Reckoning with Jason Herbert – Details, episodes & analysis

In this episode, I sit down with cultural geographer Rashad Shabazz to dissect the 1984 classic starring Prince — and ask the uncomfortable questions.

Is The Kid a tortured genius… or a young man replaying generational trauma?
Is the final performance redemption — or dominance?
And what does Minneapolis represent in a film about Black masculinity, ambition, and control?

We unpack race, space, violence, desire, artistic genius, and the myth of upward mobility — all through the lens of one of the most iconic soundtracks of the 1980s.

This is Purple Rain as you’ve never heard it discussed before.

🎧 Press play.

In Episode 183 of Reckoning with Jason Herbert, historian Heather Cox Richardson joins the show for a lively and surprisingly sharp conversation about the film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter—and what it reveals about American mythmaking.

What happens when we place a fantastical, axe-wielding Abraham Lincoln alongside the real political crises of the 1860s—and our own? We explore the Civil War, Reconstruction, the endurance of the “Lost Cause,” and the power of storytelling in shaping national memory. Along the way, we ask whether some myths refuse to die… and whether that might be the point.

Smart, funny, and unexpectedly timely, this episode blends pop culture with serious history—reminding us that the stories we tell about the past often say more about the present than we realize.

This week Dr. Rachel Gross drops in to explain the rise of outdoor goods manufacturers and how they sold us on going outside.

About our guest:

Rachel Gross is an environmental, cultural, and public historian specializing in the history of the modern U.S. Her research and teaching interests center on business, consumer culture, and gender, and she is especially interested in what seemingly ordinary consumer goods tell us about identity and power. She teaches courses on capitalism, commodities, women and gender, and public history.

HOO BOY this week Roman historians Dr. Sarah Bond and Dr. Bret Deveraux drop in to talk about Ridley Scott's ode to his first film, uh, ancient Rome, Gladiator II. We talk about the legacy of the first film, our impressions of the new release, and the actual history behind Gladiator II. This discussion is pretty epic. Stay tuned and subscribe.

About our guests:
Dr. Sarah E. Bond is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa. She is interested in late Roman history, epigraphy, late antique law, Roman topography and GIS, Digital Humanities, and the socio-legal experience of ancient marginal peoples. She earned a PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2011) and obtained a BA in Classics and History with a minor in Classical Archaeology from the University of Virginia (2005). Her book, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professionals in the Roman Mediterranean, was published with the University of Michigan Press in 2016. Follow her blog: History From Below.

Additionally, Bond is a regular contributor at Hyperallergic, a columnist at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and a section editor at Public Books. She has written for The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Washington Post.  Bond's latest book, Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire will be out on February 4, 2025. It is available for preorder here: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300273144/strike/

Dr. Bret C. Devereaux is an ancient and military historian who currently teaches as a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. He has his PhD in ancient history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his MA in classical civilizations from Florida State University.

Bret is a historian of the broader ancient Mediterranean in general and of ancient Rome in particular. His primary research interests sit at the intersections of the Roman economy and the Roman military, examining the ways that the lives of ordinary people in the ancient world were shaped by the structures of power, violence and wealth under which they lived and the ways in which they in turn shaped the military capacity of the states in which they lived (which is simply a fancy way of saying he is interested in how the big picture of wars, economic shifts and politics impacted the ‘little’ folks and vice versa). More broadly he is interested in many of the nuts-and-bolts of everyday life in the ancient world, things like the production of textiles, the economics of small farming households, and the burden of military service.

He is also a lifetime fan of fantasy, science fiction and speculative fiction more generally. Bret enjoys good music, bad jokes and writing about himself in the third person. He is also required, by law and ancient custom, to inform absolutely everyone that he has, in fact, beaten Dark Souls (and now also Elden Ring).

This week Dr. Robert Colby joins us as we talk about one of the most powerful—and one of the most challenging—films in recent memory: 12 Years A Slave. We also talk about Rob’s new book which examines the trade of enslaved people during the American Civil War. 


About our guest:
Robert Colby is an Assistant Professor of American history, focusing on the era of the American Civil War.

Dr. Colby’s research explores the social, military, and political experience of the Civil War era with a special emphasis on slavery and the process of emancipation. His current book project examines the survival of the domestic slave trade during the War, demonstrating the ways in which Confederates used slave commerce to survive the conflict and the ways in which it shaped the onset of African American freedom. His is the winner of the Society of Americans’ Allan Nevins Prize and the Society of Civil War Historians’ Anne J. Bailey Prize and Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award. His research on the wartime slave trade was also a finalist for the Southern Historical Association’s C. Vann Woodward Award. Colby’s writing has appeared in the Journal of the Civil War Era, theJournal of the Early Republic, and Slavery & Abolition. He has also published on Civil War monuments and written on disease in the domestic slave trade.

Dr. Colby earned is B.A. in history from the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to coming to the University of Mississippi, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University.

Find Rob’s book here: https://amzn.to/3YZwgXM

This week Kevin Rusnak and Emily Carney drop in to talk about the movie that made us all dream of going to Space...or at least Cape Canaveral. This episode gets into an era of nostalgia around the Space Shuttle program, the changing role of women inside NASA, and how the Challenger disaster affects how we remember this movie.

About our guests:

Kevin M. Rusnak is the Chief Historian of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center History Office, located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio.  He is responsible for leading the professional research, collection, preservation, analysis, writing, and dissemination of AFLCMC's history and heritage to the organization’s leadership and workforce, as well as to a public audience. Disclaimer: Kevin's thoughts and opinions do not reflect those of his employer or the federal government.

Emily Carney is a spaceflight professional with over a decade of industry experience. She is a space historian and podcaster, and the original Space Hipster. In 2018, the National Space Society named her one of the Top Ten Space Influencers. She is also the co-host of the Space and Things podcast and a Celestis Ambassador at Celestis Memorial Spaceflights. 

This week Craig Bruce Smith and Robert Greene II drop in to debate whether The Terminator was the most important film made in the 1980s, plus ranking the biggest action stars from 1980 to 2000.

About our guests:
 Craig Bruce Smith is an associate professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norfolk, VA. He authored American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era and co-authored George Washington’s Lessons in Ethical Leadership.

Smith earned his PhD in American history from Brandeis University. Previously, he was an associate professor of military history at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), an assistant professor of history, and the director of the history program at William Woods University, and he has taught at additional colleges, including Tufts University. He specializes in American Revolutionary and early American history, specifically focusing on George Washington, honor, ethics, war, the founders, transnational ideas, and national identity. In addition, he has broader interests in colonial America, the early republic, leadership, and early American cultural, intellectual, and political history.

Robert Greene II IS  Assistant Professor of History at Claflin University. Dr. Greene received his Bachelor of Arts in Writing and Linguistics with a concentration in Creative Writing from Georgia Southern University; his Master of Arts in History from Georgia Southern University; and earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of South Carolina, Columbia. Dr. Greene recently completed his dissertation at the University of South Carolina, about the ways in which Democratic Party leaders in the South from 1964 to 1994 vied for the African American vote via appeals to Southern identity and memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Mr. Greene has published a book chapter in the collection Navigating Souths, and has published a scholarly article in Patterns of Prejudice. He has also published at several popular magazines and websites, including The Nation, Jacobin, Dissent, Scalawag, Current Affairs, and Jacobin.His research interests include African American history, American intellectual history since 1945, and Southern history since 1945. Dr. Greene is also a blogger and book review editor for the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians, and has just begun a six-post stint for the Teaching American History blog. 

This week, resident HATM horror experts Rachel Gunter and Nicole Donawho drop in to talk about Scream, its legacy, and our favorite scream queens. 

This week we dive into the history and science behind Antarctica and question who made it out: Childs or MacReady? The Thing is a 100% PERFECT film. Grab your flamethrower and join in.

About our guests:
Peter Neff is a glaciologist and climate scientist working primarily to develop glacier ice core records of past climate, environmental conditions, and atmospheric chemistry. Peter’s current research focuses on better understanding recent climate of changing coastal regions in West Antarctica, areas which play a large role in uncertainty for future projections of sea level rise. Peter is also working to capture the last 200-500 years of hydroclimate variability in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, through recovering and developing the southernmost annually-resolved ice core record in North America, from Mount Waddington in the Coast Mountains. Peter is also the Director of Field Research and Data for the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center that seeks to find the oldest possible ice core records of past climate preserved in Antarctica. Peter shares widely about ice core climate science via Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.

Matthew Siegfried is a glaciologist who uses satellite remote sensing techniques in combination with field-based and airborne geophysical methods to understand physical processes of Earth’s glaciers and ice sheets. He runs the Mines Glaciology Laboratory, where the team collects and synthesizes ground-, air-, and space-based datasets in an effort to span the spatial (centimeters to 100s of km) and temporal (minutes to centuries) on which these processes occur. He is particularly interested in processes at the ice-bed interface, which lies hidden beneath 10s to 1000s of meters of ice at the intersection between glaciology, hydrology, geology, microbiology, and oceanography. He strives to work with a diverse set of researchers to create a unique perspective on the role of subglacial processes within the larger global Earth system. As a polar scientist, Matt is also committed to maintaining an open discussion of the changing cryosphere, having collaborated with institutions ranging from local elementary schools to the U.S. State Department in an effort to facilitate our conversation about the local, regional, and global impacts of changes at the Earth’s poles. Matt is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Geophysics at Colorado School of Mines and is affiliated faculty with the Hydrologic Science and Engineering Program and the Humanitarian Engineering Program.

Daniella McCahey's primary research attempts to connect Antarctic geographies to greater world history. Her current book project examines the United Kingdom’s 1955-1958 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, arguing that the way this project unfolded demonstrated a scientific community unable to cope with the twin pressures of decolonization and the Cold War. Dr. McCahey has broad interests and has authored/co-authored articles and scholarly book chapters on topics ranging from the media-savvy of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, to paleontology and popular culture in the 1990s, to pornography in Antarctic research stations. She is also conducting ongoing international collaborative research projects on the history of permafrost science and on the history of the British Empire’s use of science in its Southern Ocean empire. 

Wait, the pyramids weren’t built by aliens???This week HATM celebrates our 100th episode by talking Egyptology with Julia Troche and Stargate’s historical consultant, Stuart Tyson Smith.