Podcast Colin Woodward

John C. Rodrigue returns! John is a professor of history at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, where he has been since 2007. He was one of Colin's professors at LSU when they were both in Baton Rouge in the early 2000s. John's new book is Freedom's Crescent: The Civil War and the Destruction of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Cambridge Un…

Greg Wells is a hustler. The owner of Records and Relics in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond, he's been buying and selling vinyl for a long time. As he tells Colin, he sold sold records at antique stores, vinyl shows, and on Ebay before he decided to get his own place. Greg has been in Richmond for over 25 years, and he's seen the city chan…

A professor at Texas A & M since the late-90s, David Vaught is a longtime baseball fan. A native of the Bay Area, he visited ever-chilly Candlestick Park as a kid and remembered seeing Perry pitch. But while he has loved the Giants, Spitter: Baseball's Notorious Gaylord Perry, grew out of a previous book on baseball. San Francisco was just one of m…

Play All Night!: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East is Bob Beatty's most recent book. Bob, however, has been an Allman Brothers fan for a long time. Like the Allmans, Bob has Florida roots. He now lives and works in Tennessee, where he got his Ph.D. and is a history and museum consultant. Bob's fast-reading book looks at the breakout alb…

John Kirk is English, but he has lived in Arkansas for more than ten years. Raised in the Manchester area, his fascination with the US began as a graduate student, where he studied the civil rights movement. He is the author and editor of ten books, and his newest is on soldier, philanthropist, and governor Winthrop Rockefeller (yes, that Rockefell…

Bradley J. Sommer is a native of Ohio who received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2021. In Pittsburgh, he studied under labor historian Joe William Trotter. His dissertation was “Tomorrow Never Came: Race, Class, Reform, Conflict, and the Decline of an Industrial City, Toledo, Ohio, 1930-1980,” which he is now revising into a book. Oh…

Edward T. O'Donnell is a professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. A native of the Bay State, Ed completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University. For years, he was the host of the history podcast In the Past Lane, whose guests included Ken Burns. Ed has stayed focused throughout his career. At Columbia, he gave history to…

Dr. Ruth Hawkins didn't get her Ph.D. in history, but she has proven one of the most important preservationists in the history of Arkansas. As the head of Heritage Sites Program at Arkansas State University for thirty years, she oversaw the restoration of the Johnny Cash Boyhood Home in Dyess, the Pfeiffer-Hemingway House in Piggott, and Lakeport p…

Guy Lancaster is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture in Little Rock. He is also one of the foremost historians of lynching in America. American Atrocity is his most recent book. American Atrocity focuses on Arkansas, but it tells a larger story of lynching and race relations in America. Dr. Lancaster, a native of Arkansas…

Michael Stewart Foley has been writing about music and Johnny Cash for a long time. His new book, Citizen Cash: The Political Life and Times of Johnny Cash, looks at the politics of the Man in Black, who had the unique ability to appeal to Democrats and Republicans even when the country was hideously divided. What was the source of his appeal? Cash…

It's been nearly two years, but historian and music expert Court Carney, a professor at Stephen F. Austin State University, returns to talk about the recent Beatles documentary Get Back. Director Peter Jackson's long-awaited film attempts to put the Beatles' Get Back/Let It Be sessions in the best possible light. Does he succeed? And how do we judg…

Amanda Frost is a Harvard-educated lawyer who teaches in Washington, D.C., at American University. You are Not American is her first book. It looks at various moments in United States history where citizenship was debated and legislated in lasting ways. Some of the cases she examines are well known, such as the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857,…

Christina Proenza-Coles's book, American Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World, is now available in paperback. Christina grew up in Miami (which she calls an "apartheid city"), the daughter of a Savannah mom and Cuban dad who fled not Castro but Batista. As a kid in Miami in the 80s, she saw Hispanic culture b…

Ben Beard is a writer based in Chicago. He also loves film. He has written about civil rights and Muhammad Ali in the past, but his most recent book is The South Never Plays Itself: A Film Buff's Journey through the South on Screen. Born and raised in the Deep South, Ben has been writing about movies for years. The South Never Plays Itself covers s…

LaQuita Scaife is the daughter of Cecil Scaife, who worked at Sun Records with Sam Phillips. Born in Arkansas, and a man who initially wanted to act, Cecil worked at a radio station in the Mississippi River town of Helena before somehow meeting Phillips. As the Sun promotions man, Cecil traveled to radio stations to get them to play the latest hits…

James Horn is a native of England who now resides in Virginia and works in Williamsburg, which makes sense if you know his scholarship. He has a new book out, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America. His book examines the crucial early years of the English colonies, which involved starvation, warfare, dise…

The Alabama rock band Drive-By Truckers have long been one of the hardest working and most thoughtful outfits working today. Now, they have a worthy biographer. Music writer Stephen Deusner is a native of McNairy County, Tennessee, a place immortalized on the Truckers' 2004 album The Dirty South. Stephen first encountered the Truckers through the b…

Keith Ryan Cartwright returns to the podcast to talk about his new (and first) book, Black Cowboys of Rodeo: Unsung Heroes from Harlem to Hollywood and the American West. Keith admits he didn't know much about the subject when he started, but he approached his work as another mission to "write about people." Over the course of his years covering ro…

Robert Mann has dedicated his life to politics. A professor at LSU in the Manship School of Mass Communication, he is the author of numerous books about American history and politics. He now has a memoir out, Backrooms and Bayous: My Life in Louisiana Politics. Born in west Texas, Bob moved to Louisiana as a young man. A conservative at first who h…

In the second half of Colin's two-part conversation with actor and director Lou Antonio, Lou talks about playing Koko in the film Cool Hand Luke and what it was like being on the set with such a storied cast. Lou also talks about how he was almost chosen to play one of the Corleones in The Godfather, the joys of filming on location, his work on the…

Lou Antonio is an actor and director perhaps best known for playing Koko in the 1967 classic Cool Hand Luke. But his part in that film was just one role in a long career dedicated to the stage, screen, and working behind the camera. Over the years, he met and worked with everyone from George C. Scott and Liz Taylor to Laurence Olivier, William Shat…

Colin continues his conversation with Emory Thomas, Civil War historian and former professor at the University of Georgia, Athens. They discuss his biographies of Robert E. Lee and Jeb Stuart. Emory also talks about the Civil War sesquicentennial and the tragedy of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015. And speaking of At…

Civil War historian Emory Thomas is a native of Richmond, Virginia. It's no coincidence, then, that he is known for his work on the Confederacy, including his biographies of Robert E. Lee and Jeb Stuart. However, he has made Athens, Georgia, his home since the late 1960s. As a football player at UVA, Emory got the history bug after reading C. Vann …

It's not often that historians make the leap from interplanetary geology to the study of antebellum Virginia. But Dr. Miller is one such person. And maybe it makes sense that someone from southwestern Pennsylvania who did part of his education in West Virginia, would want to study the inner workings of planets (it's coal country, after all). Now, h…

Some writers start young. Keith Ryan Cartwright is one of those. An early gift of a typewriter kept Keith busy while growing up in Wisconsin. And he hasn't stopped writing since. In part one of this conversation (part two will appear when his book comes out this fall), Keith talks about his brief stint in college in Florida, writing on the Madison …

Sam Wilson, Jr., is the son of the late General Samuel Vaughan Wilson, a member of the World War II unit "Merrill's Marauders," Cold War spy, and commander in Vietnam. His father's shadow falls long over his family, but Sam, Jr., had his own accomplished career in the military. He eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, which included a …

Writer and podcaster David Hill is the author of The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Spring's, America's Forgotten Capital of Vice. Originally from Arkansas, he moved to New York to work as a union organizer but moved back to his hometown for a year to write the book. One of the notches in the Bible Belt, A…

A native of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Blake Ball originally wanted to be a musician. Then he got the history bug. He has a new book out and it's his first, Charlie Brown's America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts. He's also the head of the history department at Huntingdon College in Alabama. When you think of Peanuts, you probably don't think of poli…

Josh Rothman has gone native. Originally from New York, he has lived in Alabama for a while, where he is the head of the history department at the University of Alabama. He has a new book, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America. Josh began his career as a historian at Cornell University, where he completed a B.A. under …

Edward Packard knows about choices. He went to Columbia Law School, but he never really wanted to be an attorney. He admits he was often "sleepwalking" through life before landing on an innovative idea for young readers. He eventually began writing full time, and many 80s kids (like Colin) can thank him for that. Edward created and wrote for the po…

Colin often gets confused with Colin. And by that, we mean the author of Marching Masters is often thought of as an author of books about Maine and pirates. To clear things up, Colin Woodard is the Maine author and historian behind Republic of Pirates, The Lobster Coast, American Nations, and the recent book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story …

Recorded on St. Patrick's Day, Colin talks with historian Michael Bellesiles about our country reckoning with major issues such as gun violence, citizenship, and equality. Michael is best known for his controversial book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, published in 2000. The book was the subject of an intense and prolonged ca…

In part two of Colin's talk with journalist Frank Smyth, Frank talks about his 2020 book, The NRA: The Unauthorized History. The history of the National Rifle Association begins in New York City in 1871 as a group made up of Union veterans and those interested in target shooting. Founded on the model of the British National Rifle Association, the A…

Frank Smyth is a journalist with a long and impressive career covering war-torn places such as Central America and the Mid-East. His resume includes articles and stories for The Village Voice, The Nation, and The Washington Post. He is also the author of The NRA: The Unauthorized History (2020), the subject of the next American Rambler podcast. You…

Dan Gullotta is the host of the popular Age of Jackson history podcast. A relatively recent arrival in the U.S. by way of Australia, Dan is a Ph.D. student of religious studies at Stanford University, though he is currently residing in Kansas. Dan is working on a dissertation that focuses on 19th century religion and how it influenced the developme…

Movie detectives are as old as movies themselves. So what could a 2020 film add to the genre? Michael Scott, co-host of cinema podcast The Dana Buckler Show and his own film podcast Adkins Undisputed returns to American Rambler to discuss the recent crime noir/comedy/thriller The Kid Detective. It's a detective movie, but in addition to having a su…

James Oakes is a two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize for Civil War studies. As he tells Colin, he initially went to college for business, but an English teacher at Baruch College wisely turned him away from the world of international finance. Since then, he has made a name for himself as a distinguished scholar of the 19th century, slavery, and ab…

Michael Gorra is a native of Connecticut who has taught at Smith College since the 1970s. A professor of English, his most recent book is The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War. This book builds on a career dedicated to examining writers such as Henry James and V. S. Naipaul. In Faulkner, Professor Gorra has tackled one of our most brillia…

Colin gives a sneak peak at his January 6 "Legacies and Lunch" talk for the Central Arkansas Public Library in Little Rock. His talk will be on his upcoming book Country Boy: The Roots of Johnny Cash, coming out in the fall of 2021 from the University of Arkansas Press. Country Boy seeks to reclaim Cash for Arkansas. In the book, Colin examines Cas…

It's not often that Colin has a poet warrior on the podcast. It's been twenty years since Dr. Farrell taught at Hampden-Sydney College, where he was a professor of modern languages. He spent 27 years at HSC before moving on to VMI, where he was fired from being a dean after he said the wrong thing to a "fat guy in an expensive suit." Nevertheless, …

Historian Jean Baker is a lifelong resident of Baltimore, so it makes sense that her most recent book is Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Her book on Latrobe is only the latest in a long and productive career that began as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. At Hopkins, she worked under the late, great, two-time Pul…

David Dixon is the author of Radical Warrior: August Willich's Journey from German Revolutionary to Union General. Surprisingly, it is the first major biography of General Willich, whose life was the stuff of Hollywood movies. Willich was an aristocrat, born into a prominent family in Prussia. After growing up in the household of the philosopher Fr…

Happy Halloween! Movie guru Michael Scott returns to the podcast to talk about his love for the Friday the 13th films. How did a low-budget 1980 horror movie spawn a franchise and draw in millions of fans? Is it all about the hockey mask? As it turns out, Michael's first foray into the series was Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives, which led him…

A native of Maryland, John Lingan's first book is Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of Mountain-Top Honky Tonk, which examines the northern Virginia town of Winchester. Winchester is known largely for two things: the Civil War and being the birthplace of Patsy Cline. But as John's book shows, just as compelling are the…

Once again, Colin plays "Six Degrees of Court Carney," this time with fellow LSU veteran and historian James MacDonald. As is the case with Colin, James is a Damn Yankee who moved to the South as an adult and has never looked back. Oh, and like Colin, he married a southerner. James teaches at Northwestern State University of Louisiana in Natchitoch…

American Rambler talks about some new albums he got at Plan 9 Records in in Carytown in Richmond. Carytown seems to be losing businesses steadily, but Plan 9, thankfully, is still open. Yesterday, Colin picked up music from Margo Price, Blaze Foley, King Curtis, and King Biscuit Boy. The band County Kitchen takes us out with the song "Devil Dog," s…

Wayne Edmondson is a high school teacher living in northern Louisiana. He and Colin are old friends and survivors of the LSU grad program in history. Colin stayed to finish his dissertation, but Wayne took a different path. In addition to studying at LSU, he's played in a rock band, been a sonar technician on a nuclear sub, surveyor in the Gulf of …

It's fitting that Colin and Tim talked on the anniversary of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. That's because Tim's recent documentary Monumental Crossroads (link below) examines the debate over Confederate memorials and the meaning of the Civil War in the South. Taking his camera to locations in Louisiana, Tennessee, V…

John Jay Osborn, Jr., is perhaps best known for his 1971 novel The Paper Chase, which was made into an Oscar-winning movie starring John Houseman (with whom John became friends). The book was based on John's experiences at Harvard Law School and centers on James T. Hart, a bright, ambitious, first-year student trying to balance his studies and tumu…

Chris Leahy was a fellow traveler with Colin in his days at LSU. Since 2007, he's been a professor a Keuka College in upstate New York. He has a new book out, President without a Party: A Life of John Tyler (LSU Press, 2020). His biography began as a dissertation in Baton Rouge, where Chris studied under the imposing William J. Cooper (a previous p…