This week we interview Rachel Jamison Webster, professor of creative writing at Northwestern University and the author of four books of poetry and cross-genre writing. Her latest book, Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family, was published by Henry Holt and Company in March 2023.  Webster has taught writing workshops through the National Urban League, Chicago Public Schools, Gallery 37, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art, working to bring diversity… Read More »

This week we interview David Waldstreicher, a history professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and author of his latest book, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: a Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence, published by Farrar Strauss and Grioux in March 2023. Waldstreicher’s other books includer Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification, and Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution. He also has written for The New … Read More »

This week we interview Tanisha C. Ford, a cultural critic, educator, and author. Her latest book, Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon, and the Glamour, Money and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement, was published by Amistad in October 2023. Ford has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Time, the Root, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, and she’s been featured on NPR, among other places. She was named to the… Read More »

This week we interview Dean King whose latest book, Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship that Saved Yosemite, was published by Scribner in March 2023. King is an award-winning author of ten nonfiction books including Skeletons on the Zahara, Unbound, Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed, and The Feud. His writing has appeared in Granta, Garden & Gun, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, the New York … Read More »

This week we interview Brad Snyder, author of Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment, published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2022. As a Georgetown University law professor, Snyder teaches constitutional law, constitutional history, and sports law. He was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in constitutional studies, and he is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Supreme Court History. Snyder has written… Read More »

This week we interview Yunte Huang, a Guggenheim Fellow and author of Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History, published by Liveright in August 2023. Huang has taught at Harvard University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a professor of English. He also is the author of Inseparable and the Edgar Award–winning biography Charlie Chan. Both of those books were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists.… Read More »

Happy New Year! This special episode features a fascinating presentation by the 2023 National Humanities Awardee, Tulane University history professor, television and podcast host, and celebrated biographer, Walter Issacson. His September 28, 2023, “Lessons About Living with Genius,” lecture was presented at the Leon Levy Center for Biography in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in Manhattan. Issacson’s latest book, Elon Musk, was published in September of last year by Simon… Read More »

This week, we interview author Justin Martin, who specializes in meticulously researched and engagingly delivered American history books. His most recent, A Fierce Glory: Antietam, the Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery, was published by Da Capo Press in September 2018. This group biography is about Antietam—a turning point in the Civil War—in which Martin emphasizes character development over troop movements and portrays key figures both on and off the battlefield on that… Read More »

This week, we interview Maryemma Graham, author of the first comprehensive biography of famed poet, writer, and educator Margaret Walker. The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker was published by Oxford University Press in December 2022. A Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Kansas and Founding Director of the History of Black Writing at the University of Mississippi, Graham has published 12 books, including The Cambridge Companion to the … Read More »

This week, we interview Beverly Gage, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, published by Viking in November 2022. Gage is professor of 20th-century American history at Yale and in her previous book, The Day Wall Street Exploded (Oxford University Press, 2009), she examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gage writes frequently for the New York Times,… Read More »