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Slack.com slash DHQ. From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is now and then.

I'm Heather Cox Richardson, and I'm Joanne Freeman. Before we get to our topic, because this is

the first episode, I thought we'd start with telling our listeners how we met and why we

decided to team up to do this podcast. And I'm going to turn to Heather because she has

hinted to me that she remembers how we met and that I don't. And I'm convinced that's true.

And you're going to laugh when you hear this. Joanne had just written a really big book,

A Therese of Honor, her first book, which she probably doesn't recognize was like everybody

was talking about at a conference. And somebody pointed her out at an elevator bank in a hotel

in Los Angeles. It was very late at night, and I went over and met her and shook her hand,

because I wanted to meet her. And she looked exhausted and she has absolutely no memory of it.

Do you? No, I have absolutely no memory. But we quickly became, certainly on each other's

radar screens, because there were so few women doing political history as we came up through

the ranks of the profession. And then in the last, really since the pandemic, we got to

know each other quite well because we did so many Zoom events together and discovered

that we really thought about the world very similarly and that we liked working together.

And even before that point, we were sending messages back and forth and talking to each

other because we at some early point sort of realized that we really had opinions. We wanted

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