Empire & Colonialism Episodes

Historian Geoffrey Plank joins Jennifer Robin Terry to discuss his new book, The Last Place in Europe: A History of Gibraltar, and how one tiny territory became a crossroads of empires, cultures, commerce, and contested borders. Gibraltar has almost no natural resources, yet empires have fought over this tiny territory for centuries. Its importance lies in its geography, where Europe meets Africa and the Mediterranean opens into the Atlantic. Geoffrey Plank traces this contested crossroads fr...

One of Hollywood’s most enduring symbols of worker activism came about when actress Sally Field stood alone on a factory table, handwritten "UNION" sign held high above her head. That table moment really happened. But as labor historian Dr. Aimee Loiselle reveals, the true story behind the 1979 Academy Award film Norma Rae was a multi-racial, collective movement—not a lone white hero's crusade. In this episode of The Clio Dialogues history podcast, host Jennifer Robin Terry speaks with Aimee ...

Historian Megan Kate Nelson joins Jennifer Robin Terry to discuss The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier and how the complicated lives of the people who inhabited the American West challenge one of the nation’s most enduring myths. The popular story of the American West is deceptively simple: white settlers in wagons moving steadily toward the Pacific. The historical reality, however, was a vast network of competing ambitions, shared spaces, and multi-directional jo...

History only looks inevitable because we already know the ending. As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, it is easy to look backward and see a straight road to 1776. In Contested Continent, historian Peter C. Mancall shows just how uncertain that road actually was. He joins Jennifer Robin Terry to explore a North America shaped by competing peoples, incompatible ambitions, and consequential choices. The result is a different, more comprehensive origin story, one that recovers ...