Nostalgia Trap

Steve Brier is a historian whose work at the American Social History Project helped draw me into the field of working class social history. Steve also has some amazing stories about his father's time…

Sarah Leonard is an exciting voice in left journalism, currently working as a writer and editor for The Nation, New Inquiry, and Dissent. She writes about stuff that matters: mass incarceration, femi…

Frances Fox Piven is a towering figure of the American Left, a professor of political science whose combined academic work and political activism provide an extraordinary framework of ideas about pov…

James Oakes was sitting at the head of a frighteningly tiny conference table when I entered the room for my first graduate course at the CUNY Graduate Center many years ago. A professor of American h…

In recent months I have been depending on writer and professor Anthony Galluzzo's fantastic Facebook feed for his uniquely cynical take on the latest news, notes, and opinions--particularly when it c…

David Zeiger's documentary film Sir! No Sir! had a profound impact on my graduate studies, educating me about the "GI movement" against the Vietnam War and kick-starting my project on the "GI coffeeh…

During my early years as a graduate student in history, I took a course at the CUNY Graduate Center called "From Civil Rights to Black Power," taught by Professor Clarence Taylor. The readings for th…

Reading Todd Gitlin's book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage was a major moment in my development as a historian. Gitlin's colorful, rigorous description of that turbulent decade heavily influ…

In 2004, when he was executive officer of the CUNY Graduate Center's department of history, Professor Joshua Freeman was my first contact and mentor in the early years of grad school. His expertise a…

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, writer, critic, translator, archivist, and much more. As a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, he is known as much for his scholarship as for his generosity: w…

My friend Justin Rogers-Cooper, a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York, recently invited me to campus to record a "live" podcast with his students. The course was d…

I've gotten to know Christopher Silsby through our work together at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College. Christopher's particular take on the role of technology in educa…

As the main adviser on my dissertation, Josh Brown was and continues to be an important figure in the development of my own thoughts and ideas about American history. Active in the Vietnam antiwar mo…

I first met Barbara Garson while researching the GI coffeehouse movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which aimed to open antiwar, counterculture coffeehouses in small towns outside military bases, as par…

Lavelle Porter is a writer with a fascinating set of interests, ranging from poetry and science fiction to racial politics, sexual identity, and the structures of higher education itself. His recent …

Why is the minimum wage so ridiculously low in 21st century America? My guests today (Eljeer Hawkins, Cora Bergantinos, and James Hoff) are part of the 15Now movement, which is seeking to drastically…

Why are sitcoms like Small Wonder so haunting to some of us? My guest, Bridget McGovern, a writer and managing editor at sci-fi/fantasy site tor.com, sheds some light on this subject and many others …

What does is it mean to be "conservative" in America? My guest on this episode, professor and writer Corey Robin, has spent a great deal of his career thinking about conservatism and its particular i…