Making of a Historian

Show notes and more at historian.live! I recorded this way back in September when I had ambitious dreams of doing a whole series on the history of British social clubs, but I’ve been unfortunately wiped with work and with the emotional toll of American politics lately, so I was never able to get the series off the ground. But what we have is a fantastic conversation with my colleague, Seth Thévoz, talking about his research on clubs in 19th Century Britain. Seth is the author of a really wonderful book on how London gentlemen’s clubs had a massive impact on 19th century politicians and politics. At the height, probably over 19 out of every 20 Members of Parliament were a member of at least one club. We talk about Seth’s book and then talk about the differences we see between clubs in the 18th and the 19th century.

You really need to check out show notes at historian.live for this episode. We have so many videos, images and book recommendations for this one. Also check out the mailing list at makingofahistorian.substack.com and you can get an email whenever I make a thing. This week I’m joined by my colleague, Dr. Andrea Horbinski, a PhD from Berkeley who now works for Netflix. We talk about a part of her dissertation. First I should say that her dissertation is fantastic, and in the next few years it’s likely to be a book, tentatively titled Manga’s Global Century. You need to keep a watch for it when it does because it’s an eye-opening history that traces the origins of manga from the late 19th century up to the present. We can’t talk about that whole scope in this podcast, so we talk about the story of the Astro Boy TV show. The creator of Astro Boy, Tezuka Osamu, really really wanted to make an animation. But animations were really expensive. He stumbled onto a method that would mark the entire genre of anime. First, he made the animation on the cheap, borrowing from the street performance style of kamishibai. Second, he sold the animation to TV studios at HALF the cost it took to produce, hoping to recoup costs from sales of comics and branded merchandise. It was a gamble, but it paid off. It became the model for future animes. Expensive productions would be bankrolled by merchandise sales. The entire industry was built on people LOVING anime. The people who drew the animation were apprentices who were hoping one day to become masters with their own manga and anime. The consumers were fans who supported the shows and comics they liked by buying merchandise and attending conventions. Dr. Horbinski traces this story through to the fan conventions, and to new ‘circles’ of amateur and professional creators, many of whom made genres for new audiences, like women. We end by talking about the development of Shoujo and particularly Boy’s Love comics, comics oriented towards women, that circumvented the trap of the boredom of traditional heterosexual romantic tropes by exploring same-sex relationships. It’s a fascinating discussion, and I hope you enjoy it.

Show notes at historian.live

For show notes, check the website historian.live. Get email reminders of when I make stuff: makingofahistorian.substack.com So this episode is an absolute blast. I talk with my old friend Brendan McElmeel—yes, another Brendan M—about his dissertation research on love during the thaw years of the USSR. But before I gush to you about how good the interview is, I have to offer a bit of a mea culpa. I ended the interview too soon! Brendan’s research delves into the limits of the Soviet sexual revolution as well—and how there were a lot of groups left out of the process he’s talking about. But we never get there. Because I ended the interview too soon. I’m a bit worried you’re going to get too rosy a view of what we’re talking about—and take Brendan as being too uncritical or accepting of the people he studies. We’ll have to have him back on the show to talk more about his research when he gets another chapter done so he can correct the record. Now time to gush. Brendan has done such great research into the everyday life of a time period I don’t think we often hear about—that of Soviet Russia. You’ll learn about the horny balconies of group homes, dances, and a brief history of the Soviet Union. And you’ll learn about two Brendans stumbling through the study of history together.

This week I talk with Susan Lanzoni who talks about her book tracing the history of empathy. Empathy has, over the past 100 years, changed a lot in meaning. It started out as one of these untranslatable weird German words that art historians would throw around to discuss the mystical depths of aesthetic experience: einfühlung. This was the ability to literally feel into a thing—usually an object—when you were moved by it. When you were aesthetically moved by a painting of a mountain, you imagined that there was a kind of embodied feeling in the mountain itself. This was translated to empathy—in-feeling. But the term migrated from being applied to things, slowly, to being applied to people. After the Second World War, big professional groups of psychologists and social scientists were struggling with the twin problems of a population brutalized by the Second World War, firebombing and the holocaust, and the prospect of nuclear armageddon. One of the solutions was this human capacity to literally feel for other people—empathy. And slowly this arcane technical word migrated into common usage. It’s a wild conversation that will make you pause every time you use the word in daily speech!

Our website, historian.live, has links, book lists, and more! So if you’re like me, you’ve used the phrase ‘object lesson’ to mean some kind of telling real-world example of something. The new parent waking up at 4:30 in the morning to get work done, for example, is an object lesson about the current childcare crisis. But the phrase used to mean something concrete itself: a particular kind of educational practice that put at its center a student's concrete and systematized appreciation of a physical object. A teacher would present an object—be it something everyday, like a window or a ladder, or something special like ginger, or a little classroom museum of interesting things—and then lead the students through a number of practices that allowed them to appreciate the object, first as an object, and then later, as a representative of abstract ideas. This shows a really distinctive way that 19th century Americans thought about objects, and thought WITH objects. When they saw, say, a piece of coal, they had been taught not only to appreciate the coal as an object, and describe it, but to understand it as a process of production, trade, and the economy.

For show notes, links, and book lists, check out our website at historian.live. Today I talk with Professor Michael Schoeppner, Assistant Professor of History at University of Maine, Farmington, about his book Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship and Diplomacy in Antebellum America. I was initially drawn to talk with Professor Schoeppner simply because he wrote a book about something I knew nothing about: between the early 1820s and the Civil War, many Southern States had rules that barred free Black sailors from coming into their ports. If you were a free negro seaman and came into a Southern port, you’d be brought ashore and put in jail until your ship departed. But Professor Schoeppner uses these now-forgotten laws to tell a much bigger story about the nature of citizenship in the US. The idea of the Negro Seamen Laws as that free Black seamen brought to the otherwise pacific slaves of the south the moral contagion of freedom. We have a deep conversation about the nature of citizenship both in the past and in contemporary America.

Full show notes, including pictures, further reading, and my PATREON are available at the website, historian.live. I’m honored to have Professor David Beerling on the podcast this week, to talk about his book Making Eden, which is a deep history of the evolution of land plants. We’ve talked a bit about environmental history in the past, but I’ve been curious about the longer history of the planet. Professor Beerling’s book is a fantastic look into one of the greatest stories of this history: how plants came to evolve and turn a rocky, eroding planet green. If you—like me—know nothing about plant biology, don’t worry. Professor Beerling guides us through our latest understanding of how plants enslaved bacteria, put on coats, learned to breathe, and started making seeds. Professor Beerling is the director of the Leverhulme Center for Climate Change Mitigation. They just have a new article out in NATURE about how we might mitigate climate change by adding ground up rocks to soil, and thus harnessing the power of plant roots to eat up carbon dioxide. The title is inspired of course by the great Dylan Thomas poem, which Professor Beerling quotes in the book.

Check out full show notes--including book lists on our website at historian.live This week we discuss Tom Almeroth-Williams’ book, City of Beasts—now out in a reasonably priced paperback—which looks at how people and animals worked together in 18th century London. We talk about cows, horses, the great geese herds of Christmastime, and why people in London sometimes just wanted to spend some time outside on their horses. The conversation is really fun—as is Almeroth-Williams’ book. But it’s serious, too. In taking an animal perspective of labor in 18th century London, Almeroth-Williams’ pushes us to change the way we look at the Industrial Revolution, social life, and consumer society.

For show notes, and information on supporting the show, check out our website at historian.live The Nestucca River has been home to salmon and salmon fishers for thousands of years. In this summer-vacation themed episode, I talk with Professor Joseph E Taylor about the 19th and 20th century history of this unique salmon fishery. Combining labor history, environmental history, local history, and a history of recreation, Professor Taylor’s book, Persistent Callings is a deft illustration of how fishing persisted and changed in response to environmental change, changing regulations, and gentrification. All the proceeds from Persistent Callings go to the Pacific City Dorymen’s Association scholarship fund.

In this episode I talk with Professor Brent Sirota about church history in the long 18th century. People have portrayed religion in the long 18th century as a little boring and staid. In the 17th century you had a civil war over religion in Britain. In the 19th century you had evangelicals, Darwin, and the Oxford Movement. But in the 18th century you have almost a cease fire. Professor Sirota's work looks at the process of how that ceasefire came about, and how it was less about religious toleration and more about a political process. In talking about this we end up talking a bit about the end of the world, and why a lot of people in America now think its coming soon. Check out our website at historian.live for book lists, and a link to our Patreon!

In this episode I talk with Stanford Professor Kathryn Olivarius about her research on Yellow Fever in antebellum New Orleans. Yellow Fever was bad. It killed around half of all the people who caught it. Why then did young immigrants to New Orleans seeking to make their fortune sometimes willingly infect themselves with the disease? Olivarius’ research shows that immunity to Yellow Fever became a kind of human capital. People who could demonstrate that they were ‘acclimated’ to Yellow Fever were considered bona fide citizens of the Yellow Fever Zone. Everyone else was just a tourist. If you survived, then it was evidence of your grace—your worthiness in the face of risk—a worthiness that translated to success in the cut-throat world of slave racial capital. It’s a great conversation, one that made me think about the current debate about social distancing and COVID in a brand new way. Thanks to number one listener John Handel for recommending Olivarius’ work to me! Check out Olivarius’ article Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans in the AHR. And keep your eye out for her book out next year Necropolis: Disease Power and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom.

If you like the show, give us money on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/makingofahistorian In this episode, I sit down with Craig Johnson, “the most returningest” guest in the history of this podcast. I ask him to talk about historical parallels to our current quarantine, and the conversation quickly goes in a direction I didn’t expect. Listen! It’s probably the most political episode we’ve done yet. You can find Craig on Twitter @HistOfTheRight. if you want to hear more from Craig (and you should), listen to his podcast, Fifteen Minutes of Fascism.

If you like the show can now support us on Patreon! (patreon.com/makingofahistorian) This week we have returning guest Kyle Jackson—who last came on to tell us about the Panama Canal. Today he’s coming on to practice his orals. I ask him to tell us to give us three different dates when we could start the beginning of US history. It’s a great discussion. You’ll learn a lot. Both about US history, and also about how historians think about history. Can’t get enough of Kyle? (We can’t.) In his other life he’s a producer / rapper dubbed Nahvocado. You can find him on his Insta @nahvocado.

We're inaugurating a new podcast interview series during this weird time of isolation with recurring guest, Varsha Venkatasubramanian. Varsha is studying for her comprehensive exams in like TWO WEEKS and she was gracious enough to join us to talk about what it's like to read a thousand books when you don't have library access. We discuss the history of decolonization, which Varsha masterfully guides us from the ideological origins in the American Revolution, through the Haitian Revolution, to Woodrow Wilson's 14 points, to Indian independence. Probably the most educational and fact-dense interview I've ever done!