Slate History
A feed with the best history coverage from Slate’s wide range of podcasts. From narrative shows like Slow Burn, One Year, and Decoder Ring, to timely analysis from ICYMI and What Next, you’ll get the fascinating stories and vital context you need to understand where we came from and where we're going.
Episodes
May 25, 2024 • 29 mins
In this week’s essay, John discusses Mothers’s Day, playing tennis with the Attorney General, medical scares, and more
Notebook Entries:
Notebook 19, page 16. April 2011
Is it possible, through applied thought, to become systematic in an approach to life? If you were to do that how would you proceed?
Notebook 16, page 6. July 26, 2005
“I’m here with a bunch of midshipmen and wondering what there is to do around here.” - Boy try...
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May 22, 2024 • 41 mins
This week Christina Cauterucci returns to Outward to talk with Bryan about her experience making ‘Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs’ and diving into one of the most consequential civil rights battles in American history: the first-ever statewide vote on gay rights.
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May 22, 2024 • 50 mins
In the 1970s, San Francisco became a welcoming home for tens of thousands of new gay residents—and a modern-day Sodom for the American right. With a moral panic sweeping across the United States, a Florida orange juice spokeswoman inspired an ambitious California politician to launch his own campaign against lesbians and gays—one that would change the course of U.S. history.
(If you—or anyone you know—are in crisis, contact the N...
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May 21, 2024 • 39 mins
On today’s episode of Hear Me Out: don’t scare me like that, colonizer.
Understanding the legacy of colonialism is a project relatively few Americans have undertaken — and most have done so only relatively recently, at that.
But understanding the forces that led to the foundation of this country, and the creation of modern racism as we know it, is an important project. And it’s one that is also increasingly hard to bring into sch...
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May 18, 2024 • 33 mins
Emily Bazelon talks with authors Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, about their new book, Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals. They discuss the evolution of animal treatment in America, moral duties to animals, and how to care about more animals than our pets.
Tweet us your questions @SlateGabfest or email us at gabfest@slate.com. (Messages could be quoted by name unless the writer stipulate...
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May 18, 2024 • 43 mins
In this week’s essay, John discusses the differences between moving around New York in 1991 and 2021; remembering 9/11 twenty years later; and more.
Notebook Entries:
Notebook 75, page 12. September 2021
Notebooks to Garret
Notebook 75, page 13. September 2021
Can you make a typo with handwriting? What’s a typo with handwriting called?
Notebook 4. 1991
We have to unplug the light to run the vacuum, so we do a lot of our vacuum...
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May 11, 2024 • 38 mins
In this week’s essay, John discusses the Pomodoro Routine (among other productivity routines), why he especially needs a meditation pillow, and how a particular teacher captured his heart.
Notebook Entries:
Notebook 75, pages 8 and 9. September 2021
OReinstating the Pomodoro Routine…
Starting Marshall again…
Write Brice…
Send Laura the larger project list…
Work on budget to get accounts in order
Meditation pillow upstairs.
Note...
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May 11, 2024 • 52 mins
Get your tickets for Amicus Live in Washington DC here.
In the second part of our series on Amicus and at Slate.com, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern are back on the originalism beat. This week they’re trying to understand the mechanisms of what Professor Saul Cornell calls “the originalism industrial complex” and how those mechanisms plug into the highest court in the land. They’re also asking how and why liberals failed to ...
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May 10, 2024 • 45 mins
Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates is arguably the strongest voice of his generation on the role of race and identity in American politics and culture. He’s the author of several books, including “Between the World and Me,” “We Were Eight Years in Power,” and “The Beautiful Struggle,” and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant and a National Book Award. For this week’s episode, we feature a conversation between Coates and host Jason John...
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May 8, 2024 • 27 mins
This week Bryan talks to Lucas LaRochelle, the creator of the online platform Queering the Map. Queering the Map is a community-generated digital archive and map of LGBTQ2IA+ experiences around the globe. They dig into the map’s beginnings, stories from the platform, and how this archive has been able to share queer joy, sorrow, and possibility across continents and in 23 languages.
Podcast production by Palace Shaw.
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May 4, 2024 • 41 mins
In this week’s essay, John discusses an onboarding memo for his assistant Laura, and recounts his early days living and working in New York City.
Notebook Entries:
Notebook 75
Onboard memo for Laura
Notebook 3, page 44. May 1991
June 17 start job. Good stuff
Notebook 3, page 46. May 1991
Tips on buying renting in NYC
Ask about broker
20s and 30s East side. Murry Hill
Live on no major avenue
Interest bearing account for secur...
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May 4, 2024 • 47 mins
In this, the first part of a special series on Amicus and at Slate.com, we are lifting the lid on an old-timey sounding method of constitutional interpretation that has unleashed a revolution in our courts, and an assault on our rights. But originalism’s origins are much more recent than you suppose, and its effects much more widespread than the constitutional earthquakes of overturning settled precedent like Roe v Wade or supercha...
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May 1, 2024 • 41 mins
Former Outward producer June Thomas joins hosts Bryan Lowder and Jules Gill-Peterson to chat about the very gay new series from Starz, Mary and George. They talk 16th-century sex and sexuality and share their prides, provocations, and the gay agenda for May.
Read What's Fact and What's Fiction in Mary & George from Slate
Podcast production by Palace Shaw.
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April 30, 2024 • 44 mins
On today’s episode of Hear Me Out: solidarity?
College campuses across the country are grappling with protests and occupations in the name of a free Palestine. Many hundreds of students, faculty, and outside community members have been arrested in tense clashes with police — called onto campuses by the universities themselves.
Student protestors have shaped public discourse on matters like war and the environment for many decade...
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April 27, 2024 • 33 mins
In this week’s essay, John discusses the art of attention and how to develop the skill of slow-looking.
Notebook Entries:
Notebook 75, page 8. September 2021
1016
Notebook 1, page 54. June 1990
- Magna carta 1215 at Salisbury
- Girls skipping
- The Haunch of Venison
- Chris
References:
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
A Little History of the World by E.H Gombrich
Artist Jeff Koons
“The Art of Divination: D.H. L...
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April 27, 2024 • 62 mins
When you hear “boy band,” what do you picture? Five guys with precision dance moves? Songs crafted by the Top 40 pop machine? Svengalis pulling the puppet strings? Hordes of screaming girls?
As it turns out, not all boy bands fit these signifiers. (Well…except for the screaming girls—they are perennial.) There are boy bands that danced, and some that did not…boy bands that relied entirely on outside songwriters, and those that wro...
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April 23, 2024 • 35 mins
On today’s episode of Hear Me Out: nobody wins with two parties.
A competitive presidential election draws closer every day – and as ever, every vote will count. So is it fair to accuse third-party voters of wasting a vote, as often happens? Or are third-party candidates actually preserving what little we have left of a competitive democracy?
Bernard Tamas of Valdosta State University joins us to make the case for the power of t...
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April 21, 2024 • 27 mins
In this week’s essay, John dives deep into the loss of his beloved dog, George, the essayist’s dilemma, the comfort of quiet mornings, and more.
Notebook Entries:
Notebook 75, page 5. September 5, 2021
I go to the morning alone.
Notebook 75, page 6. September 6, 2021
Phantom nails on the stairs
References:
“Every Dog Is a Rescue Dog” by John Dickerson for The Atlantic
“Oxytocin-gaze positive loop and the coevolution of huma...
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John Dickerson talks with author David E. Sanger about his new book, New Cold Wars. They discuss how Russia and China came to reach their new levels of power, the role the Middle East and Obama Administration played in all of this, and more.
Tweet us your questions @SlateGabfest or email us at gabfest@slate.com. (Messages could be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth.
Learn mor...
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April 17, 2024 • 40 mins
April is Autism Acceptance Month, and how we’ve come to understand autism has evolved over the past several decades.
For years, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was thought of as something that needed to be cured. Through better data and years of activism, that misunderstanding is changing.
On this week’s episode of Well, Now we discuss that evolution with Sara Luterman, caregiving reporter for The 19th.
Podcast production by Vic Wh...
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