Category Archives: Places

S10E7 Podcast: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith

Stan’s guest this week is author and historian Keri Leigh Merritt, discussing her new book, An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America (St. Martin’s Press, 2026). Smith, born in 1897, was a white Southern woman living in the Jim Crow South who defied all stereotypes: she passionately championed racial equality and integration while living openly with her partner, Paula, at their home on Old Screamer Mountain in Clayton, Georgia. Best known as the author of Strange Fruit (1944) and Killers of the Dream (1949), she continued to fight for both civil and human rights—all while receiving death threats—until her death in 1966.

S10E6 Podcast: A New History of Lewis & Clark

Leave a reply

Stan’s guest this week is historian Craig Fehrman, author of This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark (Avid Reader Press, 2026), an exciting new history of the Corps of Discovery. Thirty years after Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, Fehrman offers a fresh and more accurate account of one of the most important episodes in American history, humanizing forgotten figures and shattering long-held myths.

S9E18 Podcast: In the Shadow of the Great House: The Plantation in America

Leave a reply

Stan’s guest this week is UGA professor Daniel Rood, talking about his new book, In the Shadow of the Great House: A History of the Plantation in America (W.W. Norton, 2026), a new history of American slavery and American capitalism. The plantation traces its roots to the Portuguese conquest of an island in the Atlantic in the 1500s and reached its most powerful manifestation in the United States. But Rood argues in this provocative new history that plantations did not end with the Civil War but metastasized across space and time and can still be found today, touching nearly every aspect of our lives.

S9E3 Podcast: Tracking Hernando De Soto Through Georgia

Leave a reply

Did Hernando De Soto travel near what is now DeSoto Falls in North Georgia? Or Desoto, Georgia, in Sumter County? Why don’t we know where he went and why is the evidence so hard to find? Stan’s guest this week is Dennis Blanton, professor of anthropology at James Madison University, author of Conquistador’s Wake: Tracking the Legacy of Hernando De Soto in the Indigenous Southeast (UGA Press, 2020). Dr. Blanton discusses the myths and realities of De Soto’s 16th-century expedition, based on his years of painstaking archaeological research—and how his current finds in southwest Georgia may re-define what we know about the infamous Conquistador’s entrada.

S8E23 Podcast: Confronting Jim Crow: Race, Memory, and UGA in the Twentieth Century

Leave a reply

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.