dr. Adam Blackler to talk about Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel . Folks, I'd never seen this film before watching it for the pod so listening to Adam dissect it is a thing of beauty. But stay on, because he'll talk about his work in German colonial Africa as well as German cinema and how it...

What is it about time travel movies that entices us all? I guarantee if you start thinking about your favorite films there's a time travel movie in there somewhere. Besides, isn't history a way of traveling to the past and thinking about what we would've done in those circumstances? This week, we're getting medieval on the HATM Podcast with two historians who are rethinking the...

There are few films that can be considered as perfect movies. But 1974's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three may be on that list. We're joined this week by Eric Rauchway, a professor at UC Davis and specialist of The New Deal. We break down what this movie has to say about American politics coming out of  World War II, the meaning of the subway to the people of New York City, and whether...

We all know Die Hard is a Christmas movie, but is it a history movie? This week we're talking to two of the most prominent historians of the Early American Republic to get to the bottom of the debates. You're gonna love where this goes. Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. Gordon-Reed won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in...

When I was a graduate student studying slavery in the Americas, there were a host of books you had to read. Among them was and is this dude, Brett Rushforth. Brett has since become a friend of mine and what you'll find when listening is that this guy is not only one of the smartest people working the field, he's a giving human being and I'm so flattered that he chose to sit down and...

This episode is for all of you who can't stop taking pictures of your food. I'm joined by Emily Contois (@emilycontois) and Zenia Kish (@zeniakish) to talk about Jon Favreau's Chef . This is an awesome episode and you're gonna love it. About our guests: Dr. Emily Contois is a scholar and teacher of media, food, health, and identity. Her book, Diners, Dudes & Diets: How Gend...

So here it  is. The very first Historians At The Movies Podcast. If you're new to #HATM, we're (allegedly) the longest running watch party on the internet. Every week for over four and a half years, scholars and lovers of movies and history have joined together every Sunday night to watch and livetweet a movie together. It's been an amazing experience and one that has built a commun...