Nostalgia Trap

What is the "deep state"? Does it really exist, or is it a specter in the minds of far-right conspiracy theorists from Jack D. Ripper to Alex Jones? In this episode, Justin Rogers-Cooper joins me to …

Michael Brenes is a historian and Senior Archivist for American Diplomacy at Yale. When I first met him years ago, we were both working on degrees in American history at the CUNY Graduate Center, and…

Yasmin Nair is a writer and activist based in Chicago, known as much for her dynamic political and cultural writing as for her contentious social media adventures. In this conversation we spend a goo…

Justin Rogers-Cooper and I have often talked about combining our scholarly interests into an academic mega-project, exploring the connections between 1877 and 1977, an era that witnessed spectacular …

Douglas Williams is a fierce political writer and grassroots organizer whose work can be found at TheSouthLawn.org. In this conversation, he tells me about the influence of his father's union work on…

Peter Sabatino, the Nostalgia Trap's producer and sound wizard, joins me to unpack the recent revelations about Louis CK's abusive behavior. Our conversation attempts to put this stuff in context, di…

Nelson Lichtenstein is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also serves as the director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. He joins …

Christian Appy's work on the history of the Vietnam War has had an enormous influence on the direction of my own research and writing on the war. In this conversation, Appy joins me to talk about the…

David Fouser is a professor of history who recently completed a Ph.D at the University of California, Irvine. In this conversation he tells me all about the field of environmental history, how grad s…

Fifty years after publishing his first short story, Stephen King remains a powerful force in American popular culture. Claudia Moreno Parsons joins me to talk about what King's work has meant to us p…

In this episode, Justin Rogers-Cooper and I take on the immigration debate from our typically broader historical perspective. How did we get from "tear down this wall!" in 1989 to "build the wall!" i…

Mikhail Gershovich was my boss at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute in New York, where we were both surprised to discover that we had each been raised in Ventura County during the 1980s…

On my way out of Baruch College after twelve years of teaching in the history department, I stopped by Professor Vincent DiGirolamo's office to talk with him about his youth in California and his pat…

Climate change is a favorite topic for me and my friend Justin Rogers-Cooper, who joins me here to talk about the state of the planet and the doomed human species in the Trump era. Despite its apocal…

My good friend Justin Rogers-Cooper came over to help me understand a bit more of what's going on in Syria, and our conversation ended up focusing more on war imagery and how it functions in the soci…

Michael Koncewicz is a historian and writer whose book They Said ‘No’ to Nixon: Republicans Who Stood Up to the President’s Abuses of Power will be out next year from University of California Press. …

Matt Karp is a professor of U.S. history at Princeton University, and the author of the recent book This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. In this conversatio…

To celebrate the publication of my book, Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), my good friend Justin Rogers-Coop…

Professor Carolyn Eisenberg was studying history  at Columbia University during the late 1960s and 1970s, witnessing (and taking part in) some of the historic political activism that emerged from the…

Like many of my favorite guests, I met Jesse Schwartz when we were both doing our doctoral work at the CUNY Graduate Center. He's now a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College in Long Isl…