DiscoverC19: America in the 19th CenturyS09 E01 | Just Add Nutmeg: YouTube, Nostalgia, and the Fantasy of Early America
S09 E01 | Just Add Nutmeg: YouTube, Nostalgia, and the Fantasy of Early America

S09 E01 | Just Add Nutmeg: YouTube, Nostalgia, and the Fantasy of Early America

Update: 2025-07-21
Share

Description

In this episode, Christopher Douglas (Jacksonville State University) leads Ashley Rattner (Jacksonville State University) through some of the most popular late 18th and early 19th-century content available on YouTube: period cooking recreation. If one were to search "18th century America" or "early America" on YouTube, the top results are short videos of people making food in recreation settings. This episode focuses specifically on Townsends, which covers 18th-century America and Early American, which focuses on the early 19th century. The ways these channels recreate the past omits voices that had fewer opportunities to publish during these periods, minimizing or ignoring the ways in which enslaved persons and Indigenous peoples made food, thus creating a limited recreation of America's historical past. The episode ends with suggestions for including more authentic recreation in the general-education classroom. Post-production support by Ryan Charlton (Georgia State University). Works Referenced at bit.ly/S09E01WorksReferenced. Transcript available at bit.ly/S09E01Transcript.
Comments 
In Channel
loading
00:00
00:00
x

0.5x

0.8x

1.0x

1.25x

1.5x

2.0x

3.0x

Sleep Timer

Off

End of Episode

5 Minutes

10 Minutes

15 Minutes

30 Minutes

45 Minutes

60 Minutes

120 Minutes

S09 E01 | Just Add Nutmeg: YouTube, Nostalgia, and the Fantasy of Early America

S09 E01 | Just Add Nutmeg: YouTube, Nostalgia, and the Fantasy of Early America

Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists