Afleveringen
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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 âthoughts and prayersâ or âappreciate your patience and understandingâ). Much of this gospel of progress and toxic positivity contradicts our own lived experiences - we know things donât work, and the system sets up to screw us. History narratives often work that way too, with big national stories of shiny continuity and advancement, where the occasional âroad bumpsâ â say, environmental destruction and labor impoverishment due to the strip mining of, oh, copper â get written off as collateral damage. Just aberrations in the narrative, with stories of people and places lost in the folds of a map, and unremembered lives hidden in the shadows of the archives. And the beat of progress goes on. Want the truth? Demand better stories about the past. Forget about âobjectivity,â âboth sides,â and god knows, âfair and balanced,â and make your inquiries avowedly truthful and ethical. Look into the shadows, examine the folds, investigate the cracks in the storytelling, because like Leonard Cohen said, cracks are where the light comes in.
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When is a war not a war, but a police action? When is killing not killing but a âpragmatic, managerial militarismâ? If you guessed, when the war criminal represents a liberal democracy, you win the cheese! If you simply said, âHenry Kissinger,â you win the whole wheel of cheese! âA perfect expression of American militarismâs merry-go-roundâ is what historian Greg Grandin calls Kissingerâs tautology of justifying wars in the present by appealing to wars in the past. And here at HAG, we have our own name for it. We call it, the narcissism of power. With narcissists of power, it can be pretty hard to tell the heroes from the villains, especially when they all use the same AI-generated come on. But as Frank Herbert reminds, you better think twice before accepting the doe-eyed kid with the perfect locks and curls is a messiah, cause he might just be a pissed off, spice-sniffing, megalomaniac with a rising body count out to settle some scores. Our advice? Ask to see his publicity photos first, and find out whatâs going on his statue before signing over your soul.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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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 celebrity mythology - letâs call it history - and a nation can sell almost anything: bad deeds become star-spangled reveries, while the supposedly sacred symbols veil the productâs toxic contents.
Join us with our special guest Ricardo CatĂłn, as we ponder the past, from the banal to the just plain bad, and the marketing schemes known as national history.
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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 has come through once again: their indefinite suspension for repeated instances of unsportsmanlike podcasting is lifted, and both of your favorite HAG hosts are back on the court, in their old school shorts and Converse All Stars, podcasting with the same reckless abandon that has won them so many past championships. Some podcasting pundits and doubting Thomases say those championships are in the past, but HAG fans do not despair, because it is in the past where Josh and Chris do their best work. So join them on a victory lap, as your indefatigable HAG hosts run circles around the perils of nationalism and expose the really messed up stories they inspire.
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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 managerial hubris combine to drive us deeper into an unthinkable administrative boondoggle, we once again pause to take ground readings, and assess the risks of collapse in the histories so often told. Concerned for the well-being of our students, we have declared several of these stories to be seismically unfit. From Davies Hall to the Haitian Revolution, and the great universe of storytelling beyond, join us for another rambunctious episode of History Against the Grain.
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Hey Florida, oh well, whatever never mind - you take the leprosy weâll 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 your summer thirst with stories that matter. Special guest Bram Hubbell of Liberating Narratives
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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? Itâs the history that keeps us young. And the trick is to find yourself a skeleton key to unlock all the hidden stories that you never knew were there all along waiting for you to tell. Speaking of which, have we told you the one about theâŠ
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What do you do when itâs 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 not to fear. Just tune in, turn on, and hang loose with your HAG hosts as we break it all down and build it back better. Just in the nick of time too - with a new History Against the Grain, itâs like a day at the beach.
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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 of a 21st century identity crisis, as many, including state legislatures and even some historians, cling to 19th century self-identities. The remedy? Your HAG doctors prescribe a dose of reality: look out the window. Not to worry faithful listeners, the bright lights of the big city could not dim the ardor of your intrepid hosts for truer histories and better stories.
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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 that gets constantly recycled, where great ideas come from the pens of great men, and freedom is bestowed as a gift by founding fathers. Have you heard it? Itâs in all the textbooks. Weâre going to check the label on that one, see where it was made and with what ingredients. Too many added preservatives and saturated fats it would seem, and grown from a toxic soil. Here at HAG we are on a fitness kick, and recommend a healthy history diet grown from a truthful soil, with stories that are equitably sourced, humanely raised, and rich in storytelling nutrients. In fact, letâs make it our New Yearâs resolution: a healthy history diet and a happy and healthy 2023.
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âIt is impossible that things should be other than they are; for everything is right,â said Dr. Pangloss. "Oh, Pangloss!" cried Candide, "what a strange genealogy! Is not the Devil the original stock of it?â
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 not so easy as one might imagine, harried as we are by zombie narratives that refuse to die, textbook deadlines, and paeans to liberal democracy proclaiming the end of history. If man really did invent agriculture because he was getting hungrier, then who are we to deny the foolish optimism of those who say weâve never had it so good? Or maybe it is just time to interrogate the archives and hear some other voices for a change. But thatâs only if we really want to know whatâs wrong and how to fix it. On the other hand, if youâre fine, and itâs fine, and everything is fine, then grab a seat next to Ted Cruz at the baseball game and pretend you canât hear all those Bronx cheers.
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Youâve 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. Itâs getting so you canât tell your friends from your frenemies. The profit-maximizers over at the College Board announced a new AP African American History course, so good, right? Sure, but what took so long? AHA president James Sweet got into hot water over some goofy comments on presentism, African American history, and the Supreme Court, and then apologized. So, uh, good? We hear that President Joe Biden calls on a historian when he needs perspective. Thatâs gotta be good, right? Wait, ithe historian he listens to is Jon Meacham? Well letâs just say itâs all pretty confusing, but not to worry. Think of us here at HAG as your history relationship therapists. In this episode weâve brought in Past and Present to work through their communication issues, break some really bad habits, and establish some healthy norms going forward (you hear that Future?).
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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, special effects dinosaurs or black robed Supreme Court Inquisitors, youâre not crazy, summertime surreal is here and history really is in retrograde. But donât believe them when they say there ainât no cure for those summertime blues. We got your tonic right here! So join us on episode 57 as we sample a special brew of history rich counterstories and drink to your good health.
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âStories are wondrous things,â says the writer Thomas King, âAnd 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.â
Another mass killing of innocent people in America has been perpetrated with an appeal to history. Touting an idea called âReplacement Theory,â right-wing political pundits, politicians, and now, again, domestic terrorists have loosed the poisonous story of white nationalism to violently project who they say âwe really are as a nation.â No longer limited to the lunatic fringe of racial supremacists, unfiltered white nationalism has found a home in the comfortable lap of the GOP and mainstream conservative media. As we suggest in todayâs episode, such extremist claims are different only by degree from the long-standing white nationalist, standard mainstream history of the nation. And if we donât immediately recognize that, it is only because the stories we usually tell ourselves, have been carefully formatted as designer memories, safely romanticized for the mainstream understanding of who âwe really are as a nation.â No matter how familiar those designer memories may seem, a closer look often reveals them to be born of a checkered past, with stories tailored and curated to serve the needs of certain narrow interests. These designer memories usually involve some variation on the âus versus themâ story emplotment, a bewildering narrative binary that makes more palatable the nationâs long history of violence, war, and domestic terrorism.
In other nations as well, that same appeal to an imagined historical exclusivity and âus versus themâ storyline, has engendered similar pathologies of violence.
The national stories we tell ourselves, it would seem, are killing us.
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We invite you to listen in with Episode 55, and celebrate the 2-year anniversary of History Against the Grain. Itâs 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 thatâs just because we have saved our straight razors for the shaving of bad history. And in this episode we reflect on the many lessons unlearned as the world once again plays host to another state-sponsored war of destruction. Heart wrenching scenes of humanity bleed into the mediasphere, where banal and myopic commentary intones history with providential conviction. It seems the reports of Historyâs death back in the 90âs were greatly exaggerated. Triumphalist national narratives live on like history zombies amid the ashes of war, and in the endless deja vu of national sermonizing, the masters of war exonerate and convict each other as men of the same shared hypocrisy.
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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 narratives that modern states cultivate, narratives that bewilder and obscure the true costs of such violence in deference to claims of progress. Even when inflicted tragedies are acknowledged, and sins confessed, a certain historical narcissism may redirect the focus away from the true human costs to the supposedly magnanimous quality of the confession, or frame it all as just so much unfortunate but unavoidable collateral damage along the road to progress. Like the directions on a shampoo bottle, there follows an endless ritual of atrocity, memory, forgetting, and repeat.
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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’s multiple choice so you have a decent 1 in 4 chance of guessing correctly.
The question is: Which of the following correctly describes an essential element of virtually any imperial or national history?
A. Secular.
B. Sacred.
C. Profane.
D. All of the above.
Did not answer “D. All of the Above”?Well don’t feel bad, listening to podcasts is a worthwhile way to live your life.
Recording this episode as we are on the anniversary of the January 6, 2021 Capitol Insurrection, we felt obligated to make sense of the inevitable swelling up of nausea that memories of the day are sure to inspire, and the proportional part played by the national history and imperial history stories we tell ourselves in making and keeping us sick. Our diagnosis? Those stories are toxic and we are being poisoned. Our prescription? Tell truer and better stories.
Think of us as your friendly neighborhood history pharmacists, and from Emperor Aurangzeb to George Washington, we have the dosage you need to cure your history headache. -
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 acknowledge its great historical debt to Black Lives, and published at a time of racial violence and rigid segregation. Today, our episode, records on the occasion of yet another breakthrough publication in historical storytelling called The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Arguably the greatest effort to tell the âbig storyâ of Black lives in American history since Du Bois, we devote our episode to consider the lifecycles of stories, the birth, death, and rebirth of histories that break new ground and inspire new understandings of the human project, from the Dawn of Everything to the reckoning for racial justice. Our conclusion? We must not wait another 86 years for the story wheel to turn, these new stories must find a central place in the storytelling imagination of the nation, if we are ever to have the nation we wish.
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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 wouldnât think so. After all, challenge a statue to a blinking contest, and youâre bound to lose. Challenge it to a game of tag and you are bound to win. So unkinetic are they, that pigeons always know just where to find them. So unchanging are they, that passersby barely need to look up. Yet we know that history is just never frozen in time, and no matter how stiff the statue, the closer we look the more elusive its meaning becomes. Never mind the heroic and motionless exterior, the action is going on within, where the truth and facts of the story offer a constantly moving target of historical meaning. And for that, we must chase that meaning like track stars. Statues and the stories they purport are not for us to worship with unquestioned devotion and reverence as âhistory,â but to interrogate for the hidden meanings. Because It is the meaning we are after, not the stolid exterior. We want to know what sort of story it tells, and whether that story is told truthfully and with meaning, whether it is a story that keeps us sick, or a story that makes us well. And for that, we must interrogate the statue, the story, and the history they hide, lest we remain captive to that statueâs unblinking, impassive authority.
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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 codify its ways of storytelling, how do we prevent it from becoming a Frankensteinâs monster of the same stories repeated in a cycle of self-enforcing orthodoxy? Well, for starters, open the windows and unlock the doors, and breathe that autumn air. A whole world of stories awaits us out there, and even with episode 50 of History Against the Grain, may it always be true that our baskets of knowledge never fill up.
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