Listen to episode one, on the promise and pitfalls of school desegregation, here.
Why, hello there! Glad you could check in! Have you ever wanted to hear what this blog would sound like in audio form? Have you wanted to hear experts talk about what they know best, but brought into a conversational style? Aren’t you at least a little curious about what editor Alex Cummings sounds like? It’s not as awkward as you might think! (Editor’s note: it is.) Over the past few months Alex and I have been developing a podcast companion to Tropics of Meta that we are calling Doomed to Repeat.
My name is Nic Hoffmann. You may have seen me on this blog before, and now I am here to talk in a much more production role. For the past few years, while working on my PhD I have produced a podcast called Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, a fairly run-of-the-mill movie review podcast. Since then, I have been asking Alex about doing a history podcast of one sort or another and in Fall semester last year we started to work on one. After a bit of “market research,” we decided to call it Doomed to Repeat, a title that is becoming more and more ominous with time.
Much like this blog, we are striving to bring academic work to a wider audience. Tropics of Meta is designed to take historical scholarship and present it in a more digestible way: “historiography for the masses,” as the tagline goes. The podcast is working on the same premise; that history is not something that exists only in academia, but can and should be more visible in the arena of public debate and discussion. In the first season, we will bring you episodes on segregation, the anti-vaccination movement, the US relationship with Russia (with interviews both before and after November 8, 2016), and the craft beer movement; we also hope to develop an audio companion piece to the series Romeo is doing on the hip hop scene in Fresno.
We will be alternating between highly produced sample episodes like topics listed above, and more conversational discussion based episodes between Alex and myself with possible guests. So please, contact us with ideas for subjects, information on leads for interview subjects, and just let us know how you think we are doing. You will soon be able to find us on iTunes, but the first episode can be found below – with deep thoughts from the illustrious historians Ansley Erickson and Kevin Kruse, and theme music by Tender Pony.
Thanks for your time and enjoy!