Claim OwnershipNostalgia Trap
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Deep dive conversations on American history, politics, and pop culture, hosted by history professor and writer David Parsons.
536 Episodes
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For Part Two of our 9/11 trilogy, Justin Rogers-Cooper helps us untangle the world of 9/11 truthers and related conspiracy theories, as we explore how the attacks and their aftermath destabilized consensus reality and led us into a new landscape of weaponized digital information. This conversation covers a lot of territory, from Alex Jones to Burn After Reading, from the White House to Saudi Arabia, and from Seymour Hersh to Zero Dark Thirty. Cutting through the haze of fake news, internet grifts, and homemade YouTube documentaries, we try to answer some basic questions: Why did 9/11 happen? Who benefitted? And how did it transform world history? Listen to the full episode: patreon.com/posts/episode-290-9-on-55920380
To mark the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Justin Rogers-Cooper joins us for a trilogy of episodes considering the event's legacy and long-term impact. In Part One, we consider the immediate shock of the day and how it seemed to instantly give birth to a new historical era, examining how Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and Jon Stewart's sappy Daily Show monologues reflect the sentimental nationalism that gripped American liberals in the attack's wake.
Bertrand Cooper joins us to discuss his latest incendiary piece in Current Affairs, "Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?," which argues that the elite class composition of many Black creators reveals deep contradictions in the politics of woke Hollywood. Listen to the whole episode: patreon.com/posts/episode-288-we-w-55434030
Jenni Olson is a historian, archivist, and experimental filmmaker whose two feature-length films The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) combine dreamlike urban landscapes, the dark history of California, and deeply personal reflections on queer love and desire. In this conversation, we talk about the origins of her aesthetic and the particular challenges of both creating and exhibiting historical material in non-traditional form. To hear more about queer and radical cinema, see Episode 281 with Donald Borenstein: patreon.com/posts/ep-281-at-new-we-53149916.
Who are "the people"? Erik Baker joins us to discuss his latest piece in n+1, a review of Thomas Frank's 2020 book The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. Baker takes on Frank's New Deal nostalgia and romantic vision of a monolithic, left-leaning American working class, a set of distorted perspectives that still hold weight for a significant portion of the (extremely online) left. In this conversation, we explore what's the matter with Frank's analysis, and how to move past the ahistorical assumptions that continue to animate progressive discourse. For more on left populism and angry white dudes, check out this week's bonus episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/ep-285-party-its-54555603
Full episode: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap. Kyle Riismandel returns to the Trap to discuss the abysmal HBO documentary Woodstock '99: Peace, Love, and Rage, a film that, despite its shortcomings, gives us plenty to chew on about a weird era in American cultural politics. From Alanis Morrissette to Kid Rock, from Girls Gone Wild to Monica Lewinsky, we talk about the jarring social landscape of third-wave feminism, frat rock backlash, cynical corporate cash-grabs, and lots more heavy, angsty riffs straight from the late '90s.
What do Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, and the rest of the gang have to tell us about the staggering loneliness at the heart of the American experience? Blake Scott Ball is a professor of history at Huntingdon College and the author of Charlie Brown's America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts. In this conversation, we trace the history of Charles Schulz's iconic comic strip alongside the history of the late 20th century, as we see how Schulz's characters navigated the Cold War, civil rights movement, Vietnam War, and other epochal events of the era, creating an emotional throughline that continues to permeate the American cultural imagination.
Kyle Riismandel, author of Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001, returns to talk about the idea of generations, both as useful historical dividers and as complicated, constructed cultural identities. Are you Gen X? Boomer? Millennial? Zoomer? Does any of this shit matter? In this conversation, we reflect on what makes this generational stuff so powerful (hint: it makes a lot of money), and think about both the utility and limits of this brand of temporal categorization. To listen to the full episode and access all our bonus content, subscribe at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap.
Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning author and journalist; her latest book, You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (2021), profiles three journalists whose groundbreaking work rearranged the history of the Vietnam War. In this conversation, Becker explains how Kate Webb, Catherine Leroy, and Frances Fitzgerald each developed critical journalistic practices that brought new insights to the conflict, and offers some jaw-dropping stories (spoiler: she met Pol Pot!) from her own extraordinary career.
Donald Borenstein is a freelance video director, editor, and one of my favorite online friends, whose posts on politics, culture, and media have been a highlight of my feed for years. This week we finally get to meet face to face (on Zoom) and talk about two of our respective favorite films, Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames (1983) and Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky (1982), both of which are essential viewing for anyone interested in radical politics and radical filmmaking practices. As works of sci-fi queer punk feminism, Born in Flames and Liquid Sky occupy a totally unique territory in the history of American politics and culture. In this conversation, Donald and I reflect on what makes these films "important" but also what makes them feel so fun and alive, and how they reshape the aesthetic and narrative boundaries of "political cinema." For full episode subscribe at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap.
The kids are crazy for Columbo! This week our friend Bill Black drops by to talk about the long-running detective show starring Peter Falk that's seen an unlikely resurgence in the COVID era. From its weird class dynamics and parade of villainous guest stars to Falk's truly iconic performance, we explore what makes Columbo's stories, characters, and rhythms so different from the binge-watchable content of the digital era, and try to wrap our minds around its sudden popularity among a new generation. To listen to the whole episode, subscribe at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap.
Allan Cooper is a professor of political science at North Carolina Central University. He joins us to discuss his latest book, Africa and the Global System of Capital Accumulation, which describes the strategic role Africa plays in the global capitalist economy, where exploitation of labor and resources sustains the world's middle class and consolidates state authority. In this conversation, we explore the role consumer desire for products like chocolate, diamonds, and cell phones plays in that larger chain of racism and imperialism, and trace how neoliberalism creates a culture that skillfully obscures its ravaging of the planet.
Aaron Lecklider is a professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture. In this conversation, we talk about the intersection of sexuality and radical politics in the pre-Stonewall era, from 1920-1960, as we explore queer liberation's complicated place in the history of the American left.
This week Claudia and I continue our movie series with two 1980s Hollywood comedies about the lives of working class women, Pretty in Pink (1986) and Working Girl (1988). Our conversation explores how each film reflects a pre-"Lean In" pop feminism, with central characters that seek class mobility and romantic independence in the context of a vapid, wealth-obsessed 1980s culture. Subscribe for full episode: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap.
A quick clip from this week's livestream with Justin Rogers-Cooper providing some historical context and analysis to ongoing horrors in Ethiopia, Myanmar, Colombia, and Belarus. Subscribe for the full episode: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap.
Kyle Riismandel teaches American history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers-Newark, and is the author of Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001. He joins us to explain how fear became an organizing ideological principle of the American suburbs in the post-Vietnam era, as hysteria about crime, sexual deviance, drugs, and Satan himself drove suburbanites to an obsession with security, surveillance, and policing that continues to haunt the American landscape.
This week we talk about the political and social economy of "first person shooter" video games with Danny Bessner, whose recent piece in The Drift investigates the deep cultural contradictions at play in the enormously popular Call of Duty franchise. With armies of alienated young men casting themselves as protagonists in deeply distorted narratives of 20th century history, we explore the lines between harmless entertainment, violent brainwashing, and military propaganda. For full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap.
Alex Vitale is a professor of sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. His 2017 book, The End of Policing, has received significant attention in the wake of the George Floyd protests and a wider public discourse about the history, ideology, and practice of American policing. In this conversation, Vitale explains how policing and incarceration became the state's primary mode of dealing with socio-economic problems created by neoliberal capitalism, from mass homelessness to mental illness, and how the defund/abolish movements have evolved a range of ideas and strategies to imagine a post-police world.
Katrinell Davis is an associate professor of sociology at Florida State University and the author of two incredible books: Hard Work is Not Enough: Gender and Racial Inequality in an Urban Workspace (2016) and Tainted Tap: Flint's Journey from Crisis to Recovery (2021). In this conversation, we explore how different populations, from Black women bus drivers in San Francisco to the working class residents of Flint, Michigan, face extraordinary socioeconomic constraints, and how these communities respond, resist, and live joyously in the face of capitalism's relentless attacks.
Abraham Lincoln: Working class hero? Holy Angel of Liberation? Capitalist collaborator? Matthew Stanley has some ideas for us. As an associate professor of history at Albany State University, his work focuses on how we remember the Civil War, and why that matters. In this conversation we discuss his latest book, Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War, which explores the diverse ways that historical memories and images of war function within radical political movements.
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great episode!