I'm Starting a Podcast About US History. Please Help Support It!

An earnest appeal.

I’ve been thinking for many months about starting a podcast. Now I’m actually going to do it, and I could really use your help. The show will be called "Think Back." In each episode I will interview a historian with a new book out or with an older book on a topic that has become newly relevant.

Every two weeks—that’s my goal—I’ll put out a smart, loose conversation (around 30-45 minutes) about how American history haunts our benighted present. The list of topics I’d like to address, and scholars and writers I want to talk to, is endless.

I already have a few guests lined up for the first episodes, including some major names. I’m learning the editing software, having one friend record some intro music I’m ridiculously excited about, while another friend is designing my logo and other graphics. I hope to have the first episode recorded, uploaded, and distributed on all major platforms by the middle of March.

TL;DR: Will you help me by supporting this podcast?

Click the button below to pledge $6/month!

So here’s where you come in. Might you be willing to help support this endeavor? What with the books business being what it is and magazine rates not having risen since the 1990s, I can’t really take on another money-losing venture. Yet I feel confident this show is a good idea. In a time of unbelievable chaos and disruption, when, as Wordsworth said, “the world is too much with us,” digging into history is to my mind one of the more productive things a person can do. I’m terribly excited about the idea of calling on this country’s vast ranks of scholars to try to grasp what is truly new about this strange new era and what is better understood as an inheritance from more or less forgotten periods and moments of our history.

Will you contribute $6/month to help me get this project off the ground? For the price of a mediocre latte, you’ll be helping me to set aside time from my other endeavors to prepare, record, edit, and promote this podcast. I plan to put a great deal of time and effort into this project in order to make it as interesting, sophisticated, clean, and professional as possible. Ideally, at some point I will be able to hire an audio producer to bring it up to the next level.

I’m going to start doing the show regardless—so feel free to hold off until then if you’re unsure. But setting off with a good fearsome wind at my back would be a huge vote of confidence in me and in this project.

If you click the buttons in this post, you can pledge a monthly or annual subscription to this newsletter, which I’m going to rename THINK BACK and use to distribute the podcast (along with occasional scribblings and updates about my work, as before). Then, in a few weeks when I bring the podcast to life, your pledge will automatically convert into a paid subscription, ensuring you get full access to all content, updates, and occasional subscriber-only exclusive episodes. (To be clear: you will only be charged once I change things over.) I kind of hate gimmicks like this, but if you pledge at the “Founding” level I’ll give you a shout-out at the end of the first episode.

As a fairly avid consumer of history-related podcasts, I see a clear niche for an interview-style show that both takes good scholarship seriously and looks for ways in which the past illuminates the present and the present illuminates the past. I also see it as important to take the whole of American history as my remit; as the show progresses, I wish to play the decades and the centuries up and down the scales just as, at the beginning of each episode, you’ll hear my friend so commandingly play the piano. My inspiration, as you’ll hear in the first teaser I episode I’ll post in a week or so, comes from the poet William Carlos Williams: “It is an extraordinary phenomenon that Americans have lost the sense, being made up as we are, that what we are has its origins in what the nation in the past has been; that there is a source in AMERICA for everything we think or do.”

If this sounds like the kind of show you’d enjoy, I’d love your support. Thank you so much for your time, attention, and, if you can afford it, your generosity. I’m so looking forward to getting started with this long-gestating project. Wish me well! As I do you.

And if you think you know somebody else who might be interested in supporting the show, please share it with them. Thanks again.