Skipped History

I’m so excited to share today’s interview with Professor Deborah N. Archer about transportation history—my favorite subject! Professor Archer details how highways are a visceral emblem of white supremacy. We may often forget their origins, but as she reminds us in her new book, Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality , “with transportation infrastructure, his...

I spoke with author Malcolm Harris about his new book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis . We explored three strategies that have a chance of staving off climate change before it’s too late. Malcolm demonstrates—compellingly, I think—how and why the left needs to unite ASAP. Malcolm is a journalist, writer, and critic. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this wit...

If you missed it, the Trump administration took aim at the Smithsonian. As stated in an executive order , their goal is to end the “revisionist moment” carried out by historians. It goes without saying, but to be clear, I don’t support that executive order. On the contrary, I’m proud that this newsletter is part of the “revisionist moment.” The study of slavery, the subject of my interview today,...

Today, we’re talking about the Red Scare: a time of black-and-white politics when people could be arrested just for their political views. Granted, ICE wasn’t abducting people with visas off the street, but I think you’ll find today’s interview relevant nonetheless. Among other things, Clay Risen helps draw a clear throughline from Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump and shares some valuable takeaways...

My guest today is Dr. Edna Bonhomme, author of A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19 . I don’t think Dr. Bonhomme wrote her book knowing there’d be a resurgence of measles, but here we are! I asked Dr. Bonhomme about the history of epidemics and pandemics, both in the U.S. and around the world. Exploring earlier outbreaks set...

Today, I want to share something a little different: a personal story from “one of our country’s greatest historians.” In The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir , Professor Martha S. Jones unearths her family’s history, dating back to when her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement. Over the generations—from Kentucky to North Carolina to Long Island—Professor Jones’s forebears...

In Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America , Russell Shorto brings to life the English takeover of New Amsterdam. The city that emerged from a dramatic standoff stood in stark contrast to Boston—with one place more globally minded and another more inward-looking. Russell argues that the unreconciled differences between “the two ideological centers of the...

My guest today is Professor Brad Snyder, author of You Can't Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads: Angelo Herndon's Fight for Free Speech . Herndon was a Black Communist Party organizer who found himself at the center of a landmark court case in the 1930s. The case made him one of the most famous people in the country, and generations of protesters have “stood on his shoulders.” Yet today, he'...

Today, we dive into a forgotten episode where the government did everything it could to help the worst people. In The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War , Professor Jeff Forret (Lamar University) explores shipwrecks in the 1830s. On board were hundreds of enslaved captives. All of them survived, and almost all of them were soon free in British colonies. Afte...

The Trump administration is poised to try and close the Department of Education. For Professor Eve L. Ewing, “it’s an open question” whether we should abolish schools altogether, albeit for very different reasons. Professor Ewing argues that the pillars of American racism are reinforced in schools. She’s conflicted about whether we need to rebuild schools from the ground up, but there’s no doubt w...

To say there’s a lot going on right now is an understatement. One area where I can offer some clarity, thanks to Professor Julie Greene, is Panama. Professor Greene, a labor historian at the University of Maryland, is the author of The Canal Builders , nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and most recently, Box 25: Archival Secrets, Caribbean Workers, and the Panama Canal . She details the expe...

My guest today is Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza . It’s hard to improve on his book title for summing up our conversation, where we explored some of the history of American Jewish identity, the possibility that what we dubbed the “American solution” might succeed, and how, in Peter’s estimation, we can and must hold competing truths in pursuit of collective saf...

Earlier this week, I spoke with journalist and critic Kyle Paoletta about the history of major cities in the Southwest. In his new book, American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest , he writes, “To see where America is going we have to look at where the Southwest has already been.” So we traced where the Southwest has been, from hundreds of years ago to the present day, befor...

Here and there over the last few years, I’ve come across references to the Freedman’s Savings Bank, an institution formed after the Civil War—which then collapsed nine years later. When I saw that Professor Justene Hill Edwards had written Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank , I jumped at the opportunity to bring her on Skipped History. Professor Hill Edwards (Universit...

A few weeks ago, I sent out a poll asking what kind of history would be most helpful to learn about as we enter another Trump era. Over half of respondents answered “activism we can emulate.” (Shoutout to the 8% of you who selected “quit crying and entertain me!”) In light of the survey results, I thought I’d share a more recent, grassroots history lesson, courtesy of New Yorker cartoonist Sofia W...

Earlier this week, I spoke with Professor David Greenberg about his new biography, John Lewis: A Life . I was curious about lesser-known sides of the iconic activist, whose steadfast commitment to nonviolence was both admired and critiqued during the Civil Rights Movement. Lewis “wasn’t without his flaws,” Professor Greenberg told me, but he grew into “a reminder that America had been through wors...

Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd (University of New Orleans) is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America . She’s also the host of the American Campus Podcast . Her work, which has appeared in various national publications, traces the modern conservative movement to campus wars in the late 1960s. In her estimation, neither Trump nor the conservative ag...

In our last interview before the election, I spoke with Professor Elizabeth Hinton, whose work has been instrumental in shaping my understanding of inequality and urban violence. Professor Hinton highlights how leaders of both political parties have long known “what’s required to meaningfully address the problems of poverty and racism,” but time after time, have opted for more politically palatabl...

My guest today is Rebecca Nagle, an award-winning journalist and citizen of Cherokee Nation, and the author of By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land . Rebecca details the history of violence, dispossession, and resistance behind a monumental Supreme Court case decided in 2020. The case resulted in the restoration of tribal land, but it’s not exactly all unicor...

Amid the anxious wait for Hurricane Milton last week, I asked Professor Jack E. Davis if he’d come back on Skipped History to review some storm history. In The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea , Professor Davis explores how and why Americans began to build on the Gulf Coast. The aftermath of one hurricane in particular generated a practice of trying to overcome, rather than retreat from, extrem...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit skippedhistory.substack.com In our latest interview on the election, I spoke to Professor Drew McKevitt about guns. The gun problem feels insurmountable — in just one example, a new report from Everytown found that “the number of gun violence incidents on school grounds in 2024 so far has outpaced the total number of incidents in all of...

In The Burning Earth , Professor Sunil Amrith delivers a global, history-spanning account of our planet’s environment. One subject he comes back to over and over again is food: rice, sugar, wheat, meat, and more. I asked him about the societal impact of each crop and why he believes there’s no faster way to slow the climate crisis “than changing food systems and agriculture.” Sunil Amrith is the R...

The timing for today’s interview, I think, needs no introduction. Professor Rashid Khalidi details Israel’s long history of relying on outside powers to build a Jewish state: first, the British, and now, of course, the U.S. That record reveals the sizable influence outside forces have today to end the violence unfolding in Palestine (and now Lebanon). Public opinion shifting against Israel suggest...

Why are conservatives so hellbent on dismantling public education? Project 2025 calls for the Department of Education to be eliminated. It further suggests that education policy should “follow the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955, wherein education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families.” As Jennifer C. Berkshire and Jack Schneider reveal, the assault on public sch...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit skippedhistory.substack.com In our latest interview about the 2024 election, I welcomed Professor Kellie Carter Jackson back to Skipped History. In past conversations, Professor Carter Jackson and I explored lessons from Black abolitionists and the effectiveness of violent resistance . Both topics came up again as we discussed Professor...