Susan J. Douglas, author of the book "Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done," discusses how media myths — from reality TV to the news — undermine continued importance of feminism in the 21st century.
Economist Richard D. Wolff, the author of "Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What To Do About It," discusses the origins and significance of the housing crisis facing the United States.
This week on HFTF historian David R. Roediger discusses the history of race and “whiteness” in America. The author of several books on labor, race, and power, including The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, and most recently, How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon, Roediger’s work explores how the idea of race — including “the white race” — has been made and re-made throughout American history. In the interview Roediger talks about this history, how President Obama has navigated the issue of race, and how current debates over Islam and Muslim immigration fit into America’s racial past. Listen to the interview, and check out Roediger’s website for his latest work.
On this new episode of HFTF my guest is Rickie Solinger, independent historian, curator and author of many books including Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade, and more recently Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America. Currently, she is the curator of two new traveling exhibits on the New Deal. In our interview Solinger discusses how class and race shaped single pregnancy the United States, as well as the meaning of “reproductive politics.” Check out the show!!
Enjoy a brand new episode of HFTF featuring an interview with Charles C. Mann, correspondent for Science and The Atlantic Monthly, as well as the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. He discusses how new research from anthropologists, historians, botanists, and archeologists has undermined many of the enduring “high school textbook” images and myths about Native American life before 1492. Mann challenges the way our culture often thinks about Native Americans’ relationship to the environment — a reinterpretation with implications for how we approach our own abounding environmental dilemmas. Check it out!
Paul Sabin (assistant professor of history at Yale University) discusses his book, "Crude Politics: the California Oil Market, 1900-1940," and a brand new article in Environmental History titled “‘The Ultimate Environmental Dilemma:’ Making a Place for Historians in the Climate Change and Energy Debates.” Sabin’s work calls into question how free the “free market” is, and demonstrates the importance of the state in shaping capitalism.
This week on History for the Future, I interviewed Heather Steffen on the structure of the labor force at American universities. We discussed the increasing use of the casual labor of adjunct teachers, the crisis in the tenure system, and highly exploitative world of student internships. Steffen pointed to the ways that recent changes in the university may serve as a “canary in the coal mine” for broader developments in U.S. capitalism.
Heather Steffen is a doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon University in Literary and Cultural Studies where she is writing a dissertation entitled, “The Struggle for the University in the Progressive Era.” She also serves on the delegate assembly and the committee on the status graduate students in the profession for the Modern Language Association, and was recently featured in an forum in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the future of graduate education in the humanities ( click here to read the forum!).
At the end of the show Heather mentioned a few sources for further reading on issues facing universities. Here are links to the sources she suggested: How the University Works blog, The American Association of University Professors, and The American Federation of Teachers. And Heather’s brand new blog on the university is badformorale.org.
This week on HFTF, I interviewed Brian Black, professor of history and environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University – Altoona, and author of the books, Petrolia: The Landscape of the World’s First Oil Boom and of the forthcoming work, Declaring Dependence: The Ecology of Petroleum in Twentieth Century American Life. He discusses the the global petroleum industry’s messy origins in northwestern Pennsylvania and the environmental ethic that guided its development: “the rule of capture” (i.e. there are no rules). Continuing, Black explores the parallels between the world’s first oil boom, and its latest catastrophe: the current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
This new episode of HFTF features an interview with journalist Heather Rogers, author of the books Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, and most recently, Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution (2010). She discusses this most recent work, which answers the question, “Can’t we just consume the right products to solve our ecological crisis?” Take a listen to the show and also check out the short documentary on her first book, available on youtube: Gone Tomorrow.
This week on History for the Future, I interview John Soluri, associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, and author of the book Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environment in Honduras and the United States (2005). Soluri describes the development of the “commodity chain” that has linked the lowland banana producing region of Honduras with the mass markets of the United States from the early twentieth-century to the present, and discusses the blurring of the division between nature and society that this process engendered. Soluri’s work pushes us to think hard about where, and under what conditions, the commodities we take for granted are produced. Take a listen to the episode, and visit the website of Building New Hope, a Pittsburgh based non-profit working with a coffee cooperative in Nicaragua, which John alludes to at the end of the program.
