This week Dr. James Chappel drops in to talk about how Americans have conceptualized the process of aging and how ideas about the debts our society owes the elderly have changed over the last century. We also talk about social security, medicare, retirement, and what to expect from the next presidential administration.

About our guest:
James Chappel is the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University. He works on the intellectual history of modern Europe and the United States, focusing on themes of religion, gender, and the family. He has published two books and published widely in both scholarly and non-scholarly sites (The New York Times, The Nation, and more). At Duke, he is committed above all to History undergraduates, especially majors, and to the pursuit of prison engagement opportunities. He is currently co-chair of the Prison Engagement Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and founded the Duke-in-Prison lecture series.

His most recent book is called Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age (Basic Books, 2024). It is a history of aging, health, and disability in the USA from 1920 to the present. It appeared in November 2024 and has been widely reviewed in outlets like The New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times.

His first book, Catholic Modern (Harvard, 2018), asks about the transformation of the Catholic Church in 20th century Europe. How did Catholics, long affiliated with monarchism and anti-Semitism, come to accept liberal democracy and capitalism? How, in a word, did Europe's Catholics become modern? The book argues that the major transformation took place in the 1930s and 40s. In those crucial years of violence and war, Catholics decided to stop trying to conquer society as a whole, and start trying to salvage "the family" as the source of moral authority and political order. The book thus explains how and why Catholics became buttresses of the postwar democratic order, and also explains the new centrality of gender and family ethics to Catholic life, thought, and policymaking.

This week Jack Reid drops in to talk about how hitchhiking came of age in the United States, interactions between people on the road, and some shocking celebrities who have asked for a ride. Check out his new book, Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation.

What are you wearing this fall? Or rather, why are you wearing what you're wearing this fall? Those are the questiond Dr. Rachel Gross and I are pondering in this episode of Reckoning. Dr. Gross joins in to talk about her new book: Shopping All The Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America. We talk about the rise of outfitters as outdoors marketers, and just exactly why I can't decide between Patagonia, L.L. Bean, and Columbia.

About our guest:
Dr. Rachel Gross is an environmental and cultural historian of the modern U.S. and an assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver. In 2019 she was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and a Postdoctoral Teaching, Research, and Mentoring Fellow at the Davidson Honors College of the University of Montana.

For her doctoral research, she wrote about the history of outdoor clothing and gear in the U.S. from the Civil War to the present. The project was awarded the 2018 Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History from the Business History Conference. She works with university and community partners to bring history into the public realm. In 2019, She curated an exhibit at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula on “Outdoor Gear Stories From the Treasure State.” From January – July 2017 she served as the managing editor of Wisconsin 101, a collaborative history project that uses material culture to tell stories about Wisconsin’s past. Read a recent post she edited. In 2016-2017, she also served on the editorial board of Edge Effects, the digital magazine of environmental humanities of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.