In the late nineteenth century, a popular magazine ran a cartoon with what it called "a race problem." Tensions between black and white Americans in the postwar era? Nope. It was referring to a poor white southerner - shabby, slouching, lazy, and dumb - the kind of good-for-nothing layabout who would bring down the striving white middle class. (Think: Huck F ... Show More
Nov 2
840 A History of the Romance Novel (with Dale DeBakcsy)
Dale DeBakcsy is an author, illustrator, essayist, instructor, and the creative mind behind the popular Women in Science column. He's also a lifelong fan of romance novels. In this episode, Jacke talks to Dale about his book A History of Romance Novels: From Trembling Innocents t ... Show More
34m 27s
Oct 26
839 Elizabeth Barrett Browning (with Fiona Sampson) | My Last Book with David Medina
In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe wrote, in a review of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work, "Her poetic inspiration is the highest - we can conceive of nothing more august. Her sense of Art is pure in itself." Later that year, he dedicated his collection The Raven and Other Poems to her, c ... Show More
1h 25m
Oct 22
838 The Emerson Circle (with Bruce Nichols) | Life Hack! Could This Simple Trick Help You Read More?
What did Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, the Peabody sisters, and Nathaniel Hawthorne have in common? In addition to being literary luminaries who've been famous for nearly two hundred years, they all lived in Concord, ... Show More
1h 11m
Sep 2021
Selects: Southerners Aren't Lazy and Dumb, They Just Had Hookworm
<p>There was a time when the lower classes of the American South were considered lazy and dimwitted, a stereotype that still somewhat survives today. But this stereotype was rooted in fact. Hookworms, it turns out, were sapping Southerners’ life force. Find out all about it in th ... Show More
47m 53s
Oct 2024
Lennard J. Davis, "Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those Without It" (Duke UP, 2024)
For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulted in overwhelming depictions of poor people as living abject, violent lives in f ... Show More
32m 37s
Jun 2019
Jeannette Eileen Jones, "Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884-1936" (U Georgia Press, 2011)
When President Trump talked of Africa as a continent of “shithole countries” where people lived in huts, he was drawing on a set of ideas made popular in the 19th century. “Darkest Africa” became a favorite trope of explorers like Henry Morton Stanley who promoted his books and l ... Show More
27m 53s
Feb 2022
How to be White
This week, DK & LF talk briefly discuss how not to be white, as recently illustrated by Joe Rogan. LF also speaks with Joan Mulholland, a white Freedom Rider and steadfast civil rights icon, and Loki Mulloholand, her son, about the role of art in movement-making and the lessons o ... Show More
59m 27s