History That Doesn't Suck Presents: Office Hours with Prof. Greg Jackson

Greg, Josh, and Cielle are considering some new directions for the show. Give it a listen...

Greg, Josh, and Cielle hash out the international slave trade … in a time when it’s not suppose to exist. La Amistad provides a perfect, horrific example of the illegal transatlantic slave’s continued existence after 1808 and the challenges the 19th-century United States faced as slavery became an increasingly divisive issue.

Scott Rank (Ph.D., history) hosts the wildly popular, brilliant podcast, “History Unplugged,” and today, he joins Greg to discuss a subject we never quite worked into History That Doesn’t Suck: nineteenth-century America’s utopian communities! These are groups that came out to the United States (often to its structure lacking, western frontier) and trying to create, well … their own little utopias. Scott gives us the details on a few of these groups, and on how some of them still survive, in one way or another, right into the twenty-first century.

Greg, Josh, and Cielle go bird’s eye view on the whole of the war. They talk different theaters, commanders, and Greg suggests that the Mexican-American War makes more sense when it’s considered alongside European empires of the day.

Daniel Gullotta has more degrees than we have space in which to write, so we’ll just jump to his current undertaking: a PhD in Religious history at Stanford. Of course, with that background, maybe Greg should’ve anticipated that their discussion on the Age of Jackson would take a fascinating turn toward the Divine! We still have plenty of straight up political history--Greg and Daniel talk about the elections of 1824 and 1828, the “Corrupt Bargain,” and so on--but we also get a deeper dive on Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith running for US President, as well as a look at why American Jews were by and large fans of President Andrew Jackson. And if you’re really digging this era, be sure to check out Danie’s excellent and popular podcast: “The Age of Jackson.”