Cambridge American History Seminar Podcast

Cambridge American History Seminar Podcast

Where big ideas in history meet open conversation. Each episode invites listeners into the Seminar experience, where, every Monday afternoon during term, visiting scholars and graduate students exchange ideas about new lines of historical inquiry shaping the future of the field. We talk about presenters' current research and paper, their broader academic interests and the significance of their research in the current moment. If you have any feedback, suggestions or questions, please contact our producer via email at ds2125@cantab.ac.uk. Thanks for listening!

  1. Jul 4

    Prof. Christa Dierksheide & Prof. Nick Guyatt, ‘Jefferson’s Wolf: A Founding Father’s Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery’ (Harvard University Press, 2026)

    “The wolf is a metaphor for race war, and we mean race war on a genocidal scale.”  We release this episode at a historic moment. This Saturday, 4 July 2026, marks the semiquincentennial of America's founding.  Few historians are better placed, with their complementary research expertise, to reassess the legacy of what is commemorated each year—and especially this year—as Independence Day. Our guests are Professor Christa Dierksheide (Brockman Foundation Jefferson Scholars Foundation Professor of History; Director, Center for the Study of the Age of Jefferson, University of Virginia) & Professor Nick Guyatt (Professor of History, Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge).  They are the co-authors of Jefferson’s Wolf: A Founding Father’s Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2026).  Their book takes its title from a letter (1820) in which Thomas Jefferson famously described the nation as holding slavery like "a wolf by its ear....and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” For Dierksheide and Guyatt, that metaphor points to something much larger than Jefferson's personal anxieties as an enslaver.  It reveals a sustained effort, since the Revolution and over the course of his career, to imagine the future of the United States as a white nation — a reality dependent on racial exclusion, demographic engineering, and the forced removal of Black Americans. “It's not [Jefferson’s] understanding or his version of the Declaration that we now understand, today." "...This document, and its central idea [all men are created equal], was reimagined by African-American descendants of Monticello and a whole generation of Black activists in the 20th century. They rejected this exclusionary, narrow vision of American belonging, and reimagined and redefined this document and [the] core American creed as something based on inclusivity, and a broader claim to belonging.” Co-Hosts:  Megan Renoir - fourth-year PhD candidate  Megan’s research examines the history of U.S. land institutions, nineteenth- and twentieth-century federal Indian policy, and violence against the NCRNT. Her work expands our understanding of the relationships between federalism, Western property institutions, and intractable land conflicts.  Charlie Colenutt - first-year PhD candidate  Charlie studies British and American multinational construction firms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He uses these companies as a way into meatier debates about the nature of late imperialism, the emergence of global capitalism, and the transition from a British to an American world order. Colenutt is the author of ‘Is This Working? The Jobs We Do, Told by the People Who Do Them’ (Picador, 2025). Production: Daisy Semmler (MPhil, 2025; PhD candidate commencing October 2026) Referenced in Discussion: [01:44] Jefferson's "wolf by the ears" letter: Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, Monticello, 22 April 1820. [06:10] Prof. Guyatt has been on the podcast before! Hosted by Caleb Woodall and Hugh Wood: Prof. Nick Guyatt, ‘Writing American History in Uncertain Times’ (2023)  [08:30] 1970s book on Jefferson and anti-slavery:  John Chester Miller. The Wolf by the Ears : Thomas Jefferson and Slavery / John Chester Miller. New York: Free Press, 1977.  [20:00] Notes on the State of Virginia, available at Library of Congress: NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA. BY THOMAS JEFFERSON. (LC BOSTON: PUBLISHED BY LILLY AND WAIT, 1832)  [27:48] Prof. Guyatt’s book on Indian removal and Jefferson: Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (First edition.; Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2016) [41:51] Oral histories - descendants of formerly enslaved people from Monticello:  Getting Word Project - African American History at Monticello

  2. Jun 24

    Dr. Elsa Devienne, '"Paper or Plastic?": The Forgotten Movement to Ban Polystyrene in the US and the (Lost) Battle of Perception (1980s to today)'

    “What happened? At one point, we were really close to banning polystyrene. What happened?” In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Elsa Devienne (Assistant Professor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Northumbria University), a scholar of the twentieth-century United States with expertise in environmental history, urban history, the history of the body and, more recently, discard studies and the history of waste.   Dr Devienne spoke to us about her current book project on the War on Plastics. She presented part of this research in the seminar paper: '"Paper or Plastic?" The Forgotten Movement to Ban Polystyrene in the US and the (Lost) Battle of Perception (1980s to today).’ She argues that modern society has largely forgotten a significant period of activism when citizens successfully pushed for bans on polystyrene due to its links to the solid waste crisis, toxicity, and ozone depletion.  Devienne identifies ‘plastic denialism’ as a primary reason these early victories failed to last. “People would not have given up on this fight if it weren't for the fact that there were loads of competing stories, loads of confusion around polystyrene and whether it was recyclable and in what capacity, and what it was: whether or not it was a better or worse material for certain uses.” Her research reminds us that the current fight against plastic pollution is not a new phenomenon but rather a protracted struggle against industry tactics that have been refined over decades to maintain the dominance of fossil-fuel-based products.   "Those tactics that the plastic industry is deploying now, they've been refining them since the 80s and 90s.” Referenced in Discussion:  [05:00] On Devienne's previous work Elsa Devienne, ⁠Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles. (originally published in French, Sorbonne Editions, 2020; Oxford University Press, 2024)  [23:55] Recommended reading on the intersection of Business and the Environment See works by Adam Rome, Professor of Environment and Sustainability (University of Buffalo), including: “Beyond Compliance: The Origins of Corporate Interest in Sustainability,” Enterprise & Society (2021; 22(2): 409-437.) Berghoff, H. and Adam R., eds. Green Capitalism?: Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) [31:55] Talking to author John Javna John Javna, ‘50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth,’ (EarthWorks Press: Berkeley, California, 1989)  [34:26] “That article is an example of what I call ‘plastic denialism” (says Devienne). See:  Damian Carrington, “‘A bombshell’: doubt cast on discovery of microplastics throughout human body”  (Wed 14 Jan 2026) Co-hosts:  Shea Hendry — History PhD Candidate, Hughes Hall  Shea’s research examines the children of Loyalist refugees who embodied both American citizenship and British subjecthood—concurrently and consecutively—throughout the Early National period.  Megan Renoir — History PhD Candidate, Homerton College  Megan’s research examines the history of U.S. land institutions, nineteenth- and twentieth-century federal Indian policy, and violence against the NCRNT. Her work expands our understanding of the relationships between federalism, Western property institutions, and intractable land conflicts.  Production by Daisy Semmler — History PhD Candidate, Jesus College, 2026; US History MPhil, Fitzwilliam College, 2025

  3. May 20

    Dr. Caroline Johnston, 'Rocky Mountain Extractivism in Washington'

    This episode explores ‘carbon cowboys,’ the creation of A Blueprint for Conservative Government (1980), and an emerging historical concept: ‘extractive-statism.’ Dr Caroline Johnston is a political, environmental, and economic historian of the modern United States, and, since September 2025, the Paul Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in American History at Cambridge University.  At the seminar, she presented chapter five of her prospective manuscript, which examines the intersection of fossil fuel extraction in the Rocky Mountain West during the 1970s and 1980s and the rise of the modern American Right. She explains how fossil fuel executives in this milieu developed a paradoxical ideology: demanding extensive federal subsidies and intervention while simultaneously invoking the imagery of the rugged individualist ‘frontier cowboy’ to denounce government regulation. “And their rhetoric is explicitly anti-statist—they never acknowledge that they have historically and contemporarily benefited from enormous subsidies and structural aid from the government.”  Central to her research is the influence of figures such as Joseph Coors, descendant of the founder of the Coors Brewing Company, who leveraged wealth generated from the regional oil boom and established the influential conservative institution: The Heritage Foundation. In 1980, the Heritage Foundation published Mandate for Leadership: A Blueprint for Conservative Government, whose policy recommendations were later adopted in significant part by the Reagan administration. Keep an eye out for Dr Caroline Johnston’s (first) book, tentatively titled Carbon Cowboys. We’re excited!  Referenced in this discussion: [24:21] Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011)    [31:10] Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (Oxford University Press, 2020) Caroline Johnston presented at the seminar and spoke with us in Michaelmas term, on 17 November 2025. Co-hosts  Shea Hendry — History PhD Candidate, Hughes Hall  Shea’s research examines the children of Loyalist refugees who embodied both American citizenship and British subjecthood—concurrently and consecutively—throughout the Early National period.  Megan Renoir — History PhD Candidate, Homerton College  Megan’s research examines the history of U.S. land institutions, nineteenth- and twentieth-century federal Indian policy, and violence against the NCRNT. Her work expands our understanding of the relationships between federalism, Western property institutions, and intractable land conflicts.    Production by Daisy Semmler, US History MPhil, Fitzwilliam College (2025).

  4. May 13

    Dr. Patrick Griffin, 'The American Revolution and Global Empire'

    “Whether we like it or not, the American Revolution is kind of central to the idea of American civic life, and very central to American notions of sense of self. So, that's critical—and it has been that way consistently, really, since the time of the American Revolution itself, until this very day.”  This episode features a conversation with historian Patrick Griffin, a scholar whose research traverses histories of revolution, empire, migration, adaptation, and colonial violence across early America (17th & 18th centuries) and the wider Atlantic world.  Presenting in Michaelmas term (10 November 2025), Griffin's seminar paper examined the American Revolution as part of a connected age of political transformation, tracing these tensions through the life and career of Charles Cornwallis.  "The past is a complex space, and we are drawn to draw things in white and black. But I think my work consistently (maybe frustratingly so) draws us to the grey, to kind of the in-between-space, when imperfect people in the past are trying to do what they can to manage unstable contexts".  At the University of Notre Dame, Patrick Griffin is the Madden-Hennebry Professor of History and Director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. He is also a Bye-Fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge.  See recently published book by Patrick Griffin: 'The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World' (Yale University Press, 2023). Thank you to our guest, and thank you for listening! Co-hosts  Shea Hendry — History PhD Candidate, Hughes Hall  Shea’s research examines the children of Loyalist refugees who embodied both American citizenship and British subjecthood—concurrently and consecutively—throughout the Early National period.  Megan Renoir — History PhD Candidate, Homerton College  Megan’s research examines the history of U.S. land institutions, nineteenth- and twentieth-century federal Indian policy, and violence against the NCRNT. Her work expands our understanding of the relationships between federalism, Western property institutions, and intractable land conflicts.  Production by Daisy Semmler, US History MPhil, Fitzwilliam College (2025).

  5. Apr 30

    Annual Pitt Professor Beth Bailey, 'Making Change: Why the US Army Matters'

    "Of course, it's an institution of social change. Because it has to manage all of the social changes that are taking place in society—because it's pulling people in."  In this episode, we're joined by special guest Beth Bailey, the 2025–26 Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge and Visiting Fellow of Jesus College.   Established in the 1940s, the Pitt Professorship brings some of the most distinguished U.S.-based scholars in history and the social sciences to Cambridge. Past holders include (but aren't limited to) Eugene Genovese, John Hope Franklin, Heather Ann Thompson, Kathleen Brown, Bernard Bailyn, David Blight, and Erika Lee.   Beth Bailey is a historian of Military, War, and Society in the modern United States, as well as of Gender and Sexuality in twentieth-century America. She recently completed a decade as a member of the History Faculty at the University of Kansas, where she served as Foundation Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the Centre for Military, War, and Society Studies.   In 2022, she received the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement from the Society for Military History. She also served as chair of the Department of the Army Historical Advisory Subcommittee, a role appointed by the Secretary of the Army.  “...No matter how significant institutions and structures are, individuals can and do make a difference.”    Hosted by Megan Renoir, PhD Candidate at Homerton College  Production by Daisy Semmler, MPhil, Fitzwilliam College (2025)    Timestamped References  [07:26]  Dissertation & first book on the history of dating    From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America,  John Hopkins University Press, 1989.     [17:10] Co-edited volume with Kara Vuic  Managing Sex in the U.S. Military, co-edited with Kara Vuic, Alesha Doan, Shannon Portillo, University of Nebraska Press, 2022.    [22:12] Recent publication: An Army Afire  An Army Afire: The U.S. Army and the Problem of Race in the Vietnam Era, University of North Carolina Press, 2023    [27:51] Edited publications with historian David Farber    Beyond Pearl Harbor:  A Pacific History, co-edited with David Farber, University Press of Kansas, 2019    America in the Seventies, co-edited with David Farber,  University Press of Kansas, 2004    [32:09] Book on ‘War Time’ read in Bailey's MPhil Seminar    Mary L. Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

  6. Apr 15

    Prof. David Farber, 'The War on Drugs'

    “What makes one drug or another useful to politicians?”  David Farber asks.  At the seminar, Farber presented new work on the late twentieth-century “war on drugs” in the United States—what it was, how it functioned, and whether it has proven politically durable. Focusing on the legislative process, he examines the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and its disproportionate criminalisation of crack cocaine, asking how and why the federal government came to wage such a “war.”  In this conversation, Farber sets out the questions that underpin his current research inquiry, focusing on three interlocking dynamics:  The degree to which Black politicians, particularly at the federal level, supported the war on drugs in response to the acute impact of drug abuse in poor Black communities   The electoral incentives driving policymakers to adopt punitive approaches, as voters demanded visible action against what was perceived as a widespread crisis   The legislative process itself: how Congress attempted—or failed—to govern the issue, culminating in measures such as the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act  David Farber is a historian of modern US history, democracy, political culture, the role of business in American society, social change movements, and drug use and policy. He is the Roy A. Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Kansas and a Bye-Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He presented this paper on 3 November 2025 (Michaelmas term). Two months—to the date—after we recorded this conversation, US military forces entered Caracas and arrested the incumbent Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, on charges related to “narco-terrorism.” The strike and seizure by US forces on 3 January 2026 was codenamed Operation Absolute Resolve. (⁠⁠⁠BBC News⁠⁠⁠) “I thought in some ways the war on drugs had ended. It's just such a good tool for politicians. Here it is again in bizarre form, aimed at something totally distant from what the president's claiming. Yeah. This is a foreign policy initiative.” (Farber, November 2025) Referenced in discussion: [15:30] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (originally published in 2010 by The New Press). Adapted into the multiple award-winning documentary 13th (Netflix, 2016). Its title refers to the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude “except as punishment for a crime.” Co-Hosts: Dr Hugh Wood recently completed his PhD at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His research examines the relationship between private violence and American state-building in the second half of the nineteenth century.  Megan Renoir is a PhD Candidate at Homerton College, Cambridge. She studies the relationship between Western property institutions, state development, and violence against minorities, including Indigenous dispossession.  Production by Daisy Semmler (MPhil 2025)

  7. Apr 1

    Dr. Erin Shearer, 'Enslaved Women, Infanticide, and a Feminist History of Harm: A New Direction in Slavery Studies'

    N.B.: This episode describes sexual violence and graphic bodily harm. (With sincere apologies for the re-upload due to a technical issue.) “We’re still, as a society, so apprehensive about ascribing to women a nature of violence. When we do, we often use pathological discourses as a way of explaining why these women would be exceptions to the rule.”   Our guest, Dr Erin Shearer, is a Fellow in Residence at the Rothermere American Institute (University of Oxford), Associate Lecturer in History and Postgraduate Visiting Fellow (University of Reading), and Associate Tutor (University of Warwick).   The paper ‘Enslaved Women, Infanticide, and a Feminist History of Harm: A New Direction in Slavery Studies’  emerges from Shearer's current monograph, which asks:   How and why did enslaved women in the antebellum US South use violence as a form of resistance?   Challenging long-standing historiography, Dr Erin Shearer finds that deliberate, retributive acts of violence were not the preserve of enslaved men, but a shared and interchangeable phenomenon.  This paper intervenes in a largely unexplored area of scholarship by examining enslaved women’s acts of harm and infanticide against the white planter-class children of their enslavers. Using new methodological approaches to slavery's archive, and applying an intersectional Feminist History of Harm, Dr Shearer sheds critical light on the inner lives and motivations that inform why women facilitated acts of violence within, and against, slavery's coercive regime.   This episode explores what it means to take women’s violence seriously—and why doing so alters how we understand lived experiences of slavery, resistance, and historical method. “It’s important that we give women the same complexity that we’ve given men, and that we look at women as multifaceted beings…the good, the bad, and the ugly.”  This episode was recorded in Michaelmas term on 20 October 2025. See Dr Shearer's recent article: Shearer, “Challenging the Overseer: Enslaved Women’s Violent Resistance in the US Antebellum South.” (ANCH, 2025) And related episodes: Prof. Emily West, 'Enslaved Women and the Duality of Feeding in the Antebellum South'  Prof. Sophie White, 'His Master's Grace": Extra-Judicial Violence in Atlantic Slave Societies'  Hosted this week by:   Daisy Semmler, MPhil (2025), Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge  Daisy researches how enslaved and free Black communities learned to read and write during the anti-literacy period in the continental United States (c.1740–1865).   Timestamped References 04:55 ⁠Library of Congress – WPA Slave Narratives ⁠ 11:00 King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (2nd ed. 2011) 10:56 Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (2020) 18:19 ⁠ Nunley, “Thrice Condemned: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Practice of Leniency in Antebellum Virginia Courts ” (JSH, 2021)⁠ Nunley, The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia (2023) Taylor, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance (2023) 22:37 Johnson, “On Agency” (JSH, 2003)and “Agency: A Ghost Story” in Foner & Johnson, Slavery's Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation (2011) 23:14 Maglaque, “Reproductive Unfreedom and Structural Violence in Early Modern Catholic Europe” (JEMH, 2025) 26:39 West & Shearer, “Fertility Control, Shared Nurturing, and Dual Exploitation: The Lives of Enslaved Mothers in the Antebellum United States” (WHR, 2018) ⁠Knight, “Mothering and Labour in the Slaveholding Households of the Antebellum American South” (P&P, 2020)⁠ 28:08 Hall, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (2021)

  8. Mar 6

    Prof. Eliga Gould, 'Union and Disunion: The Turbulent History of the United States' Founding Treaty'

    When we think about the founding documents of the United States, two likely come to mind: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But perhaps not the third — the Treaty of Paris (1783), the agreement that ended the Revolutionary War and formally recognized American independence.  Our guest this week, Professor Eliga H. Gould, argues that this largely forgotten founding document is essential for understanding how the United States actually came into being. Far from a clean moment of national birth, the treaty emerged from the aftermath of a brutal civil war, triggering mass displacement, contested borders, and fragile diplomatic compromises within and beyond British North America.   Eliga H. Gould is the (2025-26) Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at University of Oxford and (for 30+ years) the Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire.    Gould’s new book project, Peace and Independence: The Turbulent History of the United States’ Founding Treaty, examines the social, economic, and constitutional consequences of the 1783 Paris Treaty.   The three themes guiding this research project are the making, unmaking, and remaking of the American Union; the uncertain fate of the “new order” many believed the Revolution had inaugurated; and the enduring theme of partition.   Along the way, we also reflect on what treaties actually do. Gould argues that treaties rarely produce clean independence; instead, they bind nations into global systems of diplomacy, commerce, and compromise — a lesson with enduring implications for American foreign policy.  “Exiting the world has never been a viable option.”  Co-hosts (PhD Candidates)  Shea Hendry's research examines the children of Loyalist refugees who embodied both American citizenship and British subjecthood — concurrently and consecutively — throughout the Early National period.  Megan Renoir looks at the history of U.S. land institutions, nineteenth- and twentieth-century federal Indian policy, and violence against the NCRNT. She aims to expanding our understanding of the relationships between federalism, Western property institutions, and intractable land conflicts.  Production by Daisy Semmler (MPhil 2025).

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Where big ideas in history meet open conversation. Each episode invites listeners into the Seminar experience, where, every Monday afternoon during term, visiting scholars and graduate students exchange ideas about new lines of historical inquiry shaping the future of the field. We talk about presenters' current research and paper, their broader academic interests and the significance of their research in the current moment. If you have any feedback, suggestions or questions, please contact our producer via email at ds2125@cantab.ac.uk. Thanks for listening!

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