Borrowed & Returned – Details, episodes & analysis

Today we’re bringing you a really interesting episode from our friends at This Guy Sucked, a podcast hosted by historian and writer Claire Aubin about the worst people in history. Each episode, Claire sits down with an expert to pull back the scholarly curtain on a terrible person from their research. Because, as they say on the show, it’s never too late to have haters, and you can’t libel the dead.

This particular episode is about the early 20th century filmmaker D. W. Griffith whose 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” led to the resurgence of the KKK among other cultural repercussions we’re still feeling today. Africana studies scholar Kellie Carter Jackson joins the episode to tell us exactly why this guy sucked.

If you like what you hear, you can listen to the rest – and dozens of other great episodes – by searching for “This Guy Sucked” wherever you find podcasts.

Guest

Our guest Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College and host of This Day from Radiotopia. Her book We Refuse is available here. 

Sensitive Themes & Topics

Racism and racial violence, slavery, sexual violence

Credits

- Host & Executive Producer: Claire E Aubin. 

- Editor: Julia Schifini. 

- Music: Marshall Dean Williams

- Multitude: multitude.productions

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, climate scientist and activist. Recently, she sat down with Jordan Kisner, of the Thresholds podcast, to talk about our climate future. You may have heard clips of their conversation in our last episode about Silent Spring. Today, we're playing the full interview as a partnership with Thresholds, a show about about the messiness, overlap, u-turns, revelations, and friction points in the lives and work of artists.

If you like what you hear, head on over to thisisthresholds.com to find more great episodes and subscribe!

When Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States came out in 1980, it literally rocked the boat. Instead of starting where most histories of the Americas start — on the deck of Columbus’s ship as it approached land — Howard Zinn flipped the script, focusing instead on what the people standing on the shore would have seen. In this episode, we look at the ripple effects of Zinn’s radical take on history. 

You can read a transcript of this episode on our web page.

• Check out our booklist with titles related to A People’s History of the United States.
• You can find Nick Witham’s book Popularizing the Past at the University of Chicago Press.
• Learn more about the ReVisioning History series from Beacon Press.
• Read more about Howard Zinn, and visit the Zinn Education Project for tons of resources for teachers and students.
• History books are one of the subject areas targeted for censorship right now. Learn what you can do to help by visiting our Books Unbanned homepage, or listening to Borrowed and Banned, our previous series about the state of book banning in America.

We’re getting in your ears to tell you about our first ever live recording of Borrowed! It’s free, at 5pm on Sunday, January 26 at Union Hall, as a part of Brooklyn Podcast Festival (event details here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/borrowed-live-tickets-84560078471).

And, we’re collaborating with The Bowery Boys on an episode about Andrew Carnegie’s complicated legacy. That will come out this Friday, January 24 on our feed and theirs (http://www.boweryboyshistory.com/bowery-boys-first/bowery-boys-podcast).

At the edge of Brooklyn, there’s a beach covered with glass bottles, nylon stockings, rusting kitchen appliances, and decaying batteries. The trash didn’t float here, though. It’s eroding from a poorly-covered landfill. We start this episode at Dead Horse Bay, where we ask what trash can tell us about structures of power, and end the episode in 1960s Bed-Stuy, where the local Civil Rights Movement took on a surprising enemy: garbage collection.

Read the transcript and check out our book list here: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/our-garbage-ourselves