Amy Renee Haines

A podcast that attempts to unravel baffling, sometimes very public, historical debates, and break them down so you don’t have to.

Produced and hosted by Amy Renee Haines, a PhD student at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

This series came to life with episode 1 as a project for Dr. Honor Sachs’s Early America seminar in the Spring of 2022. Amy, a dedicated Twitter user, confronted with historical imbroglios outside her area of expertise, set out to discover the deeper “why” certain historians were coming to blows on social media. Which led here, to this special series, exploring the ins-and-outs of the fights, the ratios, the take-downs, and the smack-downs, to get to the bottom of What the Historical Heck Is Going On?

For more information:

• YouTube The Massachusetts Historical Society Debate October 23, 2021
• The Historians Are Fighting by William Hogeland for Slate
• Gordon Wood and Woody Holton clash over past and present by Hillel Italie for ABC News
• Life, Liberty for all? T.H. Breen for Times Literary Supplement
• The New York Times Magazine 1619 Project
• The Ezra Klein Show: The Story of America’s Founding You Weren’t Taught in School
• Expanding Our Understanding of the Revolution by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
• Boston Review: The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy
• On 1619 and Woody Holton’s Account of Slavery and the Independence Movement: Six Historians Respond
• The Atlantic: The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts
• We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued the 1619 Project
• Link to Gordon Wood’s Book Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution
• Link to Woody Holton’s Book Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution
• Link to Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story