You didn’t think you’d subscribe to the newsletter of a History Professor without being assigned reading, now did you?
Well, in this case your assignment involves listening, and my sense is that many of you already are regular listeners to the excellent podcast on the history of the American Right entitled Know Your Enemy. In their most recent episode, hosts Sam Adler-Bell and Matthew Sitman talk with Columbia University historian Kim Phillips-Fein. This conversation focuses on the historiography of the American right, a topic I’ve talked about a few times in this newsletter (like here and here) and which, IMO, is incredibly interesting and important. Anyway, I won’t give too much away, but if you find my research on Walter Huss interesting then I suspect you’ll find that conversation worth your time. I also highly recommend Kim’s books Invisible Hands and Fear City.
You’ll notice at the beginning of the episode that Matt gives a shout out to the panel I organized recently at the American Historical Association which featured him, Kim Phillips-Fein, Niki Hemmer, Anthea Butler, and Rachel Maddow. The title of the panel was “Rethinking the Far Right in American History: Questioning Old Paradigms, Asking New Questions, and Engaging Broad Publics.” We had an SRO audience, the panelists had many smart things to say, and I especially appreciated the opportunity to engage in massive amounts of inside-baseball “shop talk” with this lovely group of history nerds.
In other news, for those of you in the Portland area, I’ve got two public events coming up which you might be interested in. The first is a talk at Portland State on Tuesday January 23.
The second is an event at Powell’s on February 8 where I’ll be interviewing historian Ben Park, the author of an excellent new book on the history of Mormonism.
If you come to either of those events and are so inclined, please make it a point to say hi. It’s always nice to meet and shake hands with other weirdos who find Walter Huss interesting.
The podcast episode was great! Lots of discussion of historians of conservatism!
I couldn't play it. Regionalisuue (I'm an Australian) or paid only?