American History Untucked

Folks, I know it's been a long time since our last episode. Things have been kind of crazy, but I'm hoping to podcast more consistently this year.

I'm really excited about our guest this episode: Ari Kelman. Ari is a professor at Penn State and author of Misplaced Massacre, which won all kinds of awards over the past couple of years. In our conversation, we mostly talk about his new book, Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War. We discuss the collaborative process Ari went through, working with an illustrator and co-author, to write Battle Lines.

My guest for this episode is Keith Harris. Keith is probably familiar to many people as the man behind the popular blog Cosmic America, which has now been replaced by his new site keithharrishistory. Keith is also the editor of an exciting new online journal, The Americanist Independent and the author of a recently published book, Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans.

In our conversation, we talk about engaging with the public, about his recent and upcoming publications, and about the problems with the academic job market for historians.


Here's a clip from my favorite feature from his old blog, Office Hours:

My guest for this episode is historian and podcaster Liz Covart. Her new podcast, Ben Franklin's World, been amazingly successful since it debuted at few months ago. We talk about academic historians and podcasting, how a podcaster envisions her/his audience, her research on New Englanders in upstate New York, and the snow in Boston.

You can check out her show on iTunes and other popular podcasting venues.

The iTunes feed seems to be acting up. I've reposted it.

Sorry for the long hiatus since the last episode. I'm really happy to be back with a new episode of American History Untucked.

My guest for this show is Kevin Levin, whose blog Civil War Memory has been probably my favorite Civil War website for years. He is also the author of an excellent recent book, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder and has written for the New York Times and the Atlantic. He's managed to do all this while teaching high school full time.


 

Today is the start of the Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, one of my favorite academic conferences. Alas, I will not be attending. However, I will be trying to follow the conference on Twitter. It appears that about a half dozen folks are promising to live tweet the conference (#sha2014 -- the hashtag appears to have been previously used for a music awards show in Singapore).

Obviously, much of what goes on at an academic conference won't make it's way to Twitter or some other online venue. Much of the value of going to these conferences happens away from the actual presentations -- at the vendor hall, at the receptions, etc. However, if anyone wants to live tweet the conversations at the hotel bar, I'm sure that would make interesting reading.

I'm curious about the value of live tweeting, both for the person doing the tweeting and those reading the tweets. Will I learn more about what's happening at the SHA by looking at Twitter than I would by simply looking at the conference program? Is live tweeting a conference a glorified version of public note taking?

I'm curious about what others think. If you live tweet academic events, why? Do you try to reproduce the speaker's arguments in tweet form or do you see tweeting as a form of commentary and analysis of the paper in real time? If you read tweets of academic conferences, what do you hope to get out of it?

Update

Because #sha2014 has already been used for other events (see above), the SHA is encouraging folks to use #2014sha.

My guest for this episode is Dr. Seth Kotch. Seth was a classmate of mine in graduate school and is now the Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the American Studies Department at UNC-Chapel Hill, a post has recently taken after a lengthy tenure as the Digital Projects Director at the Southern Oral History Program.

This is kind of a short episode, as both Seth and I are in the heart of the fall semester and time was at something of a premium. We didn't get a chance to talk in depth about all of the interesting work Seth has done over the past few years. Here's a sampling:

• Mapping the Long Women's Movement
• Media and the Movement (with Dr. Josh Davis, one of our grad school classmates)

My guest for this episode is David Trowbridge, who teaches at Marshall University. He is the creator of the Clio app that uses GPS technology to direct users to historic sites and provides information about the site that you can consume on the go. It's open source, so users can add content about historic sites in their area. Adding content would be a great project for high school or college students. Here's a promo video about Clio:


Trowbridge is also the author of A History of the United States and participated in a recent JAH roundtable on the current state of textbooks. Here's our conversation:

This is my first show of the new academic year and I was very pleased that Anne Sarah Rubin agreed to come on to talk about her new book on Sherman's March, Through the Heart of Dixie. We also got a chance to talk about the digital project that she had created to accompany the book, and about digital history more broadly, including her work with the Valley of the Shadow project.

Unfortunately, the audio quality of the interview isn't great. I don't know whether the problem was with our skype connection or my recording software or my own incompetence (I'm betting on the last option). Anyway, I tried to clean it up as much as I could. It's still a great conversation, even if the audio leaves a lot to be desired.

I'm spending the summer researching in the United States, and am going take the time off from American History Untucked. I can assure you that you'll have a full season of American History Untucked in the fall.

One way you can support the show is by buying the books of the people I've had as guests. Selling academic books is a difficult task: the royalties are low (if they exist at all), the print runs are small, and book stores are hesitant to carry books they think are *too academic*.

Megan Kate Nelson
Ruin Nation

Rachel Hope Cleves
Charity & Slyvia
The Reign of Terror in America

Lil Fenn
Pox Americana
Encounters at the Heart of the World

Chris Cameron
The Many Lives of Chris Cameron
To Plead Our Own Cause

Scott Reynolds Nelson
Steel Drivin' Man
A Nation of Deadbeats
Iron Confederacies

Donald Shaffer
After the Glory

JacquelineWhitt
Bringing God to Men

Many of my guests from last season also have websites or blogs worth checking out:

Megan Kate Nelson
Historia

Donald Shaffer
Civil War Emancipation

Rebecca Onion
Vault Blog