Episodes

  • S3 E10 The Craft of Writing History with Drafting the Past’s Kate Carpenter
    Jun 4 2025

    In this final episode of season 3, we talk with Kate Carpenter, creator and host of the podcast Drafting the Past, which explores the craft of writing history, and researcher of the history of storm chasing in the U.S. We examine the many angles on history writing that Kate explores in her podcast, question what a closer look at this aspect of historians’ work illuminates about the discipline and about the work of history more broadly, and delve into the fascinating history of storm chasing on the Great Plains.

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    42 mins
  • S3 E9 Big Asia
    May 7 2025

    A Martian lands on Earth, heads to the nearest university’s History Department, and asks the question, “What is Asia?” What kind of response would they get? We explore this question with historian Nile Green, who outlines a forum titled “Big Asia: Rethinking a Region” that appears in the June 2025 issue of the AHR.

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    23 mins
  • S3 E8 Teaching the Vietnam War, Fifty Years On
    Apr 2 2025

    Fifty years after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, we investigate the challenges and opportunities of teaching the Vietnam War and the ways that understanding the war has changed. We speak with four contributors to an AHR forum entitled “The Vietnam War Fifty Years On,” published in the March 2025 issue—Thy Phu, David Biggs, Wen-Qing Ngoei, and Jana Lipman. And we pay a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

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    46 mins
  • S3 E7 Archiving Loss, Learning, and Time in the Field
    Mar 5 2025

    Historian Lily Pearl Balloffet explores the real, live human relationships we form in the process of doing historical work and how, for her, those vital connections were decisively disrupted in the years of the global Covid-19 pandemic.

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    29 mins
  • S3 E6 AHA 2025 and History Teachers
    Feb 5 2025

    In this episode, we revisit AHA 2025 with a focus on history teachers. Daniel sits with Katharina Matro and Megan Porter—both high school history teachers—to talk about AHA sessions geared toward history teaching as well as the AHA 2025 K–16 Content Cohort, which this year focused on the theme of “Resilience in the History Classroom.”

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    21 mins
  • S3 E5 Jo Guldi on Text Mining, AI, and Digital History
    Jan 15 2025

    Historian and quantitative methods expert Jo Guldi discusses text mining, AI, and the wider landscape of digital history in this longform conversation. Guldi’s work on these subjects can be found in two recent AHR articles—“The Algorithm: Mapping Long-Term Trends and Short-Term Change at Multiple Scales of Time” published in the June 2022 issue and “The Revolution in Text Mining for Historical Analysis is Here” from the June 2024 issue—and in the book The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press.

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    1 hr and 24 mins
  • S3 BONUS ‘Historians On’: AI in Teaching and Research
    Dec 18 2024

    At the 2024 AHA Annual Meeting in San Francisco, historian David Trowbridge sat down with a handful of attendees to discuss topics of particular interest to historians in the present moment. In this episode of our new "Historians On" series, David speaks with Katharina Matro, Jeff McClurken, Kalani Craig, Jo Guldi, Johann Neem, Kevin Gannon, and Lauren Tilton on the topic of AI and its implications for history teaching and research.

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    51 mins
  • S3 E4 Histories of Resilience
    Dec 4 2024

    In December 2024 American Historical Review published its first ever special issue. Titled “Histories of Resilience,” it features almost two dozen scholars from a wide range of fields contributing their research on resilience. In this episode we hear from board of editors members Josh Reid and Cymone Fourshey as they discuss how the issue came together interspersed with cameos from a few of the contributors—Kate Whiteley on the Wiyot Tribe of Northern California, Thaís R. S. de Sant’Ana on migrant workers in Brazil, Tammy Wilks on Kenyan Nubians, and Bob Reinhardt on US communities submerged as part of big dam projects.

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    43 mins