History in Focus Coda

Daniel Story
Welcome to this special coda episode of History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. I’m Daniel Story.

After four seasons as host and producer of History in Focus, and almost a decade working in one capacity or another for the AHR, I’m finally hanging up my microphone—at least for now.

History in Focus will be on pause for the next several months as the team at AHA and AHR take a step back and assess the best way forward for the podcast within the broader landscape of their scholarly and communication strategies. I’ll be around in the background to offer my advice if it is needed, but for now, I’ll be turning my attention to other projects.

This truly the end of an era for me, and its admittedly been difficult for me to process just how significant doing this work has been on me as a historian, as a digital humanist, and as a person. It was back in 2017, when I was a grad student at Indiana University, Bloomington, and working as an editorial assistant at the AHR, that then editor Alex Lichtenstein brought up the idea of starting an AHR podcast. I had never produced a podcast, but I did have a bit of audio editing experience, so I volunteered to help out. That idea turned into four seasons of AHR Interview, which I produced through the end of my PhD studies and leaned on, in part, to secure my first (and current) job—a digital scholarship librarian at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And although that podcast was a very basic interview format, producing it gradually opened my eyes to potentials of audio as a means to engage with history in different and creative ways. I was hooked, and soon I was looking for opportunities to push my audio storytelling skills further.

My first big foray into a more immersive project was a 10-part oral history based documentary series I produced in 2019 and 2020 called Stories from the Epicenter, which told the story of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake that hit the Bay Area, with a focus on its short and long term effects on Santa Cruz County, my new home, and the spot where the epicenter of the earthquake was located. That was a transformative project for me.

A year later at the AHR, Alex was handing over the editorship to our current editor, Mark Bradley, and I initially viewed this as the right time for me to transition away from my podcast work with the journal. But then I began to see some of the exciting changes that Mark had in mind for the journal. And when he asked me if I’d be interested in dreaming up a new kind of AHR podcast that could fit with this era of the journal, well I found that to be a compelling idea.

I always tried to make sure that the episodes we produced were real value added to the articles in the journal, whether through extending that content with a look under the hood, leading more readers to articles that might not have otherwise found them, or in some cases providing something meaningful for folks who might never set eyes on the journal itself.

Some of this content was straightforward interview. When we could, though, we’d push further with archival audio and sound design to make the story more immersive, to capture something about that history that printed text on its own might not. Sound design as scholarly intervention, as I like to describe it.

Naturally, those sort of episodes have been some of my favorites—our very first episode, “Follow Your Nose,” which featured Odeuropa, a team of scholars researching the significance of smell in European history

William Tullett
And you would have encountered a whole series of different smells, whether that’s the smells of urban waste, not just human waste, but animal waste; the smells of animals themselves;

A horse and carriage pass close by and then move on quickly.

The different sorts of produce that might be for sale along that street; the smell of manufacture and industry, ranging from from leather working and metalworking to all kinds of other kinds of trades and industries that might characterize an average European Street in the 17th century.

Sound of metal striking metal to one side of you. As you pass, the sound recedes.

Daniel Story
An episode called Soil and Memory, also from the first season, based on an article by Alexis Dudden and Kim Inthavong on the history of activism in Okinawa, Japan.

Alexis Dudden
Over 70% of the land in all of Japan designated exclusively for US military use is in Okinawa, a prefecture that comprises just 0.6% of the entire country. The United States government still controls 20% of Okinawa’s total surface area. Over half of the 54,000 American troops based in Japan together with their 45,000 dependents and an additional 8000 civilian contractors attached to the US military live in these small islands.

Daniel Story
Two episodes that each brought to life pieces from the History Unclassified section of the journal, one by Sarah Stein exploring the picnicking practices of Sephardic Jewish communities in the late Ottoman Empire

Sarah Stein
The de Toledo entourage, finely dressed, have a simple picnic. They’ve arranged their fare on a rough wooden table that lists with the hillside, makeshift tablecloth barely covering its surface. There are loaves of bread, hunks of cheese, a bag of nuts or dried fruit, water, a thermos—tea, perhaps? It is May, just after the Jewish holiday of Shavuot; the trees are full, the weather cool enough to warrant a three-piece tweed suit, the ground too cold or damp to sit on.

Daniel Story
Another, by Lilly Balloffet, probing the personal gains and losses historians often experience in their archival journeys.

Lily Pearl Balloffet
Archival work is often lonely work. Over the years that I spent researching my book, I sat for hundreds of hours in utter silence. I thumbed through stacks of old newspapers, log books, letters, and photo albums. I read miles of typed columns, record books, and hastily scrawled ink. In that world of text, the faces of my research subjects were most often a total mystery to me—they existed only in my imagination as I tapped out three-sentence descriptions of their lives in my research notes.

Daniel Story
Right down to the last few special episodes I worked on with co-producer Syrus Jin for the journal’s Authoritarianism 101 Project.

Joseph McCarthy
One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many. Even if there are only one Communist in the State Department, that would still be one communist too many.

Daniel Story
That’s actually a good segway to mentioning the great work that my co-producers have done on History in Focus: Syrus who was on board for season 3 and returned for the tailend of season 4; and Matt Hermane and Conor Howard who came on in the middle season 1 and worked through the end of season 2. And actually my favorite episode, and the one that to date has logged the most listens, is one I produced with Matt and Conor: an episode titled “Black Reconstruction,” which was narrated by Elizabeth Hinton and profiled the landmark book of the same name by W.E.B. Du Bois.

Elizabeth Hinton
W.E.B. Du Bois is this really unique and special mind. 1903’s Souls of Black Folk really kind of put him on the map in a lot of ways. And of course, Du Bois starts articulating an important counterview or counternarrative to the dominant historiography of Reconstruction, which, at the time, had portrayed Reconstruction as a kind of low point in US history, a period of Black misrule, a period of corruption and graft. And Du Bois really was attempting to force not only historians but also the wider public to recognize the accomplishments of Reconstruction, which he saw as key to combating Jim Crow and continued economic exploitation, racial segregation, and disenfranchisement. This radical reinterpretation of Reconstruction became, really, I think central to Du Bois’s thought and historical work through the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Daniel Story
Last but not least, I’m grateful for the collaborations we’ve had with other history podcasters—in particular, the team from Sexing History.

Gillian Frank
Too often, when we think about abortion and religion, we picture protesters outside of clinics carrying graphic posters and shouting that abortion is a sin. But there are other stories about abortion and faith – quieter stories – that involve devout people engaging in the hard work of reproductive healthcare.

Daniel Story
Nairobi-based podcaster Mona Nyambura Muchemi from the podcast AfriWetu.

Mona Nyambura Muchemi
Hello listeners! Welcome to the AfriWetu podcast where we look to celebrate African history, people & culture, by telling our story. As always, our hope is that it fills you with enough curiosity to go and do your own deeper research.

And Kate Carpenter from the podcast Drafting the Past.

Kate Carpenter
I’m Kate Carpenter. I’m a doctoral candidate at Princeton University in the History of Science where I’m working on a dissertation about the history of storm chasing. And I am also the host and producer of Drafting the Past where I interview historians about the craft of writing history.

Daniel Story
The momentum we’ve built with History in Focus over these last four years has dovetailed, for me, with the creation of the Sinclair Prize for Historical Podcasts and the Sinclair Workshop for Historical Podcasting, the latter of which I have co-chaired with my history podcaster colleague Jim Ambuske at the last three AHA Annual Meetings—and yes, we’ll be there again in 2027 in New Orleans. As I noted in an episode earlier in the year, seeing the history podcaster community emerging at the meeting around this workshop and other podcast-related events has been really exciting.

For that reason, and for many others, it is pretty bittersweet to be stepping away from History in Focus at this moment. But I am not stepping away from audio work—I have other projects in progress and another documentary series on the horizon. If you’re interested in keeping up any of those projects, or dipping into my past work, you can visit danieljstory.com. There are contact details there too, and I’d love to hear from you if you have any ideas or projects you’re excited about, or want some advice on something you’re working on, such as I am able to offer.

For now, I want to say thank you for listening. I hope you’ve enjoyed the work we’ve done. More than that, I hope you’ve gotten something useful out of it, for your teaching, your research, your general appreciation of what’s been happening in history. I hope something has sparked your imagination along the way. I hope you’ve been inspired.

I know I have. So many times I’ve thought about the number of amazing people and projects I’ve been able to engage with through this work that I probably would not otherwise have encountered. Those connections, and the opportunity to help tell those stories, is what, as much as anything, kept me coming back.

I also want to say thanks to the many people who helped make History in Focus, and before that AHR Interview, possible: especially Alex Lichtenstein, Jane Lyle, Mark Bradley, Jim Grossman, Sarah Weicksel, Alex Levy, Sarah Muncy, Alana Venable, Matt Hermane, Conor Howard, and Syrus Jin. And I want to give a special shout out to Mark Bradley, who has done truly amazing things with the AHR over past few years, and who has been an astoundingly generous and supportive mentor and colleague to me in this work. Thanks, Mark—I hope our paths continue to cross.

And now, for the final time, History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review, with support from the American Historical Association, in partnership with the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

This episode was produced by me, Daniel Story. And as has almost always been the case, music was by Blue Dot Sessions.

And that really is it for now. I hope to see you next time, whenever and however next time comes around. Until then, take of each other.