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.
Category Archives: Places
S8E23 Podcast: Confronting Jim Crow: Race, Memory, and UGA in the Twentieth Century
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.
S8E19 Podcast: Last Seen: The Enduring Search By Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families
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.
S8E5 Podcast: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore
Stan’s guest this week is historian Evan Friss, author of the bestselling new release, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, which has been getting rave reviews in national publications. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including the Strand in New York, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company, the Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus. “A thoroughly engaging, delightful excursion into the wondrous world of books.”
S8E2: Pulitzer Prize Winner Jacqueline Jones
Stan talks to historian Jacqueline Jones about her book, No Right to An Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History.