History Against the Grain

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.

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. 

“It is impossible that things should be other than they are; for everything is right,” said Dr. Pangloss. "Oh, Pangloss!" cried Candide, "what a strange genealogy! Is not the Devil the original stock of it?” 

With earthquakes and a bit of light editing, we cast off with Voltaire and Episode 59 in search of the stories that do not make us sick. It is not so easy as one might imagine, harried as we are by zombie narratives that refuse to die, textbook deadlines, and paeans to liberal democracy proclaiming the end of history. If man really did invent agriculture because he was getting hungrier, then who are we to deny the foolish optimism of those who say we’ve never had it so good? Or maybe it is just time to interrogate the archives and hear some other voices for a change. But that’s only if we really want to know what’s wrong and how to fix it. On the other hand, if you’re fine, and it’s fine, and everything is fine, then grab a seat next to Ted Cruz at the baseball game and pretend you can’t hear all those Bronx cheers. 

You’ve heard the one about how the Past, Present, and Future walk into a bar? It was tense (pause for mandatory eye-roll). Well, speaking of tense, things are a little frosty these days in the U.S. culture wars over history. It’s getting so you can’t tell your friends from your frenemies. The profit-maximizers over at the College Board announced a new AP African American History course, so good, right? Sure, but what took so long? AHA president James Sweet got into hot water over some goofy comments on presentism, African American history, and the Supreme Court, and then apologized. So, uh, good? We hear that President Joe Biden calls on a historian when he needs perspective. That’s gotta be good, right? Wait, ithe historian he listens to is Jon Meacham? Well let’s just say it’s all pretty confusing, but not to worry. Think of us here at HAG as your history relationship therapists. In this episode we’ve brought in Past and Present to work through their communication issues, break some really bad habits, and establish some healthy norms going forward (you hear that Future?). 

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.

Here at HAG we have to stay light on our feet, in tip-top shape, because those public statues of anointed heroes which stand frozen to time and analysis, are never more difficult to pin down and even harder to catch, then when they are just standing still. You wouldn’t think so. After all, challenge a statue to a blinking contest, and you’re bound to lose. Challenge it to a game of tag and you are bound to win. So unkinetic are they, that pigeons always know just where to find them. So unchanging are they, that passersby barely need to look up. Yet we know that history is just never frozen in time, and no matter how stiff the statue, the closer we look the more elusive its meaning becomes. Never mind the heroic and motionless exterior, the action is going on within, where the truth and facts of the story offer a constantly moving target of historical meaning. And for that, we must chase that meaning like track stars. Statues and the stories they purport are not for us to worship with unquestioned devotion and reverence as “history,” but to interrogate for the hidden meanings. Because It is the meaning we are after, not the stolid exterior. We want to know what sort of story it tells, and whether that story is told truthfully and with meaning, whether it is a story that keeps us sick, or a story that makes us well. And for that, we must interrogate the statue, the story, and the history they hide, lest we remain captive to that statue’s unblinking, impassive authority.

When we tell a story about the past are we liberating our understandings or building a set of prison walls to keep our understandings captive? Does historical knowledge become our passport to explore or, like a bad 007 plot, serve as our license to kill. And if we build up a set of institutions and systems to enshrine and police that knowledge and codify its ways of storytelling, how do we prevent it from becoming a Frankenstein’s monster of the same stories repeated  in a cycle of self-enforcing orthodoxy? Well, for starters, open the windows and unlock the doors, and breathe that autumn air. A whole world of stories awaits us out there, and even with episode 50 of History Against the Grain, may it always be true that our baskets of knowledge never fill up.

If a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is the only item on the menu, and you know a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is not going to do you any good, what are your options? Do you just keep pretending that this is the best of all possible meals? Or do you dress it up with lots of tasty add-ons, like maybe some pepperoni and curry? Or, and here’s what we are thinking, maybe you create a new menu entirely, one that addresses our nutritional needs and culinary tastes.

So it is with history. We’ve been chewing on the same history menu for too long, a history sandwiched around the claims of sovereignty and flavored with the condiments of power. No matter how much we try to improve it, make it spicier or more exotic, more diverse or more inclusive, it still has us justifying the same old systems of power and privilege.  We call it the sovereignty trap -  and we cannot chew our way out of the problems it has made for us by sticking to the same narrative menu. In other words, we shouldn’t expect a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to be something it was never designed to be. We need a new menu. We need a new basis for history. We need new stories to tell.

Join us for Episode 48 The Province of Mutiny. In a week where the Olympic Games play out like the Age of Empire’s hangover, we here at History Against the Grain offer you a tonic of truth. With every medal ceremony the Olympics remind us just how ingrained the performance of nationalism is in modern life. So it is in history as well. Yet if national histories have been the standard template, they have most often told self-justifying stories of sovereignty with the emphasis on power and those who wield it. And much like one too many medley relays or an overdose of beach volleyball, these sovereignty-based histories become sterile with the telling. The solution? Ditch the sovereignty narratives in favor of real lived experiences, featuring not presidents and potentates but rather the cords of human community. This week we discuss why music tells us more about the communities we build than millionaires and military battles, and how from Africa to Appalachia we can follow the vital musical chords of the past to see how Black lives and Black music have shaped the American experience. 

Summer travel got in the way of recording a new episode this week so as a placeholder we are reposting one of our favorite episodes from last summer. In Episode 18 we talked with University of California Davis professor Ali Anooshahr about his books Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions; and The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam. Not only did this episode release almost exactly a year ago, but the ideas that we discuss with Ali tie in very nicely with the sorts of conversations we have been having in recent episodes.  Enjoy!

True crime TV shows back in the day offered sober disclaimers assuring anxious listeners that “names have been changed to protect the innocent.” As our listeners know, here on HAG we prefer calling things by their true names, and those who commit the crimes, are most definitely getting called out. That guarantee holds true even when the criminal accomplices are historians. Our guest this week is the distinguished Stanford University professor, Priya Satia, whose extraordinary book Time’s Monster makes the case that “historians were, for a long time, not only the scribes of empire but also its architects.” Historical writing has often fed the historical imaginations of statesmen, generals, and businessmen whose business it was to feed the growth of empires and national expansion, often with destructive results, from war to genocide. History itself, in other words, is no innocent in history, but rather as the subtitle of Professor Satiya’s book proclaims, history also makes history. Join us for an episode with Priya Satia, one of our vital scholarly voices.

This week the HAG news team covers the latest staged performance  of the long-running tragicomedy known as U.S. History. We watch as historical veracity gets bum-rushed by the flag waving drugstore cowboys of the Arizona legislature. These dude ranch dudes down in the Valley of the Sun are threatening a $5,000 fine for any public school teacher willing to teach the truth about the bloody and racist past of American history. “Out damned spot! Out, I say!” cry the history sanitizers. Sorry dudes, but you gotta know, that whether or not you can keep it out of the official dude ranch narrative, it seems that blood just does not want to wash away. And that’s the thing about sanitizing historical narratives, they’re always full of Freudian slips and just badly bandaged  enough to keep the inconvenient truths alive and out of the censors’ reach. Once again, Josh draws back the big curtain to expose history’s hustlers, showing how the apologists of Spanish Empire invented a new genre of historical narrative that set the stage for today’s national histories. It all sounds pretty familiar as conquest gets rebranded as discovery, plunderers are recast as heroes, and from New Spain to New Orleans, the chorus of power never tires of singing how god is on their side.

Where do hidden things get found, where does the margin become the center, and where does the light shine in the dark? In Episode 45 that’s where! From Tulsa to Tiananmen, from Timbuktu to Trinidad, your HAG history team has got the good, the bad, everything. So throw on your favorite  I❤️Diouboye t-shirt, grab some popcorn, and settle in as we lay down the history gauntlet to all the memory goons and nostalgia narcissists who want to induce you into historical coma. Because you know...here at HAG...our eyes are always wide open.

"What is the meaning of this?!" Not simply a question for the affronted patriarch anymore, but a question we should be more often asking of the histories we tell. Or in the words of filmmaker Raoul Peck, “we search for truth when we should search for meaning.” We are too often poorly served by histories that hang on claims of truth but offer only confused, distorted, or dishonest meanings. Take the familiar story from the U.S. standard version history of the enslaver who famously wrote that all men are created equal. Truth or falsity is not at issue here, the basic facts of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence are well enough established. It is rather how that standard version U.S history invests meaning in his words while eliding the obvious contradiction of enslavement, a contradiction with which Jefferson himself was all too familiar and involved. The result? We have inherited a national history whose purported meaning is not only at odds with its own truth but incapable of resolving the tangle of contradictions that is the historical legacy of American enslavement. As Raoul Peck reminds us, it is time we tell not just truer but also more meaningful histories.

"We birthed a nation from nothing,” says Rick Santorum, the goggle-eyed Christian nut job and former U.S. Senator. For Santorum’s audience it is all too clear who he means by “we” - an imagined nation of white Christian people hermetically sealed in time and exclusively responsible for the authentic American identity. Well, from the nothingness of Rick Santorum’s historical mind to the machinations of China’s language authorities, the history police never tire of telling us who and what we really are. According to historian Prasenjit Duara, the nation-state “stakes its claim to sovereign authority, in part, as custodians of authenticity,” and we regularly see efforts by sovereigns and stewards of the national interest to determine the cultural norms that most authentically define us. Our guest this episode, Gina Anne Tam is the author of Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960, a fascinating look at how various sovereign interests and cultural arbiters in China’s nation-building project wielded language as a litmus for defining China’s ‘authentic’ identity. From melting pot to Middle Kingdom, we consider how claims of cultural authenticity reflect more often the interests of national marketing than the lived experience of people.

During a week when a murder trial featuring a notorious police officer as defendant rendered its verdict, another broader verdict hung in the balance over the American justice system itself. Like all governing institutions, America’s policing and justice systems are products of a historical evolution , one that has defined the ongoing development of centralized states since the dawn of human governance just over five thousand years ago. Our guest this week is the distinguished historian Patrick Manning, whose recent book, A History of Humanity: The Evolution of the Human System, makes the case for seeing such institutions in the evolutionary long run of human history. Manning argues that humankind became the quintessentially institutional animal as an evolutionary outgrowth of our species sudden development of syntactic language 70,000 years ago. Yet because evolution rather than intelligent design forms the basis for human institutional development, one might reasonably ask: what happens when human institutions outlive their evolutionary usefulness? Are they subject to extinction or abolition, or do they simply continue in an evolutionary afterlife of corrosion and rot?

Once again bigotry is in vogue, and red state minions without shame are tripping all over one another to pass shamefaced voter suppression laws. Even Major League Baseball, no slouch itself in the annals of Jim Crow, has taken action in protest of Georgia’s recent effort to disenfranchise Black voters. Un-ironically, all of this plays out as the George Floyd murder trial is held in Minnesota, which has us thinking once again just how poorly suited are the standard version histories for explaining the enduring traditions of racial segregation, voter suppression, and police violence against Black bodies. You just can’t get here via the Mt. Rushmore express. So with Episode 41, Pentimento, we again look at the truer and more honest histories that lie underneath the superimposed and mythic images of the standard version history, to surface narratives that can actually explain how we got here and why we need truer and better histories to get us out of this god awful mess.

As the United States once again sees the dreadful legacy of a gun culture reap its deadly toll on the living, we pause to consider how the histories we inherit condition us to mis-remember the violence of the past. Often presented in the narrative guise of a patriotic nostalgia and exceptionalism, the historical violence of empire and nation building translates into the adoration of certain iconic ‘great men of history.’ These same men were themselves the chief architects of those violent projects, and yet within the nostalgic national and imperial narratives, they are imagined to be the personified ‘soul’ of the nation or empire. It is all part of a historical hustle we call the sovereignty trap, and with Episode 40 we begin our second year of History Against the Grain discussing the better histories that can liberate us from its dreadful legacies.

In March of 2020, a year ago, we started a podcast, intending to capture and build upon a discussion of history we’d been having for years. It was a discussion mostly in short bursts, often in passing, outside our classrooms, in the doorways of our offices, and frequently in the hallways and stairwells of the building where we teach. Our intent was to use the calmer space afforded us by a podcast to discuss what Hayden White called in his seminal 1973 book Metahistory, the “nature and function of historical knowledge.” Apparently the podcast gods had another design, and calm would play no part. Just as we settled in for a fuzzy friendly little chatfest, a relentless historical tide began building outside our windows, and swept us all along on a course we’re still trying to understand. Let’s call it history in real time: a global pandemic, and mutinous quarantine, a racial justice moment with death and truth, a brooder’s coup d’etat with a brokered insurrection, statues tumbling like bowling pins, shock troops, city streets, and a moment of reckoning for the stories we tell ourselves and the stories yet to be told. We called it History Against the Grain, so maybe we didn’t really expect calm after all, but after our year of living historically, a little calm reflection in our 39th episode will have to suffice.

"And how does one tell impossible stories?” A question well placed for our time, and one confronted by the scholar Saidiya Hartman, who has journeyed through the heart of darkness of slavery’s archives in search of Black lives past. Yet in their efforts to recover those stories, scholars like Hartman and professional historians compete in a broader marketplace of historical knowledge, where our public memories are fed, constructed, and often distorted by public memorials and statuary, patriotic commemorations and school namings, and even the archives themselves, only to serve patriotic narratives that erase the past lives and histories that contradict the boastful and exceptionalist claims of national identity. Think this pressure for patriotic history happens only in the U.S.? Our special guest this week is historian Xin Fan, whose new book World History and National Identity in China reveals the dramatic and often agonizing personal and professional journeys undertaken by Chinese scholars to maintain intellectual autonomy across four generations of historical writing in modern China.

“Before you study the history, study the historian,” warned Carl Becker. So join us for another HAG episode as we consider the fears and fancies, fights and fault lines of the knowledge producers.

It’s angry. It’s fragile. It’s toxic. And it’s trending. Like history itself was trademarked. That’s why we here at HAG call it:

History ™

When is history not about the past?When it becomes a toxic brand. This toxic history brand comes straight from the syrup factory and it seems to be everywhere these days, from rural backwaters like Harrison, Arkansas to leafy suburbs like North Ogden, Utah; from the wine country of Bordeaux, France, to the historic port city of Bristol, England. According to the corporate marketers at Jeep, it is even centered somewhere in the dusty middle of the Kansas prairie, where a Christian cross embossed American flag map and cowboy hat wearin’ dude named Bruce will tell ya all about it. It’s a mighty popular history brand for folks who want no fuss over facts, see diversity as division, and prefer their history colored in a lighter shade of pale.

Join the intrepid HAG news team as we take you on a hemisphere hopping tour of the white identitarian history offensive that is festering in public squares and roiling in political chambers, uniting Arkansas intellectuals and Parisian rednecks alike. Neither new or improved, this is the big hat belt buckle brand of white identity history.

‘Father, father

We don't need to escalate

You see, war is not the answer

For only love can conquer hate

You know we've got to find a way

To bring some lovin' here today’

Marvin Gaye had it right, but too many who are invoking historical fathers lately sound more like the racist apostles of white nationalism from the salad days of Nazism and Fascism a century ago. Join us for Episode 36 Fatherlands as we discuss the dangers and deceits of ‘patriotic history,’ and welcome our special guest, Iowa State University professor Jeremy Best, author of the new book Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture and Globalization in the Age of Empire. As Jeremy reminds us, history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

It goes like this: mostly you stand on a level platform and the history lays out before you like a Bierstadt mountain landscape, cool, daunting, and full of color. But on the rare occasion the history blows right up your back, hot and gnarly like a Santa Ana wind. The level platform turns over as you watch your hat blow away in the dust. You forget which part is the history and which part was your hat. After the last couple of weeks, on top of the last 10 months, driven by the last four years, guess which one we were feeling for Episode 35? Hint: we called the episode My Hair is in the Soup (thank you Jericho Brown). So join us for some history therapy, as we work through the demons and try to trust the better angels of our American history. Just remember HAG rule #19: that anyone who serves up their sedition with a heavy dose of unity and reconciliation is under no circumstances to be trusted.

Hate to say we told you so, but....

On Wednesday, January 6 the coup plotters from the firm of Trump, Hawley, Giuliani, and Cruz made their bid, and like a scene from a horror movie, sent a horde of angry villagers up the hill to attack the castle. Adrenalized by a go-get-em speech from America’s grifter-in-chief, the MAGA maulers might have pulled it off, might have prevented the transfer of power with their wrestlemania cum kristalnacht autogolpe madness, if they’d only not stopped to take so many dang selfies in the Rotunda. Before the smoke had even cleared, Mr. Grifter serenaded the stormtroops with a “we love you” White House valentines videogram. Meanwhile, on a smaller stage in a converted community theater in Wilmington, Delaware, an astonished Pres.-elect sought to reassure us that “the scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not represent a true America.” You sure Joe? Maybe ask the guy with the Confederate flag, or check how many of those selfies involved any of the nine Confederate heroes featured in the Capitol’s statuary hall. Was it just “a small number of extremists dedicated to lawlessness,” like ol’ Joe said? With the blood still fresh on their hands, later in the day 147 Republican congressmen voted to overturn the election. Like the man said, it ain’t over til it’s over, and this coup American style appears far from over.

Join us this week as Josh and our special guest co-host Edward Hashima sort through the rubble of recent events, and question whether the madness is really outside the ‘trajectory of American history,’ as some insist, or if in fact this is who we are.

On a day when the U.S. capitol plays host to an armed standoff with insurrectionists relentlessly egged on by the criminal-in-chief, it pays to remember that the whole world is watching. When modern liberal capitalist systems fracture, all pretense and condescension goes out the window. And the reality of force and violence that has so long been visited upon the disenfranchised peoples of the world, now ignores borders and turns its ugly face toward inward, like the Frankenstein’s monster whose creators could no longer control the forces they unleashed. Join the Josh and Chris for a discussion of how coup d’etat done is done up American style.

Have you been feeling a little hollowed out lately? Listless? Not much appetite? Everything starting to taste like a badly overcooked Trump steak marinated in yesterday’s bathtub water? Well, you might just have a case of occidentosis. But not to worry friends, the semester is almost over and the saucy boys are making a history house call. Our diagnosis? You’re just a little queasy from the rollicking Matterhorn ride known as Western Civilization with cheap thrills that fail to deliver. Seems we’ve all been binge eating too much bad amusement park food served up western style, full of consumerism’s empty calories, seasoned with cheap retail democracy, and deep fried in a greasy batter of corporate hooliganism. Not to worry, the HAG doctors are serving up a healthy diet with plenty of good food for thought. So pull up a chair, grab your forks, and dig in to another episode rich with history’s essential nutrients.

Still sleepy from their socially distanced tryptophan turkey fiesta, the Saucy Boys awaken in Episode 31 to the lies, damn lies, and sketchy statistics of capitalism’s pandemic chicanery. Essential workers may keep us fed in the time of COVID, but cold hearted capitalism won’t budge a federal minimum wage off its 2007 level of $7.50/hour. Starvation wages for essential workers. What gives? Is it really the iron law of wages, or just patriarchy, racism, and lowdown greed once again gaming a system that’s been ripping people off since the Pilgrim’s hustled their first free dinner from their Wampanoag hosts? If colonial New England is really the cradle of white America’s liberty, maybe that’s because those Puritans had a lot of free time and plenty to eat thanks to the uncompensated essential workers of their day: the enslaved African men and women who kept their Christian hearts and funny hats well provided for in hearth and home. Listen in as we turn the great American origins myth on its head and watch all the ill gotten coin drop from the pockets of the pilferers. Don’t touch that filthy lucre friends, unless you have plenty of hand sanitizer, cause it will make you sick. Help is on the way with another feisty episode of History Against the Grain.

Join us as we celebrate HAG’s pearl milestone: Episode 30, with a chorus of global voices. We are a podcast born of pandemic, now eight months into the deep, fired by an ongoing interrogation of the history outside our windows. True to our promise, HAG has jettisoned the borders, and explored the wider world, both the roads less traveled and with the main thoroughfares revisited. With Episode 30 we find ourselves arrived at a great public crossroads plaza where all those journeys converge, where all of us now stand, knowing that “something is profoundly wrong.” Not to worry friends, we haven’t lost our grip on reality, it’s just that we need a very different reality, one framed by greater humility and humanity. And we have the history to prove it.

This episode is dedicated to the late Tony Judt.

The results are in, the car horns have all honked, and by the width of a pencil thin mustache, the competent stewards of a failed system have defeated the real estate grifter and his racist minions. Sort of. On November 3, voters said the name: Rumpelstiltskin! all right, but to no one’s surprise, that short-fingered vulgarian refuses to leave the Tower, and instead soils the presidential bedsheets while gorging on filet-o-fish sandwiches. And for the next four years? The soul of America will dad dance to the unlistenable schlock of Hall and Oates 80s studio pop. Yeah, say the Saucy Boys, it’s a bitch girl.

The whole revolting spectacle finds us in a contemplative mood, thinking about the lies we tell ourselves as a country and the true names we refuse to speak. Are we really a shining City Upon a Hill, or just the unabomber’s cabin burning in the light of another wildfire?

Listen in with episode 29 as we toggle between joy and despair, between the sensible centrists and baskets of deplorables. We can only conclude friends, that Mad Magazine had it right all along: the soul of America really is blecch.

Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded slave? Ouch! No, say the saucy boys, you wanna get hitched? Go to Reno and the Silver Bells Wedding Chappel, but under no circumstances should anyone get married on an Old South plantation. As a wedding destination, a former slave labor camp just has no merit! And speaking of merit, Josh explains that when it comes to so-called meritocracies, the deck is too often stacked in favor of the privileged and the vile. Our interview guest this week is an old friend, Jordan McGowan, who is a Sacramento educator and activist working to unstack the deck of racial privilege. From the classroom to encampments of the unhoused, Jordan carries the spirit of the Black Panther originals to build agency and respect among those who have been dealt a bad hand in the racist pseudo-meritocracy of the U.S.

Welcome to episode 25, the silver jubilee edition of History Against the Grain. We’re podcasting from the Truman Balcony, steroid free, speaking truth to power, and not even a little winded. Think of HAG as the podcast equivalent of Deadwood, a wild west roaring camp of a podcast, where an uncompromising saloonkeeper and brothel owner is the standard bearer of every episode’s conscience, and a hustler like Donald Trump ain’t fooling anyone. Just ask our special interview guests, a couple of HAG alums, Elise Robison and Kyle Fitzpatrick, who by day are high school history and government teachers, and guardians of our public education universe. Hearing them will leave you feeling much better about the state of things in these fraught times. So pour yourself a whisky, because there are no checks and balances here in Deadwood, and the saucy boys know that systems are for suckers.

This week join the HAG team and their very special guest, University of Pittsburgh historian and Pernille Røge, as we take a look at what was cookin’ in empire’s crazy kitchen known as the Early Modern era.This history moves in mysterious ways, but it’s all right, because the saucy boys offer a polyrhythmic take on modernity, and ask the question: can you really fix a system that never worked in the first place? From Ghana to Guadeloupe, from slavers to sugar traders, we hope it’s not too late to come clean with the Early Modern Era. Be sure to check out Pernille's book, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802.

This week's music: Built to Spill, "You We're Right"; Oceanator, "A Crack in the World" 

Was Mulan even Chinese? Has Tr**p ever read a book? Does the Apocalypse got ya down? Never fear, the saucy boys are back and we’re throwing haymakers straight to the jaw of every history zombie. Josh has got his groove in a synchronous fall semester season, and he’s asking students to question every premise. Howard Zinn drops by with a plea for the people, as we pull backthe  curtain on the boogeyman of patriotic history, from the U.S.A. to the P.R.C. And that includes you Walt Disney: Leave those kids alone! Rest assured, here on HAG, we ain’t rooting for the emperor.

Join us this week for an all Haiti episode. Rather than go postal on the blah blah blah of corporate conventions and platitudinous political campaigning, the saucy boys turn up the volume on voices that matter. Our special guest is André Juste, a Brooklyn- based Haitian native, artist, writer, and global observer of all things vital. In a wide ranging discussion with Josh, Andre expounds on his own personal transformation, from a Haitian immigrant kid in New York City of the late 60s, to an intellectually hungry student at Brooklyn College, where he devoured works on the African diaspora and post colonial literature. “We are the contradictions,” reminds André, in a world that too seldom gives voice to the divergent voices of the formerly colonized and once enslaved. As a result, the rich creativity and wisdom of those voices and the contradictions they represent are relegated to what the Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot called the ‘silences’ that inform the dominant narratives of power. And the solution to that silence? Just listen to Haiti.

This week's music: Arcade Fire, "Haiti"

It’s back to school time for the saucy boys as we spotlight a new school year, pandemic edition. Coronavirus politics seem to infect everything, including the school reopenings in Georgia, where craven meets crazy as admin and parents conspire to keep the masks off and the kids in the crowded classrooms. With infection rates up, it’s all part of the real time biology lab experiment known as Covid-19 American style. When the kids go to school and get infected, well the governing powers of the Georgia school districts say it’s all just hands-on learning. Speaking of power, as one of our HAG patron philosophers Michel Foucault reminds us, the writing of history itself is an act of power, and whether it is a power used to liberate or condemn depends on who is telling the story and for what purpose. Our special guest this week, China scholar and Carnegie Mellon University professor Benno Weiner, discusses communist China’s own machinations with history over the course of its decades long nation-building projects. What does it mean to be Chinese, and will the ethnic minorities who live in the borderlands of China’s vast geographical periphery, ever see themselves as genuine members of a Chinese nation? Do the governing authorities have a legitimate historical claim that they should? Or is it simply a matter to be decided by power? From Dallas, Georgia to Xinjiang, China - the HAG team keeps you socially distanced and globally connected.

This week's music: Jay Reatard, "I'm Watching You"; Run the Jewels, "Talk to Me"; Protomartyr, "Modern Business Hymns"

We welcome Josh back from his errand in the wilderness and catch up with the drunken frat party known as America. The frat prez took a cognitive test and couldn’t pronounce Yosemite. While frat brother Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas, initiated pledge week hazing with a bill to ban history teachers from discussing slavery. If you wanna pledge this frat, bro Tom will make you sing the song of American exceptionalism while they pour beer on your head. But the saucy boys aren’t buying it, we’re not pledging, and we’re not wasting a single craft brew on the nonsensical boast of American exceptionalism. Chris looks at the nefarious origins of colonial America (hint: far from exceptional), and Josh reminds us that power is what power does. Whether America, China, or the Ottoman Empire - like birds of a feather - empires march together in history, even when marching straight toward a cliff. 

This week's music: Dehd, "Disappear"; U.S. Girls, "Born to Lose"; Jeff Rosenstock lyrics from "No Dream"

Sovereignty makes its own claims, enforces its own reality, and as we learn in this week’s episode, writes its own history. Our special guest, Professor Ali Anooshahr of UC Davis joins us to discuss his research on the history claims made by the great sovereign empires of Eurasia. He explains how Persian, Indian, and Turkish chroniclers invented genealogies for the ruling dynasties they served, to cloak them in the mythic glory of an invented Turco-Mongol past, and thereby provide them with suitable claims of legitimate authority. To avoid being trapped by such invented claims, Dr. Anooshahr suggests we must think broadly about the past, beyond the bordered histories of states and their sovereign claims, to gain valuable insights and perspective, especially on the more local subjects we study.  Josh and Chris consider how such perspective benefits our understanding of the history outside our windows, as it unfolds in real time. Taken from this week’s headlines, we ask how the passing of Civil Rights warrior John Lewis offers perspective on the claims of sovereignty, the most racist of which he fearlessly confronted. John Lewis’s story of confrontation and civil disobedience reminds us of what Michel Foucault termed the “mechanisms of security” that sovereign states impose on those who protest oppressive laws, whether the steel helmeted police and high pressure firehoses of Lewis’s day, or the current arsenal of military shock weapons seen in Federal deployment of stormtroopers this week in Portland, Oregon. To keep a clear focus on the telling of these stories, the saucy boys argue we must ditch the shibboleth of ‘objectivity’ and exchange the narrative of history-as-sovereignty for an anarchy of history that serves no master.

America’s Fourth of July holiday left the H A G team feeling flat, but not to worry, you’ll find all your favorite fireworks lighting up this episode. The saucy boys take a roman candle to the patriotic nonsense of a president’s July 4th speech, and place firecrackers under the feet of a corporate media still playing the awful charade of both side-sides-ism. And with a huge assist from Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault, Chris drops a cherry bomb on the New York Times, and says we must ditch the media’s fake narratives about protest ‘violence.’ It’s time to acknowledge how those with power have done the real violence. As the smoke clears, Josh takes us home with a close look at the ambiguities and ambivalences of violence, through the life and lens of India’s Mohandas Gandhi.