#0.1 Revised Introduction for New and Longstanding Listeners
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2022
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After the experience of 15 months, 66 substantive episodes, and more than 180,000 aggregate downloads/listens, I thought it would be useful to reintroduce the podcast. I labored over the original introduction and still stand by it, and yet it does not really reflect the tone of the podcast as it has turned out. This episode is therefore a new introduction for both new and longstanding subscribers. It includes a description of the podcast as it has actually evolved, and also my thoughts on the need for history to be fun and interesting, the avoidance of “presentism,” and the importance of attempting to keep politics out of the teaching and telling of history. And there’s an awesome clip from “Inherit the Wind.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 0.1. |
| 0:11.4 | I am your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this on April 4th, 2022 in Austin, Texas. |
| 0:19.5 | Back at the beginning of 2021, when I launched the podcast, I put up a short episode, introductions |
| 0:26.3 | and such to explain what I am doing. |
| 0:29.8 | I labored mightily over that first introduction, and I stand by what I wrote. |
| 0:35.7 | However, after having produced episodes almost weekly for more than 15 |
| 0:40.0 | months, I have to admit that the original introduction is a bit pompous, and it doesn't really |
| 0:46.4 | match the tone of the podcast as it evolved. It is also incomplete in certain respects. So with that |
| 0:53.9 | in mind, here's an all-new introduction to the history of the Americans podcast. |
| 0:59.5 | We are telling the story of the people in the lands that now constitute the United States, from the beginning without presentism. |
| 1:08.3 | Presentism is the uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the |
| 1:14.4 | tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts. I'll come back to that |
| 1:21.2 | and some similar ideas in a few minutes. I got the idea for the podcast on a pandemic road trip. |
| 1:29.3 | In September and October 2020, I struck out by a car to visit friends and relatives mostly in the Northeast. |
| 1:37.4 | Since I live in Austin, Texas, that required a bit of driving. |
| 1:41.9 | Over three weeks, I drove four and a half thousand miles, mostly alone. And so I listened to a lot of driving. Over three weeks, I drove four and a half thousand miles, mostly alone. |
| 1:46.7 | And so I listened to a lot of podcasts. A law school roommate pointed me to David Crowther's podcast, |
| 1:53.1 | The History of England, which for more than 10 years now has been telling the history of England |
| 1:58.1 | in detail, mostly in chronological order, and always in good |
| 2:02.4 | humor and with great detail. I liked it so much that I dug around to see whether anybody was doing |
| 2:08.3 | the same thing for the Americans. Nobody was. Yes, there are a lot of American history podcasts, |
| 2:15.2 | but they either tend to skip around and tell disconnected stories |
... |
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