When I “make” an Interchange program I create analogizing echoes inside and outside of the show. An example. The last show with author Maggie Doherty was about her book The Equivalents. During the Interview Doherty…
Browsing Category Books
Interchange – United Slaughterhouse of America: Josh Specht on the Cattle-Beef Complex
AUDIO LINKIn Red Meat Republic author Joshua Specht brings to life a turbulent era marked by Indian wars, Cowboy myths, Chicago labor unrest, and food riots in the streets of New York. He shows how the enduring…
Interchange – Roll Jim Crow: The Racial Project of the American Tobacco Company
AUDIO LINK Our opening song is “Lucky Day.” This is Judy Garland’s version from the London sessions of 1960. The first performance of the song was by Harry Richman in a 1926 Broadway revue. “Lucky…
“The Planter” and Poor Whites – Habituated to Harm
The photo that illustrates this post is of a lynching in Excelsior Springs, Missouri in 1925, ten years before Du Bois’ published Black Reconstruction in America. I think it’s important to see these pictures of…
Reading Black Reconstruction: The True System
Today’s walk lasted approximately 40 minutes so I could listen to all of Chapter 2 of Black Reconstruction in America, “The White Worker.” What follows is just where my mind took me upon contemplation. Property…
Reading Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction – Chapter One, The Black Worker
This will be necessarily sketchy – but I hope to share what stands out to me while I listen to Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction which was published in 1935 (a universally acclaimed masterpiece). The two…
Representative Texts from Hawthorne to Dickinson
In your daily busyness you are pressed for time to think and often choose instead anesthetization – watching any number of “boutique” and highly produced television shows. These may be good, but like most in…
WFHB’s Interchange – Just a Spoonful of America
Audio: Just a Spoonful of America The title of our show, “Just a Spoonful of America – Prescribing American Studies to Fight Fascism,” might be more than a little ironic given that fascism currently stands…
Happiness Is Notoriously Difficult To Describe
Preface to the Paperback Edition of George Kateb’s Utopia and Its Enemies (1972, 1963). “Of course, no honest person claims that happiness is now a normal condition among human beings; but perhaps it could be…