Nostalgia Trap
Deep dive conversations on American history, politics, and pop culture, hosted by history professor and writer David Parsons.
- Update frequency
- every 6 days
- Average duration
- 46 minutes
- Episodes
- 525
- Years Active
- 2014 - 2025
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 106: Hyperspeed of the Immediate w/ Maximillian Alvarez
Maximillian Alvarez is a writer and academic whose work often explores the intersections of changing technological environments and the production of radical political philosophy. In this conversatio…
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 105: Between Oligarchy and Democracy w/ Heather Cox Richardson
Heather Cox Richardson is a historian of American politics with a number of important books on the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the ideological evolution of the Republican Party. Richardson’s work …
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 103: No Really, You Don't Need a Weatherman w/ Michael Kazin
Michael Kazin is a historian of American labor and social movements, and co-editor of Dissent magazine. As a student at Harvard in the late 1960s, he was a leader within Students for a Democratic Soc…
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 102: Immigration and the Carceral State w/ Carl Lindskoog
Carl Lindskoog is a historian of immigration, race, and rebellion whose forthcoming book Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System locates …
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 100: Writing Attica's History w/ Heather Ann Thompson
Heather Ann Thompson is a historian and writer whose 2016 book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. In this conversation, she discuss…
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 99: The Long Seventies w/ Bruce Schulman
Bruce Schulman's 2001 book The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics is a fascinating take on a critical era, and helps put the Trump era into an understandable histor…
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 98: The Ruins of History w/ Megan Kate Nelson
Megan Kate Nelson's interdisciplinary approach to environmental history puts towering events like the Civil War into wholly new contexts. Her book Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War …
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 97: Wild Wild Country w/ Claudia Moreno Parsons BONUS EPISODE TEASER
Here's a quick preview of next week's bonus episode, a conversation with Claudia Moreno Parsons about the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. If you want to support the show and get access to all …
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 96: The Longue Durée of Modernity w/ Daniel McClure
Daniel McClure is a historian and writer interested in long term historical processes (like capitalism, imperialism, and the nation-state), connecting those big ideas to American popular culture and …
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 94: The Greenwich Village Folk Explosion w/ Stephen Petrus
Stephen Petrus is a historian of 20th century America and author of Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival. In this conversation, he tells me about discovering the world of beat poet…
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 93: Jason Wilson
Jason Wilson's coverage of last summer's "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which culminated in the murder of Heather Heyer, helped frame the rising presence of "alt-right" and whi…
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 92: Allen Ruff
Allen Ruff is the host of A Public Affair on WORT-FM community radio in Madison, Wisconsin, a show that features interviews with a wide range of figures from the left side of the American political a…
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 91: Thomas Frank
Thomas Frank might be best known as the author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, a 2004 book that sought to explain why so many Americans in "flyover country" vote for the Republican Party. But his …
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 90: AM/FM - The Political Economy of Mass Shootings
In this episode, Justin Rogers-Cooper joins me to unpack the mass shooting phenomenon in the wider context of American history. Why do Americans kill each other? Who benefits from mass killings? And …
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 89: Erin Bartram
Erin Bartram's blog piece, "The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind," explores an uncomfortable topic among graduate students and recent Ph.D.'s: giving up on the academic job market. In this convers…
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 88: Jeremy Young
Jeremy C. Young is a professor of history at Dixie State University, and the author of Age of Charisma: Leaders, Followers, and Emotions in American Society, 1870-1940. In this conversation, Jeremy …
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 87: Eero Laine
Eero Laine is a professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo whose work often focuses on the world of professional wrestling. He joins me to talk about how he came to study wrestling as both a p…
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 86: AM/FM - Punk in the 90s
David Fouser was definitely way more into punk, as both an ethos and music genre, than I recall ever being. But now that he's all grown up, like many of us, his politics and musical tastes have evolv…
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 85: Daniel Bessner
Daniel Bessner is a professor and writer whose work explores 20th century American cultural and intellectual history. In this conversation, we talk about his book Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and …
Nostalgia Trap - Episode 84: Yekaterina Oziashvili
Yekaterina Oziashvili, a professor of political science at Sarah Lawrence College, joins me to talk about her upbringing in Georgia during the final years of the Soviet Union, and how the nation's co…