Stan opens Season 9 of Off the Deaton Path talking about his summer reading (so far)—books by Nina Stibbe, Jane Gardam, Leah Hager Cohen, Helene Hanff, James Hilton, Ferrol Sams—short thoughts on the Braves lousy season (so far), a sneak peek at upcoming podcasts, and AJC political writer Jim Galloway on the 1956 Georgia state flag in the summer GHQ.
Stan’s guest this week is NYU professor Robert Cohen, who discusses his new book, Confronting Jim Crow: Race, Memory, and the University of Georgia in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). Cohen focuses his lens on UGA’s controversial and violent desegregation in 1961 and the ways that event has been remembered and commemorated in all the years since.
Stan’s guest this week is Harvard historian Joyce Chaplin, who discusses her new book, The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2025). Was Ben Franklin the first climate scientist? The Franklin stove became one of the Revolutionary era’s most iconic consumer products, spreading from Pennsylvania to Italy, and beyond. It was also a hypothesis. Armed with science, Franklin proposed to invent his way out of a climate crisis: a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age, when unusually bitter winters brought life to a standstill. He believed that his stove could provide snug indoor comfort despite another, related crisis: a shortage of wood caused by widespread deforestation. Joyce Chaplin demonstrates that it’s not so easy to engineer our way out of a climate crisis, an ongoing challenge as old as the United States itself.
Stan’s guest this week is Pulitzer-Prize winner Rick Atkinson discussing his new book, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, Volume 2 of his Revolution Trilogy, published on April 29 by Crown. Rick discusses the crucial events and people—including the Siege of Savannah, Lafayette, Hamilton and Benedict Arnold—covered in his book, how he researches and writes, and his major role in Ken Burns’s upcoming Revolution documentary.
Stan’s guest this week is historian Judith Giesberg, discussing her riveting new book, Last Seen: The Enduring Search By Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families, published in February by Simon and Schuster. Slavery broke many families apart, and Giesberg’s book details the fascinating and often heartbreaking search for lost children, parents, and other family members in the half century after the Civil War.
