It is not a pre-requisite to be associated with a scholarly institution to listen to a history podcast or to enjoy a historical fiction novel, television show, movie, or non-fiction book, nor should it be. However, many historians (myself included) often bemoan the plethora of misinformation that circulates and sometimes we even shake our fists at the sky with rage because things that we in the field know to be false are accepted by the general populace as solid truth. But is it fair to be upset about misinformation when in many cases access to scholarly information is simply impossible to obtain from respectable databases without association with a subscribing institution? I hold a graduate degree in history and use this training to present history to the public nearly every day of my life. First, I use it to research, write, and present scholarly history to a general audience through my podcasts and social media posts for Footnoting History. Second, I use it to do my personal best to create legitimate, accurate worlds and characters when crafting historical fiction. To achieve the level of research that I believe to be acceptable requires more than just a few Google searches and books (though I love both of those things). I view the use of scholarly journal articles and databases to be imperative to my success. These articles often provide new research that has not yet made it into a book or in-depth illuminations of niche topics. When I was a student, access was so easy I took it for granted. I had the world at my fingertips no matter the location. I could log in to the University’s library and search the myriad databases without a care in the world. Once I graduated, I was on borrowed time. Although I would always retain the right to use their library, after a few months my access to the databases was revoked unless I was able to physically place myself on the campus – something which you can imagine is not always possible. Seeing as I rely heavily on databases and am thrilled that they exist, I pondered how much it would cost to simply purchase subscriptions to them as an individual. After all, I am far from the only person who does scholarly research on a regular basis without a student or employee tie to such an institution, and although I am personally able bodied, I cannot help but continue to think about the many people who would eat up having access to such a plethora of information but are physically incapable of making the trek to an institution they once attended. Further to that, what about the people who never went to college or had the privilege of being exposed to such places through any possible means of association and employment? Basically, as far as I see it, innumerable people would benefit from the ability to subscribe without an institutional affiliation. So, I did what I always do, and I decided to research how much it would cost to access some of my favorite databases as an individual. (As you read this please keep in mind, I am not trying to throw these places under the bus. They are unequivocally some of my favorite databases, which I utilize on a regular basis, and quite frankly, love. I am using them as examples because of how important I view accessing them to be.) Here is some of what I found[1], first for all-important biographical sites and the informational hub that is ProQuest: -Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online: $29.95 (monthly) / $295 (annually) -American National Biography Online: $14.95 (monthly) / $89.00 (annually) -Dictionary of Irish Biography: Subscription only available through institutions -ProQuest: With no prices listed, they suggest contacting a local library to see if they provide access Then for JSTOR, my absolute favorite database, the holder of all-things scholarly, which offers tiers for subscription: A wide portion of articles are available as Open Access, but these are the ones that are public domain so therefore are (in many cases) nearly a century old Alumni of some universities are still granted full access, and JSTOR has a list of them. Lamentably, my alma mater is not among them, though I wish they were more than I wish for a lot of other things. MyJSTOR is a free account, which is infinitely better than nothing, that allows you to read up to six articles a month for free. (I often need far more than that, so ultimately this is only a band aid on the issue for me, but I give them credit for even creating this and hope some people who come across this post will take advantage of it. But in truth, what I would love is JPASS. JPASS allows you unlimited reading privileges. If you do it monthly, you can download up to 10 articles a month, while if you do it annually, you get 120 article downloaded per year. The price? Either $19.50 (monthly) or $199 (annually). While I am thankful that some places are offering individual subscriptions, the costs of many of them are too much to handle easily. Perhaps if a researcher chose one database only it could be affordable, but that is not even true for everyone. I know that I certainly could not afford to subscribe to all of the examples above, no matter how much I’d love to, and if I can’t, how could I expect that of my listeners and readers? I love curating Further Reading lists for my podcasts. They’re usually fairly decent in length and combine books, digital sources (like the mercifully-free images and texts from Gallica, New York Public Library, British Library’s Illuminated Manuscripts, and the Fondation Napoleon), and academic articles. I always hope that those who listen to me then read these and use the sources I list as jumping points for their own education, but when it comes to the articles I often have a broken heart when I realize how complicated accessing these important contributions to written history will be for people, if they can manage it at all. I understand that not everything in life can be free, and that information sharing and publication are as much businesses as anything else, but I do wish they were more affordable for those outside of academia. Having my remote access revoked by my institution following graduation caused a strange feeling of being cast out to sea without a raft. I was trained to do a job, but without remaining in that setting or jumping into another one just like it, I was largely cut off from the tools of the trade. Although I make it work the best I can, it does often feel like academia does not want you there if you are not employed within its walls. We cannot lose by allowing independent researchers and the public greater access to the scholarly world from their homes, especially in a time when so much information is available through tapping into phone or laptop, but the prices listed above are among the many that are simply too much for the average person to afford. Sadly, I looked up my own public library and found it lacked subscriptions to all the places above, save some areas of ProQuest. For now I will have to do my best to make the hour journey to the university library and be thankful that I am able to do so, despite the extreme inconvenience. As for my non-academic listeners and readers? I have to hope they will find ways to read these sources, even if it means trading university remote access passwords the same way they do Netflix logins, because no one should have to go broke to gain knowledge. [1] All prices are based on the internet-listed prices as of August 2018. Some will vary by geographic location of the subscriber. I attempted to post the prices in regards to a person living in North America, as that is my location. #Podcasting #Academia #Education

Reader, I met my foster elephant. Today, August 12th, is World Elephant Day. These twenty-four hours are designated for bringing attention to the plight of (in my opinion) the world’s most beautiful mammal, the elephant. If you add together the total amount of African and Asian elephants currently alive, you would be well below 1,000,000. That means there are 50-70% more humans in a city like Chicago or Houston than there are elephants in the world. How would we feel if our numbers were that low? Not too great, and it should be noted that things are worse for Asian elephants than their African counterparts. It is believed Asian elephants number only around 40-50,000, which is less than the human population of my suburban town. Poachers kill elephants on a frighteningly regular basis (in Africa it is estimated to be about 100 elephants killed a day) to take their tusks and sell the ivory on the black market, while particularly in Asia elephants are forced into servitude for tourism and entertainment purposes, often having to give rides to people - something they would not voluntarily do. If you take nothing else away from this post, take this away: elephants are for loving, not riding. In the spirit of World Elephant Day, I want to share the story of meeting Ambo, the orphaned elephant calf I foster through the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, because the very fact that he is alive is a tribute to the power human's have to help. (To learn how a period of intense personal depression put me on the road to fostering Ambo, please see my post Ambo the Elephant: A Love Story.) In addition, at the bottom of this post I have compiled a new, longer list of links that includes information about elephants and ways you can (from the comfort of your home) help make sure they are around for generations to come. And now without further ado, the tale of how I fulfilled my dream of meeting Ambo: In February I had the absolute pleasure of spending two weeks in Kenya with my friend Danielle. Our objective was simple: meet our fostered elephants. I was chomping at the bit to meet Ambo who, at two years old, was growing quickly in the Trust’s Nairobi Nursery. His existence makes me happy. Ambo was almost a casualty of nature, having been orphaned when he got stuck in the mud in a hole from which he could not initially extricate himself. Thankfully, he did pull himself out and the Trust came to his rescue. He was brought to the Nursery where the wonderful keepers provided him with around-the-clock supervision and a beautiful family of other rescued orphans. From the minute I first fostered him, I knew I wanted to travel to Nairobi and meet the whole crew. Arriving in Kenya, I admit I was nervous. It was strange to think that I traveled halfway around the world to see an animal. We arrived at the Trust for the public visit the following morning and I was taken immediately by how many people were there. School children, tourists, and locals, all contributed to caring for the elephants with the price of their admission to watch the little guys have their milk feeding and play in the mud. We gathered around the mud hole, kept back from where the elephants would be by nothing more than a thin rope. After an introduction by the keepers, the first group of orphans came down from the bush. Let me tell you, little elephants love their milk as much as I love cookies. Danielle and I were entranced. We located our elephants (Ambo was, um, relieving himself, and her foster, Maktao, threw himself into the mud with reckless abandon) and we marveled at how their grey skin was turned red by the mud and dust they use to cover themselves as elephant sunscreen. During the luncheon, we learned more about each elephant's story, and all the trauma endured by these sweet little lives. A few of them wandered over to us, curious, and ran their sides against us, smearing us with the red mud. I had never been happier or felt more inspired. That evening life got even better when we returned for the foster parent visit which was the equivalent of tucking in a child. We waited patiently near the stalls where they slept while the keepers called them in for bed, and much like that morning they ran eagerly in, single file, excited for their pre-bed snacks. With most of the elephants being under the age of four, I was immediately impressed by their orderly behavior and how they all went directly to their own individual stalls. Their personalities were vivid as some got annoyed at others for getting milk first and one stopped his running to say hello to a favorite keeper, waiting to walk in with him. When the small collection of foster parents wasn't taking pictures, we were all staring and whispering about how excited we were for this intimate experience. As soon as the elephants were in, we were free to disperse and visit wherever we wanted. I, of course, headed straight to Ambo's stall. There was something surreal about visiting him. For over a year, I had diligently checked my email, devouring every monthly update I received. I stalked social media, watching him grow and feeling a desperation to hug him as I learned all about his antics. Ambo, I had learned, loved his friends but sometimes hated going out in the rain. He wasn't always super fond of mud baths, and he always remembered when someone wronged him so he could return the favor. Now, here he was, in front of me, happily eating leaves and sticks and preparing himself for bed. He was beautiful, and he came over to me of his own accord, allowing me to pat him on the trunk. I never wanted to leave. In 2016 I had been at my personal lowest, and following Ambo's journey from struggling orphan to thriving little boy kept me going. I developed a love of elephants, growing to understand their intensely loving ways and resilient personalities. Seeing how, with the care and attention of their keepers and the older orphans who became their adoptive families, they were well on their way to reintegrating into the wild filled my heart with joy. Now, in 2018, I was face to face with the innocent, craft little guy whose story inspired me every day. I was thankful for him and for every piece of aid he ever received. I could not (and still cannot) fathom wanting to harm these animals, to kill their mothers for their ivory and leave orphaned babies all over the world. Being there with Ambo was a special time, where everything else faded into the background and I could feel how far he came, how far I came, and how far we both had to go. An elephant's lifespan is roughly comparable to a human's, so since he is multiple decades my junior, he could actually outlive me. I hope we both have long lives, and that I can continue to watch him grow into a magnificent bull, and that we are both strong enough to push through any more bad things that might come our way. If I could have stayed there forever, I would, but we had to leave because baby elephants need their sleep. Danielle and I spent the night talking about how we wished our whole trip involved visiting our foster elephants every single day. It would truly never get old. The next morning we left Nairobi to visit two safari camps. I fully admit the only reason I was able to do it was because I knew I would come back to see Ambo again before returning to the United States. (Yes, that visit was as magical as the first one, and I actually got to witness him put himself to bed for the night. When I left, he was snoozing happily.) First we set off to Laikipia, where we stayed at Ekorian’s Mugie Camp in the Mugie Conservancy, and the first thing we saw upon landing in the area were these beauties enjoying some water on a hot Kenyan afternoon: The trip was filled with these sorts of sightings. We regularly encountered elephants moving in herds with babies and older ladies and every age in between. One day we went kayaking on the Mugie Dam where we had the pleasure of seeing the elephants cooling off nearby. No one has to tell you to be quiet, because the sheer size and beauty of them makes you lose the ability to speak. They communicate, chastise misbehaving children, and frolic just like we do, but with such easy grace that it is hard to imagine how anyone could prize the ivory of their tusks over the awe-inspiring nature of their lives. (Side note: did you know elephants, like humans, have a dominant side? Check out which tusk is smaller, that’s the dominant side. It is shorter because it is the one more worn down from use!) Moving from Laikipia’s Mugie Conservancy to the Mara North Conservancy brought us in contact with a whole new population of elephants. Here, one day we spent nearly fifteen minutes simply idling in our safari vehicle (we were now staying at Offbeat Mara Camp) because an elephant calf had left the side of her browsing mother in order to take her time standing in front of our vehicle and fighting to pull one specific plant from the path we were following. When a baby elephant wants to eat, you let it. The most impressive sight down in the Mara though was Hugo, the tusker. I had never seen tusks as magnificent as Hugo’s. He stood, languidly hanging out beneath a tree, resting his trunk atop one of his tusks. You may notice in the picture below that Hugo is collared. This is because, although he is a completely wild elephant, there is a fear that his tusks make him a prime target for poachers. Danielle and I were sad to know he had to wear it (though we were assured that he barely notices he even has it on and no other elephants have treated him differently because of it), but glad that people were watching after his well-being. We were further gladdened that he was tracked several months later, when the Sheldrick Trust posted a news update that Hugo had been speared! Luckily, it was not a poisoned spear and they were able to help him recover, but the fact is that human-elephant conflict is always a threat. The key, of course, to prevent losing the world's population of precious elephants, is also humans. In the United States, movements are taking root that have resulted in laws preventing the use of elephants in circuses in certain states, while China recently ceased the government-sanctioned trade of ivory. Whether you choose to foster an elephant or sign a political petition, you are lending your voice to help the elephants who cannot speak for themselves. Elephants are known to love and thank humans, and also to help them when they are injured and protect them until they can be helped, so the least we can do is show them the same level of love and concern. Should you be interested in helping elephants or reading more about them (and I hope you are), I have many suggestions for how you can do that, so please check out the links below and mark World Elephant Day in whatever way best suits your life: Helpful Links World Elephant Day 96 Elephants Elephants in Japan The Saving the Elephants Run Ivory Ella FLOAT.org (rotates the animal charity being featured) The Elephant Pants Arte for Elephants Elephant Sanctuaries and Conservation Foundations Global Sanctuary for Elephants (Brazil) Elephant Haven European Elephant Sanctuary (France) Wildlife SOS (India) The Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (Kenya) Reteti Elephant Sanctuary (Kenya) Save the Elephants (Kenya) Mara Elephant Project (Kenya) Big Life Foundation (Kenya and Tanzania) Amboseli Trust for Elephants (Kenya and Tanzania) Phuket Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand) The Elephant Sanctuary (United States) The Zambezi Society (Zimbabwe) Elephants in (Footnoting) History Jumbo the (Victorian Celebrity) Elephant Medieval Gift Elephants Books (Non-Fiction) Carol Bradley, Last Chain on Billie. Paul Chambers, Jumbo: This Being the True Story of the Greatest Elephant in the World. Daphne Sheldrick, Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story. ---, The Unsung Heroes. Books (Fiction) Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone. Vaseem Khan, The Baby Ganesh Detective Agency Series. ---, (#1) The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra. ---, (#2) The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown. ---, (#3) The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star. ---, (#4) Murder at the Grand Raj Palace. Jodi Picoult, Leaving Time. Nancy Richardson Fischer, When Elephants Fly. Travel Locations Mentioned in This Post Extraordinary Journeys (the agency I used, thank you Pearl for your help!) Ekorian's Mugie Camp Mugie Conservancy Offbeat Mara Camp Mara North Conservancy #Ambo #Elephants #WorldElephantDay

I spent July on a writing retreat in a cabin – that is to say, a virtual cabin. While staying in this virtual cabin, I had one goal: to write 20,000 words of my newest project, a historical fiction novel set in the early Napoleonic period. My cabin was cozy and in my head it was nestled somewhere cold. In reality, I was parked in my bedroom each night, usually between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m. (prime time to a nocturnal lady like myself), with my air conditioner plugging along merrily beside me as I let my brain open up and its characters come flying out onto the screen. I was not alone in this virtual cabin, because like in a summer camp, I had been assigned bunkmates I did not know until camp started. These bunkmates came from all different backgrounds and had various goals and agendas for the month, but we all possessed two major similarities: they loved history and were writing historical pieces. I was among my people! For 31 days I wrote in my own private corner of our virtual retreat and then logged my progress and engaged with my fellow writers. I learned what my fellow campers found easiest about writing, how they conducted their research, what was troubling them, and some of the treasures they discovered. I have still never met them, but I feel like I know them, and through this experience I finally understand what it means to have a community around you that understands exactly what you’re doing because, in their own way, they are doing the same thing too. Normally I write in a vacuum. I follow other fiction writers on social media, I partook in PitchWars last year, and I have many wonderful friends who write but most of them focus on academic history. This was the first time I engaged with a proper writing community filled with other historical fiction creatives, all of whom were assigned to be around me by the Powers That Be. I hope I was a successful cheerleader for my fellow writers, because I am incredibly grateful for their participation. Even when we weren’t conversing in our little forum, just knowing they were progressing too made all the difference. I am a sucker for deadlines and a lover of chatting (especially when I can do both things while in my pajamas!) so this program was perfect for me. My proof? From January through June, when I was not part of anything, I wrote 20,000 words to start this project. In the month of July alone, I amassed the aforementioned 40,000 words…literally double my output for the entire six months prior. Talk about an intense increase! And as such, I have to say thank you, Camp NaNoWriMo. Camp NaNoWriMo is a brilliant offshoot of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). The premise of NaNoWriMo is that you do everything you can to spend the month of November writing 50,000 words of your project of choice. The Camp version allows you to set your own goal, thus my conservative attempt that turned into a more ambitious one. The cabins can be either created by groups or assigned by the Powers That Be. Obviously my choice to be placed wherever the fates wanted me to be worked out in my favor. The truth is though, that I owe NaNoWriMo an apology, and not just a small one, because I am a convert. Now I sing the event’s praises to all writers I encounter, but up until last year I was one of its biggest detractors, and I stand corrected and apologetic. You see, when I first learned of this enormous writing marathon, it struck me as wrong. I was bothered by the fact that it seemed (to me) to be promoting the notion that someone could write an entire novel successfully in a month. The people I encountered who talked about it, all spoke as if writing was easy, something to be done for a lark, and that anyone in possession of a pen or computer could churn something worth reading out in a few weeks. They didn't care about quality, just quantity, and that put me on edge. It bothered me that they spoke as though it was so easy write since it is a skill I have spent the better part of my life seeking to master. I admit this sort of attitude (that anything is easy and does not require lengthy study) always causes me to have negative reactions and become defensive. I regularly have people tell me that they are historians because they watch the History Channel or that “anyone” can be a singer, two things which I’ve always felt devalued the fact that I worked very hard for my BA and MA in history, continue educating myself in that field, and have spent over two decades training as vocalist. Well, NaNoWriMo, I let my personal hang ups get the better of me, and I apologize. I have learned that the lax attitudes conveyed by those I initially encountered are outliers, not the norm. My experience in July’s Camp incarnation has shown me the truth. The vast majority of participants take what they do very seriously. They are seeking to do far more than churn out a large number of words. They are building a community, learning from one another, dedicating more time than they might usually be able to allot to their craft, finding critique partners and beta readers, brainstorming ideas, asking for/giving advice, cheering and consoling one another, and sharing in everyone else’s successes while helping others move beyond the times when they have fallen behind. It is a remarkable event, and an important one. I am glad that I began it in July instead of November, because I do still find the hype around November’s event a little daunting, but that doesn’t mean I won’t do it. You see, that’s one more great thing about NaNoWriMo: it is open to everyone, including a former naysayer like me. Resources Official NaNoWriMo Website Official Camp NaNoWriMo Website Official PitchWars Website #Writing #CampNaNoWriMo #NaNoWriMo

For the past few months I used my blog to host the #PodcastingHistory series, which sought to give established independent podcasters a place to discuss their methods and experiences in an unedited format. Each time an entry from a new colleague came in, I was happy to read a new perspective on why and how people podcast. Now that the series (or, at least the first incarnation of it) has concluded, I took the time to reassess what it was like to begin a podcast. When Footnoting History started back in 2013, we basically closed our eyes and jumped into the fire of the podcasting world. Sure we talked about what we would do before we launched, but it still took some time for us to find our proper footing. This is perfectly normal, but it is always good to be as aware as possible of what you are getting yourself into before you start. This entry seeks to help you answer the question, "Is (history) podcasting for me?" You'll note that 'history' is in parentheses because much of what I am going to say can be applied to many genres of podcasting, but I am aware that my experience and expertise is limited to the history podcast world. The good thing about podcasting is that no one can stop you from doing it, so what I've done here is compiled a list of ten questions to help you decide if creating a podcast is for you. There are no wrong answers and it is certainly not up to me to tell you whether or not you belong in this world, but I feel it is important to provide some basic things to consider before you, too, go into the figurative fire. I hope they help, and should you decide to come to the jungle, I wish you luck and would love it if you let me know in the comments. Five Questions about Your Podcast What would your podcast be about? A podcast without a purpose is one more likely to flounder. Your niche can be anything you want it to be, from the specific (think: military history of Ancient Rome or the wives of Spanish kings) to the broad (overlooked people and events in world history or world fashions), but knowing what your podcast is about will help you focus your episodes, and give you a lens through which to choose your individual topics. This is also the most important thing to consider because, if you are not in love with your topic, your audience will know and they will turn away. Who is your target audience? Just like with in-person conversations, in podcasting you will have adjust your word choices and the density of your information to a level that will best connect to your intended audience. A podcast geared toward the general public will sound very different from one created for academic specialists or high school students. What tone do you want to set? If your strength is humor, make your podcast funny. If you want to be a strict educational podcast that is more like a textbook, embrace that. Sometimes it takes time for a podcast to find its tone because what you think will work, doesn't in practice. That's okay. Evolution is a natural part of the process, but it's always good to consider how you want to convey your information before you do it. Why is your podcast special? The podcast world is constantly bursting with new content and with people having so much selection, it allows them to toss you aside before they've listened to much and move on to greener pastures because, let's face it, whatever your topic is, someone else has probably tried it before and if they haven't, there's no one who can stop them from doing something similar. Therefore, it's good to know what your spin is going to be that makes people want to listen to more than half an episode. Can you tie every historical event to a modern pop song? Are you a certified specialist in that field? Did you grow up in a castle and now you're podcasting about them? These are all very specific hooks, and yours need not be so strong but you do need to consider why someone should choose you over the hundreds of other podcasts vying for their attention. How will you promote your podcast? Plopping your podcast out into the world so it can be located on various apps is easy. Making sure people want to find your podcast takes significantly more work, and you will have to be your podcast's greatest champion. A website, twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr are just some ways you can promote yourself online, so it's a good idea to lock up the user names you want across the various platforms as soon as you know where you want to funnel your energy, plus this way you can start hyping your podcast before it even launches! Five Questions about Yourself Do you enjoy your free time remaining free? Consider however long you think it will take to determine, research, write, record, edit, release and then promote an episode on various platforms then multiply it by at least two. In fact, at the start, unless you have audio processing experience, it is probably better to multiply it by three or four. The point is, however long you think it will take, it will more likely than not take much longer. Can you handle criticism? Putting a podcast out into the world is not unlike releasing a book, album, film, or television show. People are going to talk about it, they're going to review it, and they're going to let you know when you do something they didn't like. It is important to know when to engage and when to ignore. Don't block out the people giving you sound advice, but don't make yourself look bad by engaging with the trolls. No piece of public art is going to please every person who engages with it. Are you willing to work for free? The fact of the matter is, unless your podcast is being created by a company with money or you have enough listeners to gain sponsors, you will likely be doing this for free, at least at the beginning. In most cases though, you, as an indie podcaster, will actually spend money on things like a microphone and web hosting. Would you prefer to work alone or with others? There are different pros and cons for working alone versus having partners. For example, if you are working alone you get to set your own time table and have no one to answer to, but you also have to shoulder all of the pressure of creating the product. Meanwhile, if you work with partners, you can split up the work load but you could also easily find it difficult to schedule recordings or end up having disagreements about the podcast's mission. You need to decide which best suits your personality and work preferences. What do you hope to achieve with your podcast? The level of effort you put into your podcast should determine the level of success you achieve, but that isn't always going to be the case. It is entirely possible that you might never have a fan base that lands you a book deal based on your podcast theme. Are you okay with that? If you feel rewarded and happy with the product you put out and gaining whatever audience you are able to foster, you are far more likely to be happy with your role as podcaster than someone who will be upset about not being on every Top Ten list by the end of your first month. The ease with which one can enter the podcast world makes it very tempting to consider, and the ever-expanding marketplace means you can always have a seat if you want it, but it will be as much work as it is good fun. If you can answer all of the above questions in a way which maintains your enthusiasm about beginning a podcast (with all the work and growing pains that come with it), then I look forward to seeing your logo pop up on apps in the future. Happy (potential) podcasting! #Podcasting

When it came to choosing the final entry for #PodcastingHistory (for now!) I knew it needed to go to the person who started me on the podcasting path, Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge. So please, welcome her and enjoy her discussion about researching and creating the Footnoting History episode, "Cemeteries: Washington Park Cemetery and Early 20th-Century Atlanta": Hello and welcome to Christine’s blog and my contribution to her series on #PodcastingHistory. I am Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge, the producer of Footnoting History, a podcast series on anything and everything history (yeah, we’ve got an ep for that). It helps me - at all times - to start with a series of questions and develop my answers from there and that is how I will write this overview. Are you ready to learn all about what goes into making an episode of a history podcast? Well, then, by all means: keep reading! :) Why did I start podcasting? A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I started a podcast series called Footnoting History. I was inspired by other history podcasts but also at a place in my life where I didn’t know if I had a monetizable future in history. I was working on my dissertation on late medieval England, had three small children, was adjuncting -- I felt like I would never finish graduate school and then, when I did, I would not land an academic position. I know, like I have always known, that I like to talk about history. It gives me happiness to research and present that research. I did not want to lose that joy and, so, I did what many have done: figured out a way to keep doing what I loved as a side-gig while potentially preparing for a stable job in an alternative field. Knowing that new content would be important to a growing show, but also realizing I did not have the time to do an episode a month, let alone a week, on my own (see above: dissertation, children, adjuncting), I contacted a number of friends from graduate school and asked if they would be interested. Well, 5 years, over 175 episodes, and almost 2 million downloads later, we’re still here. What do you podcast about? Our show is largely unpredictable because we all get to choose our own topics and there’s no theme to our programming. All of us, however, have developed interests over the years which are reflected in our topic choices. I, for instance, started with late medieval England, but then moved onto using fiction as historical sources, and, finally, US History. You see, my fear that I would not be able to talk history in my career was unfounded: I teach high school history at an independent school in Atlanta, GA. My courses include both Modern World History and US History. (Yes, that’s right, I do not teach any courses on medieval history.) As I began to teach US history, I realized how much I don’t know, especially about the metro region in which I live. We moved from New York City to Atlanta about 8 years ago when my oldest was a toddler. My roots are largely in the NY-area and I was not familiar with the local history beyond Sherman burning it down during the Civil War. That brings me to the episode which is the focus of this post: “Cemeteries: Washington Park Cemetery and Early 20th-Century Atlanta.” What’s the deal with that episode? Here’s why I want to talk about this episode: because it surprised me. I didn’t just learn things I didn’t know, I unlearned what I thought I knew, and found a story I never even considered existed. This episode was actually the Part II of an earlier episode on a white, working class cemetery in Atlanta ("Cemeteries: Local History of Mid-20th Century Atlanta") but what I learned while researching Washington Park Cemetery helped give me a better understanding of early 20th-century Atlanta and the South as a whole. What research/work was involved? This question is a big one for academia, and I’m going to take you down a tangent that is actually one of the reasons Christine started this series: because of how public history (like podcasts which are intended not for experts but for the public) is not considered as lofty a goal as a work intended for your specialist community. The problem hinges on the fact that podcasts are not peer-reviewed (meaning that other scholars in the field aren’t required to vet them before release) and, as such, aren’t considered true academic work. And, yet, I used my training as an historian to find evidence and evaluate it as well as scholarly works on my topic - just as everyone on Footnoting History does for each episode. As I teach high school and am not on the tenure-track, this lack of inclusion toward podcasts does not impact my career, but it does feed a belief that I have “left academia” because to be “in academia” you need to publish in peer-reviewed journals or through university presses. Of course, publishing in those venues is excellent and scholarly, but if one is hoping to engage the public - and we at FH most certainly are - than we want to make our work accessible, meaning that we try to avoid professional jargon and keep our information freely available. Unfortunately for those still in academia, this goal has not yet caught on when filling your portfolio for tenure, but, hopefully, universities will begin to realize the value of our work. No, really, what research was involved? Sorry, off my high horse. Okay, so as mentioned, this episode was a Part II. I found the cemetery I discussed in Part I simply by taking a walk by my house. I knew after learning that East View was a cemetery for white people, that I wanted to examine a cemetery in the Atlanta-area in which members of the black community were buried. I turned to google and came up with Washington Park Cemetery, also known as Washington Memorial Gardens. This cemetery was also within my county, but a drive, not walk, away. If you listen to the episode (please do!) you will learn the stories I discovered, so I will just describe the actual steps it took to develop this episode. First, I bundled two of my daughters (the youngest was in daycare - the bigs were on Spring Break) into the car and we drove to Washington Park Cemetery. I was able to speak with a staff person there and my daughters and I walked the cemetery, finding people to research. At home, I turned to ancestry.com (I use my dad’s account) and began to piece together what I could about the two women and one man I had selected. In Georgia, as I knew from the previous episode, death certificates are not easily obtained by non-family members. A few weeks later, my oldest two (again, baby was at daycare) and I went to the Atlanta-Fulton Library to look at newspapers on their microfilm reader. While some newspapers are now available online, unfortunately the timeframes for the newspapers I was interested in were not, but, luckily, we live near a library that houses records of them. Re-learning to use a microfilm reader, which I had last used a decade ago while researching my dissertation in the UK, was a pleasant experience. We then drove to the Auburn Avenue Research Library at Georgia State University to use their computers to look at the Atlanta Daily World, an African-American newspaper with copies online - I did not have remote access to the database as I don’t have a Fulton County library card and the online access is not available through all libraries. It was there that I struck the motherlode as one of my subjects had numerous articles on her and my other two subjects had slightly more detailed histories in this newspaper for the black community rather than in the “white” newspapers available on microfilm at the Atlanta Fulton Public Library. I printed out the articles and put them in my little composition notebook in which I was recording everything I learned. It was now summer. Yes, that’s right, my research took place over months because as a full-time working parent, this podcast is, sadly, considered my hobby and, therefore, comes after everything else - it does, however, sometimes allow me to show my children exactly what an historian does. But it was summer. I emailed the head archivist of the local county museum and asked if I could see any records they had pertaining to Washington Park Cemetery. We made a date and time for me to visit, the girls were in summer camp and daycare, so I went alone, which proved to be fortuitous as the Dekalb History Museum allowed me to look through folders of records, a task difficult with children sitting nearby. I was also able to discuss the history of Atlanta and learn some information of which I wasn’t aware and hadn’t considered. Then, I spent the next few months writing the episode and reading scholarly sources on Atlanta, Georgia, and the American South. As a trained medievalist, I had major gaps in my knowledge of American history and, especially, African-American history. I looked for works which would give me an overview so that I could write a more compelling and more honest story. History is never just a collection of facts. History is the story of the past and to tell a good story, I had to know the context - I had to know what life was like in Atlanta for those born in the generation or two after the end of slavery and the only way to do that was to dive into the research - to find those peer-reviewed articles and books published by university presses and mine them for information. Once I did that, I was able to take all of the scholarly knowledge others had written and published, all of the information I had researched myself throughout the Atlanta-area, and write my episode. I usually write about 100-200 words a day to make sure that I actually have time to get everything in, but also because I don’t often have time for more than 100-200 words. I recorded the episode in September and it aired on October 7, 2017. From start to finish, it was a 6 month process for a 29 minute episode. This process is similar to how I wrote my article which was published in a peer-reviewed journal (check my academia.edu page for details:) and also how I wrote my MA thesis and my dissertation, but instead of sending it off to be peer-reviewed, I worked to craft the information into an entertaining episode. In the past, parents with middle-schoolers have said they listen to our episodes with their children, so when I write, I keep these families in mind. These are the public for whom I write when I engage in public history. Those are the people I want to reach. My advice for history podcasters? People listen to history podcasts because they love history. People make history podcasts because they love research and presenting that research. Not all of my episodes take 6 months from start to finish, but even the “easy” ones take approximately 3 months. There’s a lot of reading involved and you need to make sure you have a good understanding of the historiography (the history of the history) of your topic. It is easy to read a major tome and base much of your work on it, but that major tome might be considered outdated - there may be new information available, new ideas, new discussions, and you want to make sure you have a good handle on all of it. If you are interested in a specific field or topic, I would look up reading lists for courses on the subject at universities, especially reading lists for graduate programs. Those reading lists will give you a good idea of the current state of the field. From there, think about how you view that story - do you agree with the conclusions of the authors you have read? Why or why not? And, then, after all that: take the story you have been slowly creating in your head, write it down, and record it. Now you have a history podcast episode :) In addition to being Footnoting History's Producer, Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge enjoys teaching social history and using contemporary literature to get at historical truths - at least that's why she says she reads so much Wilkie Collins. Elizabeth earned her BA in history from Boston College and has her MA and PhD in medieval (/early modern - take that periodization!) history from Fordham University. You can find her on twitter, @historianmum. #GuestPost #PodcastingHistorySeries

And now for something moderately different... In #PodcastingHistory 7 we broaden our horizons with an entry from Darrin Sunstrum, who co-hosts MythTake with Alison Innes. Enjoy this discussion of the motivation behind exploring ancient myths, with a focus on their episode, "Wonder Woman": Hello there everyone! I’ve been asked to write a few thoughts about the MythTake podcast. As educators and classicists, we were always ‘talking shop’ and bemoaning the fact that we couldn’t talk about this, or cover that, or expand upon this. We wanted the conversation and content that began in the classroom to continue and grow. Then it hit, like the Olympian thunderbolt – podcasting! We quickly ran in under the sign that read ‘abandon all hope ye who enter here’- our local BestBuy - and purchased a USB microphone, downloaded some software and asked, ‘where’s the record button?’ This is a pretty good description of the genesis of MythTake. On our podcast Alison and myself talk about ancient Classical Myth and literature and anything else that we feel is of interest to our audience, because our audience are like us. If they want a close reading of an ancient primary source and discussion, we’ve got them covered. If they want a tour of solar system that adds the mythology to the astronomy, we’ve got them covered. If they want to talk about the myths and heroes that are in movies and television, not a problem. We will talk about all sorts of things connected to our passion for classical mythology and literature. Once the microphone is on and a few ground rules laid out, we start our discussion. It’s live and sometimes we do get a bit out of hand. As a life-long student of myth, I feel that our choice of podcasting is just perfect for what Joseph Campbell would define as ‘following your bliss’. I will let him describe this for us now; “Follow your bliss. If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be. If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.” (Joseph Campbell) A perfect example of our shows flexibility comes to mind when I think about episode 24. Having been inspired by watching Wonder Woman we had decided to include a wide-ranging discussion of the myths of the Amazons, comic books, gender in the ancient world, and on the list of topics grew. Now, I’m sure this seems perfectly normal, except we recorded it and didn’t like it. It was too stuffy, too many academic sources and ‘shop talk’. We went and saw the movie again and this time we kept our opinions to ourselves (even during the car ride home) and didn’t speak until we were in front of the microphone. To this day this episode has been one our favorites as well as being the top downloaded episode of our catalogue! Podcasting and connecting with our listeners has been an experience that I would not trade for the world. We initially threw our content out into the void and thought that we were alone out there. But, we couldn’t be more wrong. We have met and connected with other fellow podcasters and have had the privilege and honour to be include in their work as well. This can seem like a thankless endeavor, but we can tell you truthfully it has been incredibly satisfying. As we grow and learn, we hope that you will continue along with our journey and join the conversation with us! MythTake a ‘fresh take on ancient myth’ We hope our enthusiasm ενθουσιασμος (ancient Greek for being possessed by a god’s essence) for our content doesn’t scare you off. So, give us a listen, a like on Facebook and follow both Alison @innesalison and myself @darrinsunstrum on Twitter! Also, did I mention the blog? MythTake.blog (here you will not only find our show posts and links, but also reflections on mythological topics, poetry, my posts on the Heroic Question and more!) We’re your hosts, Alison Innes & Darrin Sunstrum. Our podcast is a little different from other myth podcasts out there. Rather than telling the stories, we focus on analyzing the literary material where those stories come from. Sometimes we choose a particular figure or theme from mythology and examine texts relating to it. Other times, we choose a passage from a play or poem and analyze it for its themes and ideas. Our podcast is unscripted, so anything can happen! We keep it real–we want you to feel like you’re sitting down and having a conversation with us. We also welcome your input–questions, thoughts, suggestions, ideas. #PodcastingHistorySeries #GuestPost

Welcome to #PodcastingHistory 6! COMING SOON.

#PodcastingHistory 5 is here! This time, I get to share a post with you from Wesley Livesay of The History of the Great War podcast. Here, he discusses his process for creating "A Re-examination of Cavalry in the First World War, Part I", the first episode in his series on the British cavalry's contributions to World War One: Unlike some of the other podcasts which you may have read about during the #PodcastingHistory series, my show is narrative and chronological. This means I usually do not have to really hunt for my story. The First World War is a well established timeline--all I have to do is walk down it with my listeners. While this was a huge advantage when I first began, it's recently become more of danger, as it can be very easy to just start going through the motions instead of hunting for a unique and interesting story. Anybody who spends much time reading or listening to a wide range of history resources can probably tell you how easy it is for historians to tell a boring and predictable story and I try to stay away from that. For many of my episodes, research begins on Amazon. The Marne, Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele, and so many other events of the First World War are incredibly well covered by historians. To try and prevent myself from merely retelling a predictable story, I have developed several habits, and one of the most important is to spend some time wandering through the very interesting world of graduate theses and dissertations. I will often do this by just going to the Open Access Theses and Dissertations website (oatd.org), typing in a keyword, and browsing through the results. Not every entry on the site is of the highest quality--they are after all created by Master's and PhD students--but it provides some deep dives into some topics that are hard to find anywhere else. This is especially important to my podcast because I am neither a graduate student, nor affiliated with any university, and I only speak English. These factors limit my access to some sources. Perhaps my favorite item I have found on OATD is a dissertation called Offensive spending: tactics and procurement in the Habsburg military, 1866-1918 by John Anthony Dredger (1) which discusses the spending of the Habsburg military in the decades before the war. It is an incredibly niche topic and Dredger's work is built off of a huge number of German sources which are unavailable to me. While Dredger's work is my favorite that I have discovered on OATD, by far the most impactful for my podcast was Fire and the Sword: The British Army and the Arme Blanche Controversy 1871-1921 by Stephen Badsey (2). When most people think of the Western Front during the First World War, cavalry is not something that enters into the equation. If anything, people consider it to be a silly and absurd notion that cavalry could be used in a battlefield dominated by trenches and barbed wire. That was roughly my mindset as well, and the only time I planned on discussing cavalry in any meaningful way was during the episodes covering the Middle Eastern theatre. Reading Badsey's dissertation changed all of that. This would then lead me to read other works by Badsey including his recent book on the British cavalry between 1880 and 19183. This research spiral continued with other items available on OATD that focused on other facets of the usage of cavalry during the war. (4,5) When I initially decided to spend an episode focusing on cavalry I believed that it would be a story of commanders stuck in the past, not properly reacting to modern realities. However, as my research continued, a very different story emerged. Instead of commanders with outdated tactics, I found commanders trying to develop tactics that would allow them to maintain some form of mobility on a battlefield of increasing technology. The reality of the battlefield was that while firepower technology was advancing rapidly, modes of transportation were not. While cavalry would certainly become a battlefield anachronism by the end of the First World War, before the war began there were few other options. Many commanders had no choice but to rely on the horse as the only way of propelling an attack forward faster than man could walk. This research ultimately changed my perspective on the value of cavalry during WWI, which compelled me to increase the scope with which I intended to write about the topic. What began as one episode quickly became four. With much more writing ground to cover, I needed to expand the timeline backwards and cover the evolution of cavalry before the war, not just during. This resulted in a dive into the Boer War starting with Badsey's discussion of the British Cavalry in the Boer War (6) and then following up with the excellent work of Spencer Jones.(7) The four episodes that I released on cavalry, beginning in March 2016, was a real turning point for me. It represented my first large departure from the normal, and honestly predictable, story of the war. It was received well by listeners, and that gave me the confidence to explore more in future episodes. Over the last two years I have spent more time finding the weird and interesting stories of the war, to the benefit of myself (adventures are fun!) and those who listen to my show. Notes 1: Dredger, J. A. (2013). Offensive spending: tactics and procurement in the Habsburg military, 1866-1918. (Doctoral Dissertation). Kansas State University. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2097/15684 2: Badsey, S. D. (1982). Fire and the Sword : the British Army and the Arme Blanche controversy 1871-1921. (Doctoral Dissertation). University of Cambridge. Retrieved from https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/244878 ; http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.237654 3: Badsey, S. (2016). Doctrine and reform in the British cavalry 1880-1918. London: Routledge. 4: Potter, S. E. (2013). "Smile and Carry On:" Canadian Cavalry on the Western Front, 1914-1918. (Thesis). University of Western Ontario. Retrieved from https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/1226 5: Kenyon, D. (2008). British Cavalry on the Western Front 1916-1918. (Doctoral Dissertation). Cranfield University. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1826/3032 6: Badsey, S. "The Boer War (1899-1902) and British Cavalry Doctrine: A Re-Evaluation." The Journal of Military History, vol. 71 no. 1, 2007, pp. 75-97. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/jmh.2007.0001 7: Risio, A. J. (2012). Building the Old Contemptibles: British military transformation and tactical development from the Boer War to the Great War, 1899-1914. Place of publication not identified: Biblioscholar Dissertations. Wesley Livesay is the creator of the History of the Great War podcast, a weekly podcast which covers the events of the First World War in (roughly) chronological order which began in 2014. He is a software developer by trade and earned his BS and MS in Information Systems from the Missouri University of Science and Technology. #PodcastingHistorySeries #GuestPost

Thank you to everyone who has been reading and sharing #PocastingHistory! For this installment I get to hand the blog over to Ali A. Olomi of Head on History. Find out how a modern political decision resulted in an episode covering the complex history of one of the world's most famous cities in this entry about his episode, "Jerusalem": I tell my students that history is more than a recollection of the past, but a lens to analyze the present—partly to get the STEM students to buy in on the value of studying history, but also to get them to think about the discipline in a different light. The announcement by President Trump to move the US embassy to Jerusalem provided just the opportunity to demonstrate what I was talking about. Head On History as an idea sprang from the desire to provide students with a supplement for my classes. There are currently two types of episodes: the regular season; ten episodes that follow a specific theme, and special episodes which contextual current events. As a historian of the Middle East and Islam, I was particularly interested in taking some of the classes I taught and making the material available to both students and a wider audience. The first two seasons of Head on History cover the breadth of Islamic history. I decided the podcast on Jerusalem would need to be a special episode. I would use the move of the embassy and the subsequent controversy it caused as a starting point to open up the history of the city and the history of the relationship between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. I started by laying out an outline of what I wanted to cover, drawing mostly from the class I had already taught on the subject. I look my lecture notes and re-worked them into an outline of a script. This original script was organized chronologically, starting with the founding of Jerusalem and working from there towards the interaction of the three Abrahamic faiths in the city. Because the podcast is built upon a class I’ve taught, the majority of the research has already been done when I first designed the course. But as any good teacher or historian will tell you, there’s always more tweaking to be done. That means another jaunt into the literature on the subject. With my outline in hand, I knew what I wanted to cover, but I needed to keep up to date with the latest research. The literature review opened up a new angle. Interestingly, the idea came from a work of popular history published several years ago, Karen Armstrong’s Jerusalem. She mentions very briefly in her chapter on Al Quds, that Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Jerusalem shared certain holidays. Inspiration struck: a discussion of shared festivals or pilgrimages would dovetail nicely with an episode on the shared sacred history of Jerusalem. Karen Armstrong didn’t include a citation, nor mention which pilgrimages were shared. This required a dive into the archive—a trip to the New York Public Library to look at Muhammad al Balami’s Tarikh, which as it happens is also part of my research for my dissertation. The Tarikh is a Persian translation of Al Tabari’s original Tarikh al Rasul wa al Mulk. Balami’s translation is more than a faithful rendering; he includes annotations and additions. I located a passage about the importance of Jonah and the tombs of prophets—prophets that appeared both in the Hebrew Bible and in the Qur’an. From there, I looked at the United Nations information on heritage sites—from physical archive to digital. I was able to locate information about the Tomb of Jonah in Iraq and how Daesh, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, had targeted it for demolishing. The destruction of site, ostensibly because of the very same shared sacredness I was researching, was a tragic conclusion. Whenever I teach religious history, I understand that I am working with sensitive topics and strong feelings. The debate over Jerusalem was heated in the twitterverse, but the physical destruction of history was an important reminder of the stakes of these debates. The Tomb of Jonah with its historic pilgrimage and festivals quickly became part of the podcast episode. The direction of the podcast also changed. The original script covered the chronological history of Jerusalem and the interaction of the three Abrahamic faiths in the city, but now it was thematically shaped by the concept of shared history, shared geography, and shared sacredness. I was conscious to not erase the histories of conflict or violence or paint a romanticized vision of the past, but I did want to highlight the history of co-existence. I was upfront about this in the podcast; this would be a presentation of how Jerusalem’s sacredness was structured by history and by virtue of its shared space. The podcast that took shape was not just a history of a city, but of the people who lived there and interacted with one another. I was less interested in what building lay where in the city and instead what people said and felt about Jerusalem and more importantly how they shared the space. When I sat down in front of my mic with my notes in hand, the story I told was of poets who extolled the virtues of a city, of crusaders who fought for a land, and of pilgrims who worshiped side-by-side in Jerusalem. Ali A Olomi is a historian and Ph.D candidate at the University of California, Irvine where he works on the history of the Middle East and Islam. His dissertation examines Muslim identity in the Persianate world during the fragmenting of the Abbasid Caliphate and re-structed around an imagined golden age. He is the host of Head on History. He tweets @aaolomi #PodcastingHistorySeries #GuestPost

Welcome to Guest Post 3 of #PodcastingHistory! This week I get to hand this blog over to Devon Field, creator and host of The Human Circus, a podcast dedicated to journeys in the medieval world. In this post, Devon takes us through the process of creating his episode "To See the Mongols 4: A William Leaves Town", and as a result we get to travel with his subject, Friar William, from Europe to visit the Mongols: When I prepare a podcast episode, I’m preparing to tell a story. In particular, I’m preparing to tell a story about a medieval traveler, whether they be a monk, crusader, merchant, pilgrim, ambassador, or some combination thereof. Probably the most important part of my process then is choosing what story to tell. For me, that means finding texts that are dramatic, contain an element of surprise, and teach me something. I’m looking first for stories that have some dramatic element to them because, obviously, I don’t want to bore the listener any more than I want to bore myself. Here, it tends to help to find narratives that can be summed up in a kind of elevator pitch. My first subject left Bavaria in his mid-teens to fight the Ottomans but didn’t come home for 30 years because he was serving first the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid and then Timur the Torco-Mongol ruler. Another had never left England until he sailed for Constantinople with a gift from Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmed III, and he performed a concert for Mehmed with the sultan’s knees at his back, fearful that his head was about to be cut off. A third was over 60 years old when he journeyed overland from France to witness a Mongol Khan’s ascension and deliver a letter from the pope. And so on. They’re all immediately gripping stories, to me at least, and they all let me speak to my main theme of unexpected interconnectivity. I think there’s still a fairly popular picture of the medieval world as made up of homogeneous islands existing pretty much in isolation from one another and as being exemplary of an imagined purity (cultural and/or racial) that once existed. I like to tell fun stories, but I also like to tell stories that serve as ways into both their characters’ broader contexts and the wonderfully interconnected medieval world. I think people are surprised to learn about the history of Anglo-Moroccan diplomacy, Parisian craftsmen in the Mongol capital, and English-born employees of the Ottoman Empire (as they clearly are surprised by diversity in Roman Britain for example). Finally, I’m looking for stories I want to learn more about. Medieval travel narratives are not in my academic background (my graduate thesis was on Luigi Giussani), and a PhD is still just a future possibility (one I’m not sure I can justify in my current situation). This podcast gives me an outlet for my own research. It lets me take a text and related background materials and create something satisfying. What I try to do with all of this is present it in the form of a narrative. A question I sometimes get stuck on is when and where to break with that format. Is it better to break the flow of the story to emphasize a point or provide analysis and to make sure it doesn’t all merge into a more historically grounded “once upon a time,” or can good storytelling communicate the themes adequately by itself? It’s something I’m still experimenting with. There are other questions also, and a big one, as with any writing, is what to include and what to throw away. Sometimes I’ll come across a tidbit of information that just seems too delicious to leave out, but it doesn’t fit and it ends up cut, or rather copied and pasted to the bottom of the document for potential future use. I think I’ve gotten a little better in this respect. Not every related aside that makes me think “well, this is cool!” makes it in anymore. Sometimes, the scale of a story changes as I get into it. I initially started with Thomas Dallam (16th/17th century organ builder and unlikely representative to the Ottoman Sultan) because I thought it would make a good one-off episode, a nice, light palate cleanser after the violence of Timur. It turned into a nine-part series on Elizabethan diplomacy, the trade companies, and Dallam’s own delightfully opinionated account of his travels. Podcasting is pretty flexible that way. In a way, this episode came out of a similar process. I started with the topic of another friar, Giovanni Carpine (sadly I cannot remember where or why I came across him), who was sent to the Mongols by Pope Innocent IV to learn all about them and to deliver a letter to their khan, but I soon realized that Friar Giovanni was just one of several Franciscans and Dominicans to go east on religio-diplomatic missions to Mongol khans and commanders, and part of a whole travel narrative sub-genre all their own. This is the first of three episodes on the 13th century journey of William of Rubruck to the court of Mongke Khan and part of a longer (and still ongoing) series on the exchanges between Latin Christendom and the Mongol Empire, from the papal missions of characters like Giovanni Carpine to the merchant expeditions of the Polos. Friar William was a Flemish Franciscan who has often been seen, and was often seen by the Mongols, as travelling on behalf of King Louis IX of France as a diplomatic envoy, but by his own account he had a much more religious motivation: to convert the Mongols to Christianity, a prospect for which there had been some Mongol encouragement (the earlier Mongol envoys to Louis IX and the presence of Christians in senior Mongol positions) but which would ultimately result in failure. We follow Friar William as he navigates the early stages of his journey. We get to see him flung suddenly, jarringly, into a world that is to him alien and barbaric. He negotiates his status in that world and is frustrated in his religious efforts at almost every turn. He is disturbed at the actions and beliefs of his fellow Christians. He is endlessly surprised and appalled at the Mongols’ noses. Though the written account is largely a report for the benefit of Louis IX, these personal reactions make a nice occasional window into William’s own personality and bring him to life for us a little. For me, the story of Friar William ticks all the boxes I mentioned at the start. We see him struggle to overcome the physical demands of the journey, navigate the complications of his own uncertain diplomatic status, attempt missionary work through the barriers of language and an apparently incompetent translator, and eventually (though not in this episode) take part in an incredibly cinematic religious debate scene before the khan. His account contains detailed observations on the Mongols, his engagement with ideas of the unknown world (has anyone seen the dog-headed men?), and difficult interactions with his nominal coreligionists in Mongke’s camp. There’s drama in the rock-splitting cold, the nearness of starvation, and the penalty of death for diplomatic faux pas. We get a peek into Mongol diplomacy and politics, William’s attempts to make sense of Buddhists and Buddhism, and throughout his journey, the surprising diversity (often, but not always, involuntary and the result of violent displacement) of the characters he meets in the Mongol Empire: an Armenian weaver pretending to be a monk, a woman from Metz who has married a Russian builder, and a Christian from Damascus who represents the Ayyubid Sultan, all at Mongke Khan’s camp alone. For all that, perhaps my moment of peak enjoyment during the series was pulling out my The Voyages of Marco Polo board game for the first time in a while and being delighted to discover I now knew all the characters. History provides satisfaction in unexpected places sometimes. Devon Field is the creator of Human Circus, a narrative history podcast about medieval travel. He received his BA and MA in humanities from Simon Fraser University, and currently reads and writes with elementary age ESL students. #GuestPost #PodcastingHistorySeries

Welcome to Guest Post 2 of #PodcastingHistory where historians take turns sharing their experiences creating a specific episode of their podcast. Today I have the pleasure of handing the blog over to Averill Earls, Producer of Dig: A History Podcast. Please read on to learn the process behind researching, writing, and recording "A Changeling or His Wife? The Brutal Murder of Bridget Cleary"- a story plucked from 1890s Ireland and served to you through Dig: At Dig: A History Podcast, we do four-episode “series,” loosely connected by a theme. We are on for four straight weeks, one episode per week, and then we take a week off. Other than the broad theme--Sex, War, Environment, Law, etcetera--the topics we pick are really generated by whatever interests us, or what we’re teaching in our courses at that moment, or some random article or footnote we stumble across that piques our interest. On January 14, 2018, we released one of my favorite episodes: “A Changeling or His Wife? The Brutal Murder of Bridget Cleary.” This was the first in our True Crime series--we had to do a true crime series eventually, because Marissa is obsessed--and it’s one creepy f#@%&!g story. It’s also one that is near and dear to my heart. I’m an Irish historian by trade, though I only occasionally do episodes on Irish history. Some may recall an episode on Roger Casement with horrible sound quality--Marissa and I recorded it in the parking lot of an Outback Steakhouse--or my episode on queer Irish-Americans and the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in NYC. When I teach Irish history, I always talk about Bridget Cleary. Bridget Cleary was brutally murdered by her husband, with the help and witness of various members of her family. She was accused by those around her of being a fairy or a witch; they threw urine on her, forced a disgusting-tasting concoction down her throat, and ultimately set her on fire. It’s grisly and awful and unthinkable. Why? Why was Bridget murdered? Why did not one stop her husband for pouring lamp oil on her prone body and setting her alight? Bridget had her own business, was a 26-year-old childfree married woman in rural Ireland. She challenged the gender and sexuality regime of her world; she rose above those around her. And she paid the ultimate price for it. I started my research with Angela Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary. I’ve read it many times before, but needed a refresher for the details of the case, so I ordered that from the library. I also collected newer literature on Bridget’s murder, and a few books and articles on fairy lore, fairy murders, and violence against women in 19th century Ireland. I also went to the Irish Newspaper Archive and pulled a bunch of stories about fairy changeling children, wife murder, and domestic violence. I pulled some statistics using that database about the commonness of the horrific “wife murder” crime that seemed to riddle Ireland in this period. Already knowing a fair bit about the case, I knew the angle I wanted to take with this episode. With other episodes I’ve written, where I have only some tangential knowledge about the subject, I have to read more and longer to get my feet under me. I probably read for about a week leading up to the day I’m planning to write an episode, 3-8 hours in total in prep, depending on my prior depth of knowledge. I always write as I read. With this episode, I worked on the violence against women parts first, discussing the lack of options for abused women in this period. Divorce was technically legal in Ireland, but it was difficult to obtain, because it required individuals to petition parliament. I discussed the widespread violence against women, and the lack of recourse for them to escape the cycles of domestic abuse. As I wrote I noted where I wanted the core elements of the case to go. I do that sometimes -- sketch out notes, and then go back to make them a narrative later. Ultimately what I write, though, is 10-12 single-spaced pages of scripted narration. This script was 12 pages, and included footnotes, which is not something I usually do, but I included a ton of primary source quotes, so wanted to attribute those. On a writing day, it usually takes me between 6-8 hours to write an episode. I can usually do it all in one sitting. That’s what comprehensive exams train you for! Sometimes I leave notes and come back to fill in narration later. If I’ve done the writing early enough, I will take a couple of days off and come back to proofread it. Some weeks that’s not possible. I do also have a full-time job, not to mention a couple of side-hustles! Then I let my team know that it’s posted to our shared drive. Sarah was reading that one with me, so she looked it over. We do this to catch any major issues, though we’ve never really encountered any. We’ve been writing lectures and public talks for some 8+ years now, after all! Then it’s recording day. While I was writing my episode, the other women of Dig were doing the same thing - putting in 15+ hours of research and writing on their own True Crime episodes. We met early on a Sunday morning, starting at 9am, and recorded all four. While Sarah and I recorded, Marissa was sitting on a futon in the room. Elizabeth came about halfway through recording, and the two of them chimed in with comments, or asked for clarification if something we said while recording didn’t 100% make sense. We’re usually a little rough when recording the first episode, with stumbles and mess ups. We did my episode first that day. Sarah and I were a little gruffer than usual; she had the start of a cold, and I had woken up like 20 minutes before we started recording (LOL). But I’d rather go first than last; by the time we get to the last episode, we’re all a little squirrelly. We’re usually in the “studio” from 9am-3pm, depending on how long it takes us to record each of the episodes. Sometimes we record nearly 2 hours of material; those episodes will be whittled down to 1.5 hours in the editing. Our standard, though, is to record 1.25-1.5 hours, and cut that down to 45-60 minutes. After I wave them all home, all that’s left is the time-consuming work of editing and promoting the episodes. Marissa and I split the editing duties. It usually takes me a little over 2 hours to edit 1.5 hours of material. Sarah and Elizabeth create the blog posts with our Show Notes and transcripts, including images and search engine optimization. Sarah schedules tweets and Facebook posts, and Elizabeth manages our Instagram and Pinterest accounts. Marissa and I post edited drafts in our shared Google Drive folder for the rest of the team to get ears on. We make comments with specific timestamps so Marissa and I can go in quickly to make final changes. Then we export it, upload it to our hosting software -- now that we are part of the Recorded History Podcast Network, that’s Megaphone, which is AWESOME -- and embed the player in the blog post. And then boom. It’s delivered to iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher. Directly to the phones and players of all of our subscribers. That’s our process. We’re spending probably 15-25 hours on any given episode. It’s a labor of love, for sure. But we also get to teach history to hundreds, maybe thousands of people all over the world, something we won’t ever come close to achieving in our work as teachers and professors. So it’s a ton of work, but we’re in it for the long haul. We’re four women historians, with a world of history to unearth. Can you Dig it? To listen, read the transcript, or get the Show Notes and Further Reading, visit: A Changeling or His Wife? The Brutal Murder of Bridget Cleary in 1895 Ireland Averill Earls, PhD, is an historian of modern Ireland and sexuality, an Assistant Professor of History at Mercyhurst University in Erie, PA, and the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast. She writes about same-sex desiring men, policing, and Dublin’s queer urban spaces. In addition to making a podcast with the women of Dig, she is the Assistant Layout Editor at Nursing Clio. She’s published a range of pieces on teaching, literature, and the history of gender and sexuality with collaborative history blogs like Notches and Nursing Clio. She received her doctoral degree in History from the University at Buffalo in 2016, a Master’s in History from the University of Vermont in 2010, and a Bachelor’s in Political Science and History from the University of Vermont in 2008. When she’s not teaching, podcasting, or moonlighting as a member of the Cabot Creamery Co-operative social media team, she enjoys board games, baking, and hotel beds. #PodcastingHistorySeries #GuestPost

Welcome to the first installment of #PodcastingHistory! For the next several weeks my blog is going to feature guest posts from some wonderful podcasters. In each post a new person will take you behind the scenes, describing the process of creating one episode of their podcast from choosing the topic to releasing it out into the world for your enjoyment. I hope that by pulling back the curtain between hosts and listeners, it will help everyone understand podcasting history in a whole new way. To kick off the series, here is the story behind an episode pair of my own: Empress Eugenie in Exile, Part I: Flight from Paris, and Part II: Life After Empire. My adventure with Empress Eugenie of France, began on a lovely Sunday in September of 2014. I was partaking in my yearly tradition of strolling through the Broadway Flea Market. Held each year in Manhattan’s Times Square, the Flea Market is a wonderful, grand event where the New York theatre community comes together to raise money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. As usual, the streets were packed with people doing everything from buying props from shows (ask me about the rifle I own from the original Broadway production of Les Misérables) to taking photos with stage stars. I stopped at one of the stalls to examine a stack of books that seemed to be calling to me. One of the gentlemen running the table told me that his husband loved history but had recently changed most of his collection over to a Kindle so he no longer needed these books. Happy to discover history books at a theatre even, I took them off his hands. When I got home, I was immediately drawn to Desmond Seward’s Eugenie: The Empress and her Empire. Going into that book, I knew very little about Eugenie other than that she was married to Napoleon III, whose childhood I knew much more about than his adulthood. I read it quickly, and two details in it sparked my interest: In 1870, when her husband’s empire was crumbling, Eugenie fled from Paris to the safety of England…by having her American dentist help her sneak out of the country! Despite the fall of the Second Empire, Eugenie still wanted her husband and son buried with the full pomp due to their former station. France, however, wanted nothing to do with Bonaparte rulers anymore. So, she did what any determined lady would do: took matters into her own hands. Eugenie had her own abbey, complete with church and imperial crypt, built in the English countryside. It was the final resting place she believed they deserved. These epic events would form the bedrock of my Eugenie episodes. Originally I had hoped to make one episode about Eugenie, but as fascinated as I was with both occurrences, they were simply too much to cover in only one episode of Footnoting History, especially since our episodes tend to run only between 15 and 20 minutes each. So, I shouted to my co-hosts that I would cover all of January 2015 by myself and developed a two-part series: Empress Eugenie in Exile, Part I: Flight from Paris Empress Eugenie in Exile, Part II: Life After Empire In addition to the typical sifting through books and articles (thanks Fondation Napoleon and Fordham University Library!) I got to indulge my love of reading old newspaper articles. These all dated from between the 1870s and the early 1900s. I love seeing what articles decided to cover, the details that vary from publication to publication, and determining what was true in them and what was wild speculation. I found it particularly amusing that years after the flight from Paris, American newspapers were still going after Eugenie’s dentist, Thomas Evans. They very much wanted to know if he was selling off land he had secretly purchased for the exiled Empress Eugenie. (Spoiler alert: Evans denied it.) It’s engaging with this type of source, where the past shows it is so much like the present, that I love. It’s also why if you scroll through many of my older episodes you will see newspaper articles on the Further Reading list. They are invaluable. Also invaluable are real life experiences, and few could top the one I had while researching my second Eugenie episode, the one focusing on her life with Napoleon III and their son in exile in England. As I mentioned, I knew Eugenie built a monument to her family in the English countryside. Although I live in New York, at the time I was preparing to visit a friend in London for a few weeks. This seemed like an ideal opportunity. I could enhance my understanding of Eugenie by hopefully actually going to her abbey, called St. Michael’s, in Farnborough. I firmly believe that it is important to visit the burial places of the historical people I study because it is the closest I will come to meeting them, so the idea of being in the crypt where Eugenie, Napoleon III, and the Prince Imperial were interred practically caused my face to turn into the emoji with the hearts for eyes. The abbey was a short train ride from London (great!) but the public tours were only conducted at certain times, and they did not coincide with my trip (disappointing!). Not to be deterred, I contacted St. Michael’s and was able to secure a private tour of the property. It was the first time I used my Footnoting History credential for anything, and that was exciting, but mostly I could not wait to see what Eugenie had created in person. When I arrived on the day of my tour, I was greeted by a lovely guide named Maria. She knew everything about the beautiful grounds, which truly were a slice of France crated abroad. The name, St. Michael’s, came from the patron saint of France, and more notably, it was built as (and remains) a Catholic church, not a Church of England. Although it was originally the home of Benedictine monks literally imported from France, today the residents are English, because the last French monk passed away in 1956. Maria showed me the soaring architecture (all inspired by French cathedrals, of course), talking about how Eugenie donated her own dresses to be made into church vestments, and taking me into the imperial mausoleum itself. It was beautiful and sad, and parts of it had been donated by Queen Victoria. Following in Eugenie’s footsteps and seeing her private entrance brought home just how devastated she must have been after losing both her husband and son. When Maria showed me tombs located just outside of the crypt and explained that they belonged to servants who wanted to be buried near those they devoted their lives too I was even more certain that I was right to do these episodes. Returning home from my trip at the end of November 2014, I was excited and daunted by the prospect of condensing all my newfound (beloved) information down into easy-to-enjoy episodes. It took a few weeks, with tons of writing too much followed by extensive pruning. Ultimately I ended up with two episodes that totaled just over a half hour and which cover the core remarkable events of Eugenie’s life after losing the crown. I hope the degree of admiration and respect I have for her resilience shows through. Researching history is as much about learning as it is about reading and writing. I look forward to finding more topics that lead me to places I never anticipated and bringing what I learn there to your ears. Christine Caccipuoti is the Assistant Producer of Footnoting History, where she regularly talks about Bonapartes, heads the Revolutionary France Series, and runs the official Twitter account. Christine received her BA and MA in history from Fordham University, and is also a member of AEA and SAG-AFTRA. Sources from Empress Eugenie in Exile, Parts I and II D. Walter Cohen. “Dr. Thomas W. Evans, A Nineteenth-Century Renaissance Man.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 139:2 (1995), pp. 135-148. Edward A. Crane (ed). Memoirs of Dr. Thomas W. Evans. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1905. Desmond Seward. Eugénie: The Empress and Her Empire. United Kingdom: Sutton Publishing, 2004. Harold Kurtz. The Empress Eugénie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. William Smith. The Empress Eugénie and Farnborough. United Kingdom: Hampshire City Council, 2001. “The Death of the Emperor Napoleon III.” The British Medical Journal, 1: 629 (Jan 18, 1873), pp. 73-74. "Dr. Evans's Home-Coming." New York Times (1857-1922), Sept 02, 1897 via ProQuest Historical Newspapers. “Dr. Thomas W. Evans Dead.” New York Times (1857-1922), Nov 16, 1897 via ProQuest Historical Newspapers. "Empress Eugenie at Eighty-Two." New York Times (1857-1922), Sep 6, 1908 via ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The Imperial Family, photograph, via Bibliothèque nationale de France. St. Michael’s Abbey, Farnborough, Hampshire, United Kingdom. Farnborough Hill School. #NapoleonIII #Bonapartes #Podcasting #PodcastingHistorySeries #19thCentury #History #FootnotingHistory #Research