Media & Popular Culture Episodes

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...

Acclaimed historian Mary Beth Norton joins host Jennifer Robin Terry to discuss her book, I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer: Letters on Love & Marriage from the World's First Personal Advice Column, and the surprisingly modern history of relationship advice, courtship, heartbreak, and ghosting. In 1691, London printer John Dunton launched the Athenian Mercury—a broadsheet originally intended as a 17th-century version of "Google" or "Wikipedia" for coffeehouse patrons. But before long, readers b...

What does the rise of authoritarianism look like while it is happening in real time? Historian Pamela Toler, author of The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany, joins The Clio Dialogues to tell the remarkable story of Sigrid Schultz, the Chicago Tribune’s Berlin bureau chief who reported on the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Toler and host Jennifer Robin Terry discuss how economic and political in...

Wine with dinner. A beer after work. A whiskey to seal the deal. These rituals feel timeless, but they are far more recent than most Americans realize. In this episode of The Clio Dialogues, historian Lisa Jacobson explains how the repeal of Prohibition did not automatically restore alcohol's place in American life. Instead, breweries, wineries, distillers, advertisers, cookbook authors, physicians, government officials, and even Hollywood spent decades reshaping ...

Episode Description What if one of the world's most influential cultural industries wasn't built by publishers or artists alone? Today, manga is a global phenomenon. It has inspired blockbuster films, anime, video games, conventions, cosplay, and a multibillion-dollar merchandise industry. But according to historian Andrea Horbinski, manga's remarkable success cannot be understood simply by studying famous creators or bestselling titles. Its history is also the story of ordinary readers who r...