From the Reviews Desk, March 2022 Edition

A subway train rumbles over its tracks in the distance. It arrives at a station and slowly brakes to a halt. An automated voice comes through the train’s intercom.

Intercom Voice (0:11)

This is History in Focus. You have arrived at Episode Three, “From the Reviews Desk, March 2022 Edition.” And now, here’s Daniel.

Daniel Story (0:24)

So Fei, it’s exciting to be collaborating with you like this on the podcast. I wonder if we could start by just having you give us a sense of who you are and what it is you do for the journal.

Fei-Hsien Wang (0:36)

Sure. My name is Fei-Hsien Wang. I am a historian of modern China, currently teaching at Indiana University, Bloomington. As a historian, I’m particularly interested in how information, ideas, and practice were produced, transmitted, and consumed across different societies in East Asia. I joined the AHR in 2020 as the Associate Editor, and I oversee and curate the review section for the journal.

Daniel Story (1:07)

So, what are some of the things that we can look forward to in the review section of the March 2022 issue?

Fei-Hsien Wang (1:14)

In the March issue, the first thing our readers might notice is that “Review of Books” is now simply “Reviews.” This change is part of the redesign. And this change is to introduce more types of research and works of history as well as to acknowledge the plurality of historical knowledge-making. But we never seen more regular appearance of non monographic works reviewed alongside with history books. And we also have an exciting new initiative called “Authors in Conversation.” This is a new column, and in this column, we invite authors of adjacent works to review each other’s books. Another element we include in the March issue is a cluster of reviews of history podcasts. And Daniel, you know the detail of all this, since you added the section along with Alex and myself, so maybe I should ask you to talk about how we approach this section and what reviews we are including.

Daniel Story (2:23)

Right, so as you know, under Alex Lichtenstein’s editorship, the AHR began branching out in reviewing other forms of historical work like documentaries, museum exhibits, graphic histories, etc. And podcasting, I think for a long time, seemed to us like it fit really well with that more sort of capacious approach. After talking about it for a long while, we finally got around to doing it, attempting to put together a cluster of podcast reviews, and we worked on that over several months last year. And, you know, I guess we started out with a few guidelines that we agreed upon for ourselves. We wanted to review podcasts that told a story or presented an argument, as opposed to, say, strictly interview format podcasts. We wanted to make it as diverse a pool of podcasts as we could in terms of subject matter. We wanted to include both podcasts that were produced by academic historians, and history podcasts from non-academics, such as sort of journalistic podcast ventures. And so finding reviewers for this cluster of podcast reviews was a little bit of a challenge in some cases, but in the end we got there. As you know, due to the ups and downs of this sort of thing, we didn’t necessarily get the full balance of spread that I would have liked between, say, academic and non-academic podcasts. But I hope that there will be a next time or a few next times where we can address that. But in the end, I was really pleased with what we got from our reviewers. And I hope that the readers will find these helpful both for highlighting the particular podcasts that are being reviewed, but also for kind of stirring the pot a bit and thinking about how we might approach history in audio form. So just to give a bit of a sense of what we’re talking about here, we reviewed five podcasts. We have Jordan Taylor reviewing the first season of “The Last Archive.” We have Chris Myers Asch reviewing Season Two of the podcast “In the Dark,” which explores the southern murder case against accused African American Curtis Flowers. Julian Maxwell Hayter reviewed season three of “Slowburn,” which looks at the mid-90s murders of the hip hop legends, Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. David Cunningham reviews season four of “Slowburn” which looks at the life and political endeavors of Klu Klux Klan leader David Duke. And then finally Lisa Segal reviews the podcast “Sexing History,” which is a podcast produced by a group of historians researching the history of sexuality in 20th century America.

Fei-Hsien Wang (5:16)

So this ultimately raised a wider question of why historians should engage with podcasts and podcasting. So like podcast, is an import of popular media and allows historians to reach audiences outside of academia. It seems that everyone I know is listening to various podcasts in one form or the other. And it also occurred to me that it seems like podcasts also has been used more and more in teaching history. So teachers assign podcasts as they are reading, Chronicle readings, and asked students to make podcasts as assignments. And so, as one of the reviewers in this cluster of reviews also pointed out, that for students with reading challenges, podcasts are much more accessible as well. So what do you think about the question of why and how historians and students of history are approaching and engaging podcasts?

Daniel Story (6:20)

Yeah, I think for me, the motivation to engage with podcasts in this way, and in the particular way we’re doing it here, comes down to a handful of factors. One is that an increasing number of academic historians are themselves engaging with podcasts, and podcasting in different and really creative ways. So you just mentioned instructors using podcasts in the classroom. And I think that’s definitely true in a number of places, including my own institution here at UC Santa Cruz, instructors assigning podcasts for listening, but also assigning students to create podcasts. And then, of course, a number of historians, an increasing number, are producing really interesting podcasts themselves. And of course, a lot of that is geared around reaching audiences outside the academy. But I think a lot of it really can be considered serious, scholarly contribution in its own right. And of course, those two things, the sort of outward focus and the scholarly contribution aren’t mutually exclusive. But I think it’s really to everyone’s benefit in the profession, that we take this work of our colleagues seriously, and we engage it seriously. And then there’s the other factor that goes alongside with this, is that history podcasts are popular. There are so many people who get historical content through podcasts. And yes, of course, some of that is produced by academics, but much of it, and probably much more of it, is history podcasts that are produced by people who aren’t themselves necessarily historians.

And I think it’s also to our benefit to engage that kind of work too. To engage it generously but also critically, and, you know, become familiar with what it is that is attracting so many listeners.

Fei-Hsien Wang (8:15)

As a historian who is very interested in information production and consumption, I couldn’t stop noticing the differences, when we use different medium to make historical arguments. It also create a different experience at the receiving side: audience doesn’t listen to footnotes in podcasts, for example. And one could not incorporate archival recordings, music, create the kind of vivid sonic sense and sound space in the book state, right? And like, if we read a book, readers may flip back and forth to reconfigure the arguments, they may start and stop wherever they like. And—but it seems to me that when a historical argument is presented in the podcast, it appears to be more like one single flow and you listen to, like, that one narrative voice, is uninterrupted. So what do you think, are the possibilities and limitation of making historical arguments through podcast?

Daniel Story (9:26)

I think the possibilities for presenting a compelling historical argument are, in some ways, much as they are in more traditional writing. I think that you can present powerful, detailed nuanced arguments and draw upon evidence in a podcast in a similar way to writing an article or writing a book. But of course, as you’re noting, there are trade offs. You can get detailed with a podcast but maybe not nearly as detailed as you can when you’re writing a book. Or when you can, you know, fill half a page with footnotes. And how do you footnote within a podcast? You know, you’re right that listeners don’t “quote unquote” listen to footnotes. But there are ways and we’ve got to find ways to acknowledge the evidence that we’re drawing from, or, you know, acknowledge the other scholars that we’re engaging with. So I think these are things that are still under development, in the ways that historians are using podcasting. And you know, to be honest, that kind of makes it all the more exciting a medium to work in, because there are conventions, but those conventions are relatively new. And you know, we have a lot of opportunity to innovate and find new and better ways of doing things. But to me, the really compelling strength of the medium is the immersive quality.

Fei-Hsien Wang (10:53)

Indeed, I found the audio effects, archival recording of different historical actors, the sound from the streets of New York in 1920s, and even the tongues of the presenter using podcasts, opened up a new dimension of historical imagination and I think audience can really immerse themselves in the podcast, away that’s very distinctively different from, like, a reader immersed in reading a history book. So final question: I was wondering, right now, as an insider yourself, like what are the challenges and opportunities you see, reviewing historical podcasts?

Daniel Story (11:43)

I think the opportunities include some of what I’ve already mentioned, but they also include helping more historians and more students of history find ways of digesting the sort of audio material, you know, in thoughtful ways. As you rightly note, Fei, there is an enormous number of podcasts out there. And it’s easy just to dip in and out of them. But if you really want to engage thoughtfully, you want to sort of learn how to pay attention—not just to the content, or the words that are being said, but also the tone, the sonic scene that’s being set, even things like music, and how that can affect dynamics. And I think those sorts of ways, by engaging in those sorts of reviews, we can sharpen our skills at being critical listeners, and understanding how all the different elements of a medium can come together to present a historical argument. And, you know, I think, on the flip side, reviewing is challenging, in part, because there are so many podcasts out there, you know, like, where do you start? There are other practical challenges, too. I think at least one of our reviewers pointed out that audio really requires focused attention to deeply evaluate it. It’s not something for instance, that is easily given to a practice like skimming that, let’s face it, we often do when we have a stack of books that we have to get through.

Fei-Hsien laughs.

So you know, there’s those sorts of demands, too. And I think, you know, reviewing podcasts will draw on some familiar skills that we have and thinking through and evaluating material critically. But it’ll also stretch us as historians into new contexts where reviewers will need to add skills—revise skills. But I think sharpening our ability to engage history, historical arguments, across new mediums, audio included, can only be to our collective benefit.

So Fei, you already mentioned, we’re including, sort of, another experiment in this March issue by having two authors, who’ve recently published on a similar subject, review each other’s books and having those reviews appear in the same issue. And I wonder if you could say a little bit more about how that came together?

Fei-Hsien Wang (14:20)

Sure. In the AHR we sometimes ask authors who happen to publish books on similar topic to review each other’s books for practical reasons, because we are always looking for good reviewers for interesting books. Such a regimen often yields great reviews, but these reviews may not be published in the same volume or be published side by side. So when Mark, Nate, and I were brainstorming and re-envisioning a more exciting and inclusive review section during the redesign process, we decided to make this practice more institutionalized. So that’s why we create this new column called “Authors in Conversation.” And we hope this new column may model new forms of scholarly conversation and collaboration. And for the first installment, we invite Shawn McHale and Christopher Goscha, both just published a major work on the French War in Vietnam, to discuss each other’s book. They use very similar archives, but the approaches are very different. And so we hope this will be an exciting reviews for our readers.

Shawn McHale (15:42)

Alright, I’ll go first. I guess age does have some privileges. My name is Shawn McHale. I’m an Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University. And I’m the author of a book that came out a few, well, came out in August of 2021: The First Vietnam War: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Fracture of the South, which is on the First Indochina War.

Christopher Goscha (16:09)

My name is Christopher Goscha. I’m a professor of international relations at the University of Quebec at Montreal. I’ve been here since 2005. Then, I have just published with Princeton University Press, The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First Vietnam War. So Sean and I have two books that resemble each other. What is the Indochina War? It’s an extremely complicated war. It’s an anticolonial war. It’s a war of national liberation. It’s a civil war. It’s a war for control over people and territory. It becomes a part of the Cold War between the American-led bloc on the one hand and the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union and China, from 1949 when Mao takes power. And it turns into, in my opinion, the most violent war of decolonization of the 20th century for that reason. So it’s a local war, it’s a national war, and it’s an international war. And that’s a terrible combination.

Shawn McHale (17:25)

I would agree. And I would just add that it becomes iconic. It, you know, it becomes one of these, in sort of a pantheon of third worldism. And this and Algeria become the two conflicts linked together—both violent conflicts against imperial order. And they have resonated far beyond the academy. You can find poetry by Africans and French, which talks about this particular battle, this particular war. You can find this legacy just sort of reverberating, you know, through the centuries. And so, in one sense, you know, it is this iconic batt—it is this iconic war, but yes, at its foundation, it is one which is…I’d also add it is iconic and I will also add that it is, it is one which involves, as I found out, in terms of the dead—the dead come from over sixty different political units around the globe, okay. This is—it brings in deep—it brings in Armenians, it brings in Palestinians, Germans, Hungarians, Norwegians, Lao, Cambodian, mostly Vietnamese, because most of the people who die end up being—being those from what is now French Indochina. But it really is, it really casts a broad net. The first American to die in French Indochina, he dies in 1947. You know, there’s an American there. Why is the American there? Well, obviously the person sort of joined the French Foreign Legion. But it pulls in all sorts of peoples. But in the end, it really is one which is defined by the Vietnamese, the Lao, and Cambodians.

Christopher Goscha (18:59)

So Shawn, what did you think of this idea of you and I, reviewing each other’s books like this?

Shawn McHale (19:07)

It was funny. At first I thought, “What a great idea.” My second reaction was, “What a crazy idea.” And the reason why is that when you’ve known a person for some time, you’ve read their scholarship, you admire their scholarship, and so forth, you get along with the person, there’s a natural tendency to sometimes just want to give the person, sort of like, you know, a favorable review. But both Chris and I are scholars. I mean, we don’t want in a sense to put out a review, which just says, you know, “this is what my friend did, it’s good.” You know, you don’t want to do that. It becomes actually more difficult to write a review where on the one hand, you dig in on some intellectual issues, which really are differences between the two of you, without actually conveying the idea that you don’t think this is a good work. And ultimately what I do in my book review is I, I basically think, as I said, I think this is going to be the standard work on the war as a whole, okay. So it’s very clear where I’m coming from. But I also have some differences with particular interpretations of what Chris does, and I haven’t seen—he hasn’t seen my review, I don’t think I’ve seen his, but I think that to give an example of one, I thought, the framing of the work in terms of the “archipelago state” and then segwaying in the north to the “War Communism.” I thought was a brilliant way to sort of, like, simplify a very messy reality. But my question was, the state in the south, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, never grew beyond a sort of archipelago state. So why not continue talking about it post-1950?

That’s one of these sort of substantive questions. I actually understand why he didn’t in some ways. I thought, you know, you wouldn’t have taken away from the strength of his argument in the least, that’s the kind of issue which I, you know, zeroed in on. We do have different frameworks for sort of understanding this war. But what would you say? I mean, what was it like for you, when you got this invitation? You know, we know each other.

Christopher Goscha (21:15)

I had the same reaction as you. I was like, on the one hand, I was like, this is a great idea, as long as it’s not me. And then obviously, it was clear from the beginning that it was me and you. And that, you know, yeah, I mean, we’re, we’ve known each other for years, we’re very good friends. So I was a little bit—reluctance is not the word, but certainly cautious, but I wanted to go forward with it. So yeah, reluctant, but at the same time I liked the idea of, and I’ve done this on two occasions before, I think two scholars, three scholars, four scholars, can work on the same topic, and they’ll all come up with something different. And, you know, this is a little bit of, you know, philosophy of history, but I think it’s important for general readers, it’s important for undergraduates, it’s important for scholars who are a little bit older, like Shawn and I are now, but I don’t think we should be afraid of doing this sort of thing. Because I think it shows that we have two different approaches, which give us some things which are quite similar. You know, we’ve discussed them here, some of the conclusions we’ve come to. And I think there’s differences as well, they’ll perhaps come out in the reviews, we can talk about them as well, in terms of the framework. But this is a very good exercise. For me, it shows that, again, more than one person can work on one topic, I even, I think Shawn would agree if there’s other people working on the Mekong Delta, or if there’s other people saying, that War Communism, your theory of that, Goscha, is not so good, I welcome that. I think that’s a good thing. So what Sean said, about, you know, not dealing with the south after 1950, I, we can talk about that.

We’ll probably talk about it later on, you know, over a beer or a little bit in our reviews once the pandemic’s over. But no, I welcome this chance to do this. We both worked on a similar, the First Vietnam War, or what I prefer to call the First Indochina War. And I think we have different perspectives. But I think we need these perspectives, and we need others as well.

Shawn McHale (23:18)

There’s a lot to be done and there are a lot of topics which have not really been addressed. And a lot of the reason is because it’s very easy for scholars to fall into received narratives about, you know, how to frame the war. This is a big problem. It’s very easy, for example, to look at the First Indochina War and to think of it in terms of, you know, the coming of the Cold War, and you put that frame on the entire nine years or more of the war. It’s very easy to not go down to the local level, and understand the variation in the war. One of the things that is a signal advance in Chris’s book is looking at the First Indochina War, the first half of it, in terms of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s archipelago state. It’s a very useful concept. It’s something that Chris has been playing with for some time, actually. But it’s useful in moving us away in that earlier period, from thinking about it in terms of this, sort of like, embryonic, sort of like communist state from 1945 on were just sort of coming into existence. It’s actually more complicated, it’s more diverse. What it reminds us, actually, is down at the local level, Vietnamese weren’t all sort of cowering under communist regimes in the early part of the war. Because you really had a variety of local actors involved, actually, in the war. Later on in the north, that would change. In the South it always remained fractious. Interestingly enough, you take our two books together, and, you know, Chris’s, I think, is going to be the standard book on the war as a whole. It shows in a sense why the Democratic Republic of Vietnam won overall. But there is this one issue which scholars have often not really been able to explain is, where the hell did the South Vietnam come from? Why was the country divided in two, you know, in 1954? And strangely enough, a lot of the scholarship never quite explains that division in a way that I found reasonable.

Christopher Goscha (25:23)

Yeah, and I think you’ve done it quite successfully in my view, that’s the advantage of a local approach or a regional approach. To going down to the Mekong Delta, you know, you define your study. You have a case study, you have the sources that allow you to do that very thick description that we need. And I don’t do that, you know, I take more of a larger level, the whole war itself even, in all of Indochina, viewed by the DRV. I think the two books together go really well, I do. You know, it’s a methodological choice. There’s advantages to the very local level, the thick description, where you can really tease things out much better than I could. And I think you’re totally right. And I think you convince me in your book, you shed new light on the Vietnam that would emerge from this very fractious, double-fractured Mekong Delta. That’s a major contribution. Again, it’s—this is a classic methodological choice. So too, I kinda was looking at more from the DRV’s perspective in terms of all of Vietnam and even Indochina, whereas you zoomed in on the Mekong Delta. I think, again, there’s a lot more to be done with your approach. In different areas, I was thinking of the Nam Dinh area south of Hanoi, which was a very contested area with Catholics as well. Christian Lentz has done some good work on the northwest, as well. So again, there’s a lot out there for other scholars to do some very interesting stuff. I would like to say one thing, Shawn, I think you put your finger on a number of really important topics that you develop, I develop a little bit, but I think there’s all sorts of sources from the Vietnamese and the French side, you know, on things like economic warfare, blockades. What did it mean for people? I mean, you could look at it from the French side, if you want, why did the French do this? What were they trying to do? You certainly do that well, and talking about the blockade of 1949 in the south. No one’s talked about that before in any sort of detail. There was other blockades, of course, as you may have seen in my book, you know, during the second half of the war as well. The question of food, the question of rice, we’ve got great books out there, you know, on the taste of war. And of course, I think the two things you and I, we both put our finger on—civilians suffered in this war. They got caught in a crossfire. In your Mekong Delta, of course, it was a Franco-Vietnamese, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam crossfire, but they’re getting caught in a crossfire from 1945 all the way till the end of the war well before the Americans got involved in this. And I think one of the things that Shawn shows and I think I show as well, is that, well, to be honest, there was My Lais, there was many My Lais before the Americans got busy in in the 1960s, as sad as that is to say. But we need more people working on this again. So I guess maybe Shawn and I are pleading for more people will take advantage of this conversation, that there’s much to be done on the social aspects of war, the economic aspects of war, cultural aspects of war, you know, the questions have been treated for the Vietnam War, and of course other wars. They’re crying out for more attention.

Shawn McHale (28:38)

But one question I had for Chris, both Chris and I have worked—and he more than I—but we both worked in the French military archives. And the French military archives are very useful, because, yes, they have a lot of French material. They also have a lot of Vietnamese language material that we often can’t access in Vietnamese archives. We’re not allowed access to a lot of this material. And my question was, you know, the book that I started out to write is not the book that I ended up with. And my question to Chris is, did you have that experience, that sometimes actually going through the process of going through archives and materials, made you change, actually, the framework for your analysis?

Christopher Goscha (29:23)

Well, before I’d answer that, I’d shoot back with another question to you. Before you ask me that question, you spoke of the French archives, does that mean that seeing what you saw in the French archives allowed you to write a different book?

Shawn McHale (29:35)

Let me put it this way. Originally, I had an idea to write a book that was going to be global, sort of national, and then regional. And the idea behind it was the idea that wars always take place in particular places, but they’re often linked broadly to other parts of the world. And this is true of wars of decolonization. Increasingly, as I did my research, I got more interested in the more untold local stories and linking in some of these other issues to it. And not only that, the other thing that became very different with me is originally I thought, oh, in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam in particular I’m going to see the importance of religious groups, Caodai, Hoa Hao, and so forth at shaping the war. And increasingly as I went on, I thought, that’s not quite right.

There were militias affiliated with religious groups. But often religious leaders did not want, in a sense, the violence that was actually breaking out throughout the Mekong Delta. And so that made me think through how exactly do I talk about the militarization of society which I talked about eventually, the ways in which these local militias under local warlords sort of rise up in power, and increasingly come to dominate, in a sense, the countryside, and not the religious groups’ leaders. So that’s one of the things that happened with me. With you, when I look at your book and how your work has evolved over time, I see a sharpening of perspective. The whole argument about the archipelago state segwaying into the War Communism, you’re taking arguments you’ve made before, but you’re really actually putting it in a framework which is simple and powerful and a little bit more elaborated than before.

Christopher Goscha 31:25

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it’s true, our books are different in that sense. I should maybe say I had the advantage of being able to write in two languages, meaning that I need to be transparent, is that a kind of an earlier version of this book appeared in French in about 2011 or 2012. And it was called A State Born of War or A State of War. And then after that, I kept working in the Vietnamese sources and I kept working in the French sources, and then, like Sean, I like to read widely—see what people are doing. And that’s one of the strengths of Shawn’s book as well, what they’re doing on other wars of decolonization or any other war for that matter. What are the new approaches, theoretical approaches, methodological approaches? So yeah, I had like a second chance.

Chris chuckles.

 I had a second chance. And I think I’m very fortunate where, you know, I was able to transform the book quite substantially, even though Shawn in particular, who’s, you know, we read each other, he recognizes what’s going on here. So I totally agree with what Shawn just said, is that it has been sharpened with that extra time that I had. I had one of those two—maybe I had more than just one, but two or three “aha!” moments, I get it, now I can do this correctly, this is the book that I wanted to write. So the book, you know, that I wrote—The Road to Dien Bien Phu—it allows me to kind of wrap it all together and to try to make sense out of things I’ve been thinking about for the last 10 or 15 years. So yeah, I totally agree with you. The other thing I would say, though, is Vietnamese sources are important but I think those French sources, you would agree with me, sometimes they’re not in French, they’re in Vietnamese. So I think those who might be listening to us, eventually, maybe younger scholars, there’s some amazing things in Vietnamese in those archives, which Shawn has certainly shown in his book. And I think too, if you want to get to that local level, that thick description, one way in is through the French archives, because you have access to very detailed administrative reports which, they may be written in French, but they’re often times almost always written by Vietnamese. Okay so, you know, I think we can move on now from this idea that, oh, they’re colonial archives. Sure they are. But then you have communist archives as well. I mean, we all know now that we have to be careful with the sources we use, so I’m not going to even go down that road. It’s, we’re historians, we’re serious about our sources. But these sources in the French archives, and we’ve seen it for the Algerian war, they allow us to get down to a very interesting level, which Shawn I think showed brilliantly in his book, and then combine it with Vietnamese sources and all sorts of other kinds of sources as well.

I’m totally for constructive engagement. I think that’s why Shawn and I are a good pair. I welcome it. I think Shawn does as well. And I’m sure we’re gonna get together, as I said, and talk about the south a little bit more where we have some differences. And that’s a good thing.

Shawn McHale (34:33)

I think there’s a real value to doing that. We can do with more of this sometimes in academia and not just to try to simply undermine people for reasons sometimes that are kind of petty. “Why didn’t you write a book that I would have written?” That’s not really the question to ask.

Christopher Goscha (34:48)

That’s right. That’s exactly right. No, I couldn’t agree with you more. This is excellent.

Daniel Story (35:03)

So Fei, this has been fun. Thanks for talking with me today and I hope we can do this again sometime soon, perhaps, a few episodes down the line when we’re looking at the June reviews section.

Fei-Hsien Wang (35:14)

Definitely, I’m very much looking forward to working with you again.

Daniel Story (35:34)

History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review, in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California-Santa Cruz. In this episode, you heard my conversation with Associate Editor Fei-Hsien Wang about the review section of the March 2022 issue of the AHR, including a cluster of five history podcasts reviews and a new reviews column called “Authors in Conversation.” Shawn McHale and Christopher Goscha kicked off that column with reviews of each other’s recent books on the Indochina War. And you heard them in conversation here discussing their respective works and their experience testing out this new reviews approach. Episode Three was produced by me, Daniel Story, with audio engineering assistance from Myles Rider-Alexis. Transcription support was by Syrus Jin.

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 For more on this episode, visit americanhistoricalreview.org. That’s it for now. See you next time.

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