An unofficial motto of ours here at HAG is: things get worse before they get worse. And now we have evidence to support that immutable truth in the form of the time lapse apocalypse, i.e. the demonstrative enshitification of things since our last broadcast in the spring of this year. Through careful analysis of the pictures now and then, it appears things have gotten shittier. You want to see the evidence? (are you sure you want to see it?) AI’s nefarious influence has soaked deep into the pools of education, and in the words of HAG’s guiding light, Saint Rosenstock, the future is dubm. In today’s episode we take our Benihana knives to the whole “AI Education” fiasco. Another bit of inexplicable stupidity has Secretary of Defense Pete Voldemort resurrecting the zombie corpses of Confederate monuments to “restore” the nation’s proud past with more dehydrated history. To paraphrase Frederick Douglass, what’s missing here is not debate, but irony.
Well, there it is, just a smidgen of the evidence to illustrate the time lapse apocalypse. Not to fear, your HAG sushi chefs will filet and atomize the gross conceits of these evil-doers, and like lightning to a tree, offer a little historical shock therapy to bring our poor battered sensibilities back into focus.
Welcome to HAG, Episode 73, late-summer edition.
Opening Theme by Jessie DeCarlo
Music Interludes:
Ambulance LTD -- "Primitive (the way I treat you)"
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band -- "Dropout Boogie"
Contact us at Historyagainstthegrain@gmail.com
Welcome to the age of discourse dumping, are you dizzy? Do you study emoji eyes to find your facial recognition? Does the world look like a Cubist painting? Is the phrase ‘rubber baby buggy bumper’ starting to make sense? Not to worry. We are here to reassure you that the White Knight is, in fact, talking backwards and the inmates are indeed running the asylum. Our prescription: put the lime in the coconut and drink them both together, listen to Episode 72, and then you’ll feel better. HAG is, after all, the Harry Nilsson of history podcasts, and our very special guest today is Moritz Mihatsch, Cambridge scholar and co-author (with Michael Mulligan) of Shifting Sovereignties (available now). Their terrific new book offers an illuminating journey through the global history of what power has forever wanted you to believe, i.e. that the right folks are in charge. Excavating the meaning of sovereignty from the sedimentary layers of the human past, our guest explains why governing has always relied on a Wizard of Oz-like control over sound and color, equal parts legal pretense and quasi-religious authority, to create cover for whatever power wishes to do. So click your heels twice, repeat “there’s no home like HAG, there’s no home like HAG,” and settle in for more therapeutic historical analysis of a world trying to make us crazy.
Website: History Against the Grain
Opening Theme by Jessie DeCarlo
Music Interludes:
Gil Scott Heron and Makaya McCraven: "Running"
Darkside: "American References"
Is the strange truer than fiction, and are nations weirder than their staid mythologies? This episode we put that question to the test by considering some of the mind-bendingly strange truths of the more distant past, as well as the nutty history happening in real time right outside our windows. So who you calling strange anyway? You better take a good look in history’s mirror with your HAG hosts and our very special guest this episode, to see how it all reflects. Sarah Schneewind, distinguished scholar of Chinese history at UC San Diego, joins us to chat about her textbook, and why preparing students to confront the very strange in history builds empathy and bolsters critical thinking, altogether a good skill set for managing the strangeness of our contemporary world.
Opening Theme by Jesse DeCarlo
Music Interludes:
Nick Shoulders, "All Bad"
Cindy Lee, "Diamond Jubilee"
Like rock climbers scaling a big wall, Josh and Chris take on the towering crag of higher education. Josh finds perspective on this adventure in tackling a monumental read, Peter Heather’s Christendom, a story of how paradise was lost in the orthodoxies and power drive of the hulking monolith known as the Roman Catholic Church. Wary of such heights, Chris stays closer to ground and belays the discussion, releasing the climber’s narrative rope with the story of David Walker’s Appeal, a saga from the early days of the radical freedom movement. In this episode, tall tales that might otherwise leave you lost in the thin alpine air, are safely and expertly scaled by your sure handed HAG guides, who promise to meet you at the summit of historical insight.
Website: HistoryagainsttheGrain.com
Email us: HistoryagainsttheGrain@gmail.com
Opening theme by Jesse DeCarlo
Music Interludes:
Gil Scott Heron and Makaya McCraven, "I'm New Here"
Mach-Hommy, "Magnum Band Remix"
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 “thoughts and prayers” or “appreciate your patience and understanding”). Much of this gospel of progress and toxic positivity contradicts our own lived experiences - we know things don’t 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 “road bumps” — say, environmental destruction and labor impoverishment due to the strip mining of, oh, copper — 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 “objectivity,” “both sides,” and god knows, “fair and balanced,” 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.
When is a war not a war, but a police action? When is killing not killing but a “pragmatic, managerial militarism”? If you guessed, when the war criminal represents a liberal democracy, you win the cheese! If you simply said, “Henry Kissinger,” you win the whole wheel of cheese! “A perfect expression of American militarism’s merry-go-round” is what historian Greg Grandin calls Kissinger’s 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 what’s going on his statue before signing over your soul.
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 - let’s call it history - and a nation can sell almost anything: bad deeds become star-spangled reveries, while the supposedly sacred symbols veil the product’s toxic contents.
Join us with our special guest Ricardo Catón, as we ponder the past, from the banal to the just plain bad, and the marketing schemes known as national history.
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.
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.
Hey Florida, oh well, whatever never mind - you take the leprosy we’ll 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
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? It’s 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 the…
What do you do when it’s 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, it’s like a day at the beach.
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.
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? It’s in all the textbooks. We’re 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, let’s make it our New Year’s resolution: a healthy history diet and a happy and healthy 2023.
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, you’re not crazy, summertime surreal is here and history really is in retrograde. But don’t believe them when they say there ain’t 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.
“Stories are wondrous things,” says the writer Thomas King, “And 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.”
Another mass killing of innocent people in America has been perpetrated with an appeal to history. Touting an idea called ‘Replacement Theory,” right-wing political pundits, politicians, and now, again, domestic terrorists have loosed the poisonous story of white nationalism to violently project who they say “we really are as a nation.” 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 today’s episode, such extremist claims are different only by degree from the long-standing white nationalist, standard mainstream history of the nation. And if we don’t 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 “we really are as a nation.” 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 ‘us versus them’ story emplotment, a bewildering narrative binary that makes more palatable the nation’s long history of violence, war, and domestic terrorism.
In other nations as well, that same appeal to an imagined historical exclusivity and ‘us versus them’ storyline, has engendered similar pathologies of violence.
The national stories we tell ourselves, it would seem, are killing us.
We invite you to listen in with Episode 55, and celebrate the 2-year anniversary of History Against the Grain. It’s 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 that’s 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 History’s death back in the 90’s 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.
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.
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 “big story” 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.
