Like rock climbers scaling a big wall, Josh and Chris take on the towering crag of higher education. Josh finds perspective on this adventure in tackling a monumental read, Peter Heather’s Christendom, a story of how paradise was lost in the orthodoxies and power drive of the hulking monolith known as the Roman Catholic Church. Wary of such heights…

AI needs copper. Yes. Sure. Okay. But what happens next? We live in a world of banal narrative - news media, politics, advertising - wherein our lives are curated with messages and stories of progress and performative empathy (think “thoughts and prayers” or “appreciate your patience and understanding”). Much of this gospel of progress and toxic po…

When is a war not a war, but a police action? When is killing not killing but a “pragmatic, managerial militarism”? If you guessed, when the war criminal represents a liberal democracy, you win the cheese! If you simply said, “Henry Kissinger,” you win the whole wheel of cheese! “A perfect expression of American militarism’s merry-go-round” is what…

Sell the story and people will buy the product, so goes a hallowed principle of marketing. It works so well in advertising that corporations will spend 7 million dollars on a 30-second Super Bowl commercial, peppered up with shilling celebrities, just to sell a donut. And what works for donut companies works for nations. Wrap the story in enough ce…

Having tried and failed (repeatedly) in their anger management counseling, and with league fines no longer an effective deterrent, Josh and Chris decided to give history one more try. And in this holiday season of miracles, what they delivered in shiny holiday packaging is a brand new episode of History Against the Grain. Clio the gift-giving muse …

We may experience life in the eternal present, but history rides along with us. And the history inside our classrooms this semester at American River College was suddenly and without warning upended by the history under our feet: our primary classroom building, Davies Hall, was shuttered upon being declared a seismic risk. As mismanagement and mana…

Hey Florida, oh well, whatever never mind - you take the leprosy we’ll take the truth. Here on HAG we got the narratives that liberate, you dig? A good for what ails you cure for the summertime blues, wherever you may be in the thermal dome. Tune in, turn on, and get ready for a cool refreshing dip in history with a very special guest to quench you…

Another trip around the school year calendar, another teacher cycle complete. They say the students never get older, but neither do their teachers, they just get on an airplane to Anaheim and fly off into the eternal languor of another summer. And our fountain of youth? It’s the history that keeps us young. And the trick is to find yourself a skele…

What do you do when it’s raining at the beach? Throw on your swim suit, grab a beach towel, a pair of flip flops, and have a lovely refreshing swim with HAG - Spring Break edition. Think of us as your history lifeguards, keeping you safe from the currents of bad history and the culture war undertow. History may be facing an existential crisis, but …

Join us for Episode 61 as HAG takes the show on the road with a live recording at the 136th annual meeting of the American Historical Association, held in Philadelphia. The AHA is the biggest and oldest of our professional associations, and is doing its best to stay young and in the game. But the history game in the U.S. today is in the full throes…

Glad tidings to all our friends of HAG, as we wrap up 2022 and another eventful year in history. Predicting the future of the past is not for the squeamish, and once again we take our listeners into the breach where stories get made and stories are told, and as always, we are searching for a history we can trust. Take the American freedom story tha…

“It is impossible that things should be other than they are; for everything is right,” said Dr. Pangloss. "Oh, Pangloss!" cried Candide, "what a strange genealogy! Is not the Devil the original stock of it?” With earthquakes and a bit of light editing, we cast off with Voltaire and Episode 59 in search of the stories that do not make us sick. It is…

You’ve heard the one about how the Past, Present, and Future walk into a bar? It was tense (pause for mandatory eye-roll). Well, speaking of tense, things are a little frosty these days in the U.S. culture wars over history. It’s getting so you can’t tell your friends from your frenemies. The profit-maximizers over at the College Board announced a …

Whether we regale you with tales of an early morning fishing trip or a relaxing solstice sound bath, we at HAG are here to help you find an escape from the summertime blues. If you are feeling a certain dreadful deja vu, and find it hard to tell the difference between real world war crimes and aging actor fighter pilots, or decide which is scarier,…

“Stories are wondrous things,” says the writer Thomas King, “And they are dangerous, for once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world. So you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories you are told.” Another mass killing of innocent people in America has been perpet…

We invite you to listen in with Episode 55, and celebrate the 2-year anniversary of History Against the Grain. It’s been quite a trip, from quarantine beards to creeping agoraphobia, and through it all a real time accounting of life in the apocalypse. We may look a little scruffier after all this, but that’s just because we have saved our straight …

Violence has been central to the national and imperial projects of the modern age. State-sponsored violence has often targeted peoples deemed as subaltern and subordinate, especially dispossessed peoples, native peoples, enslaved peoples, and colonized peoples. Not that you would necessarily get that from the national and imperial history narrative…

Attention class, today we are having a quiz. It is a winner-take-all-quiz, so that if you answer the question correctly you’ll pass the podcast with a perfect grade. If, however, you should select the wrong answer then you will fail and be condemned to live out the remainder of your days listening exclusively to self-help podcasts. Don’t worry, it’…

86 years ago the Black activist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois published a breakthrough work of historical scholarship called Black Reconstruction, which set about demolishing the reigning story of white nationalist nostalgia framed around the storytelling conceit called the Old South. Black Reconstruction was a righteous call for America to acknowle…

Here at HAG we have to stay light on our feet, in tip-top shape, because those public statues of anointed heroes which stand frozen to time and analysis, are never more difficult to pin down and even harder to catch, then when they are just standing still. You wouldn’t think so. After all, challenge a statue to a blinking contest, and you’re bound …

When we tell a story about the past are we liberating our understandings or building a set of prison walls to keep our understandings captive? Does historical knowledge become our passport to explore or, like a bad 007 plot, serve as our license to kill. And if we build up a set of institutions and systems to enshrine and police that knowledge and …

If a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is the only item on the menu, and you know a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is not going to do you any good, what are your options? Do you just keep pretending that this is the best of all possible meals? Or do you dress it up with lots of tasty add-ons, like maybe some pepperoni and curry? Or, and here’s wha…

Join us for Episode 48 The Province of Mutiny. In a week where the Olympic Games play out like the Age of Empire’s hangover, we here at History Against the Grain offer you a tonic of truth. With every medal ceremony the Olympics remind us just how ingrained the performance of nationalism is in modern life. So it is in history as well. Yet if nation…

Summer travel got in the way of recording a new episode this week so as a placeholder we are reposting one of our favorite episodes from last summer. In Episode 18 we talked with University of California Davis professor Ali Anooshahr about his books Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions; and The Gha…

True crime TV shows back in the day offered sober disclaimers assuring anxious listeners that “names have been changed to protect the innocent.” As our listeners know, here on HAG we prefer calling things by their true names, and those who commit the crimes, are most definitely getting called out. That guarantee holds true even when the criminal ac…

This week the HAG news team covers the latest staged performance of the long-running tragicomedy known as U.S. History. We watch as historical veracity gets bum-rushed by the flag waving drugstore cowboys of the Arizona legislature. These dude ranch dudes down in the Valley of the Sun are threatening a $5,000 fine for any public school teacher will…

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 …

"What is the meaning of this?!" Not simply a question for the affronted patriarch anymore, but a question we should be more often asking of the histories we tell. Or in the words of filmmaker Raoul Peck, “we search for truth when we should search for meaning.” We are too often poorly served by histories that hang on claims of truth but offer only c…

"We birthed a nation from nothing,” says Rick Santorum, the goggle-eyed Christian nut job and former U.S. Senator. For Santorum’s audience it is all too clear who he means by “we” - an imagined nation of white Christian people hermetically sealed in time and exclusively responsible for the authentic American identity. Well, from the nothingness of …

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 o…

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 Ge…

As the United States once again sees the dreadful legacy of a gun culture reap its deadly toll on the living, we pause to consider how the histories we inherit condition us to mis-remember the violence of the past. Often presented in the narrative guise of a patriotic nostalgia and exceptionalism, the historical violence of empire and nation buildi…

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…

"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…

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, Ark…

‘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…

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…

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…

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 vi…

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 diag…

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. Starvatio…

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 t…

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 …

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 th…

Welcome to episode 25, the silver jubilee edition of History Against the Grain. We’re podcasting from the Truman Balcony, steroid free, speaking truth to power, and not even a little winded. Think of HAG as the podcast equivalent of Deadwood, a wild west roaring camp of a podcast, where an uncompromising saloonkeeper and brothel owner is the standa…

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: …

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…

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 rang…

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 th…

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 thi…