Mid-Spring Update
Season 3 winds down
I went into season 3 of the Everything is a Primary Source Podcast more-or-less the same as I have for the previous two outings—with the goal of making 30 some-odd recordings of me and a guest extracting history from popular culture. I envisioned six months of weekly full-length episodes, peppered with short clips made from my live exhibits, nice and neat, finding their place in the never-ending sea podcasts.
Now, in the middle of month eight, releasing episodes made up entirely from the live interviews and adding them to an interactive teaching resource, I can say without reservation that some different paths have been taken this season.
Recap of episodes 25 through 32
The last Substack entry related to a podcast episode was back in March and focused on trading cards. Here’s a quick recap of what I haven’t written about:
The Beech-Nut plant stood proud along the Erie Canal in Canajoharie, NY for over a century, and two podcasting teachers from there were glad to speak about the company’s dubious place in advertising history when the three of us met in Nashville last Fall. I recently learned, by driving past it, that the plant has been torn down.
George M Cohan wrote “Over There” as an exuberant rallying cry for volunteers and support for them after the US entered The Great War in 1917. It stands as not only an actual record of music and technology of the era, but as a testament to how Americans saw themselves and their place in the world.
Titanic will always be italicized when written about because our culture really only uses the word to refer to the ship or the 1997 movie. Both are primary sources of their respective eras mostly for what they mean to their respective societies.
(I know, I used a lot of blue for cover art in the Spring). The Civil War has been, rightfully, a topic of discussion since it began. How it is presented and talked about and by whom speaks volumes about their time and place. This episode is comprised of two interviews with two very different people about two totally different kinds of sources, but share in the general topic of how the Civil War has been remembered, commemorated and taught.
I met my guest for the most recent full-length breakdown episode while attending the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference with some of my students last Fall. When we spoke then and I asked what he’d be interested in talking about for the podcast, he didn’t hesitate to say EVE Online. I learned a lot from doing this episode, especially that I may have had more fun playing in space than in the World of Warcraft 20 years ago.
We stuck around the early 2000s for the next episode, analyzing Super Size Me as a product of the era. Documentaries are quite irregular as primary sources because they themselves spend so much of their production analyzing primary sources. But there is something to be said about an era when documentaries were promoted and treated on par with feature films.
Ghostbusters will be celebrating its 40th anniversary this summer, which is probably why they released the original series’ fourth installment earlier this year. My guest for this episode, Michael, a teacher who grew up in NYC, reiterates what others have stated—Ghostbusters is the ultimate New York movie. Not only does it celebrate the city and its people, but because it was made there in the present-day (1980s), it has no choice but to document the culture.
We will be rounding out this season with a few more episodes, including one about Forrest Gump, the book and the movie, as well as an interview with Rowland Scherman, who took countless photos in the 1960s and 70s, all of which one could easily envision Forrest Gump being in.
For as much fun I have talking with people about their favorite pieces of pop culture, I realized recently that these recordings, on their own, have very finite value. As a teacher, I have become familiar with a multitude of teaching resources that are marketed to me and my classroom. I use bits and pieces of several, but very few do I use extensively. The ones I go to the most are archives and databases, because they allow teachers and students to make use of their contents as needed, not as the maker of the site directs.
After producing over 125 episodes of the Everything is a Primary Source Podcast, I easily have an archive of my own. These interviews and discussions amount to oral histories, and therefore very reliable when used by a teacher or student of the past. Listening to the podcast from episode one on will ping-pong the listener all around the timeline and map, but when organized by time period and subject, the audio can be used to enrich understanding of time and place.
All of the episodes listed in the fist section of this post, the vast majority of the already published ones, and each of the recordings I’ve made with ordinary people responding and reacting to pop culture media over the last three months will become entries into The Everything is a Primary Source Project. These pages are designed to be open-source and collaborative, inviting users to not only access the existing audio and visual material to learn, but to contribute their own conversations and media so as to augment the experience for others.
As I’ve reiterated as host of the podcast over and over again, popular culture has continuously connected disparate peoples, and there’s no reason it should stop anytime soon. I have a vision of this archive achieving such a status in education that it will play some role in this much needed social unity.
If you are a humanities teacher of any level, or know one, please don’t hesitate to visit and share Everything is a Primary Source. If you wish to help our up and coming generation connect with the world around them, both its past and present, consider making a financial donation today.