Stan’s guest this week is historian Bennett Parten, talking about his new book, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation, published by Simon & Schuster on January 21, 2025. Sherman’s March has remained controversial to this day, and this book is a major new interpretation of the March and its legacy in American history. Parten focuses on how the March played a significant role in ending the Civil War, due in no small part to the efforts of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who became a part of it as the US Army marched across Georgia towards Savannah.
Category Archives: Podcast
S8E11 Podcast: Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn
This week Stan talks to Christopher Cox, Senior Scholar in Residence at the University of California, Irvine, about his new book, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, published in 2024 by Simon & Schuster. Cox’s focus is on Wilson’s role in the movements for women’s suffrage and racial equality, and his open hostility to both. This is a riveting, beautifully written reassessment of the heroes who fought so hard for decades to pass the Susan B. Anthony Amendment more than a century ago—and Wilson’s legacy in our own day.
S8E10 Podcast: The 2024 Reading Year in Review
This week Stan reviews his reading in 2024: how many books and pages, fiction and non-fiction, and offers tips on age-old reading problems, including: how to get more reading into your life, should you write in your books, reading in a distracted age, suffering from book guilt and how to conquer it, and more. Plus you’ll get an earful about the upcoming College Football Playoffs (Go Dawgs) and what the heck is Baseball’s Golden At-Bat?
S8E9 Podcast: The Fascinating But Forgotten Founder
Stan’s guest is historian Jane Calvert, author of Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson, published in October by Oxford University Press. Dickinson was at the forefront of the Revolutionary movement but refused to sign the Declaration of Independence and has been largely forgotten. Calvert argues in her new book that without John Dickinson there wouldn’t be a United States of America. How and why did this happen, and who was this fascinating but forgotten founder?
S8E8 Podcast: John Lewis: A Life
Stan’s guest this week is historian and journalist David Greenberg of Rutgers University, talking about his new tour-de-force biography of Civil Rights icon and longtime Georgia Congressman, John Lewis: A Life, published by Simon & Schuster. Greenberg interviewed Lewis and 275 others, including Presidents Clinton and Obama, about Lewis’s rise from Alabama poverty to Bloody Sunday to public servant, the man deemed the Moral Conscience of the Congress.