This Blogcast episode features Myra Billund-Phibbs’s article “Doing Trans History Despite It All,” first published in Process: A Blog for American History on July 1, 2025. In this episode, Billund-Phibbs (a PhD student at the University of Minnesota) recounts her experience interviewing trans people who lived in the 1970s Midwest. Specifically, she delves into complex questions around doing collaborative oral history in the current historical moment.

Read the blog post here: https://www.oah.org/process/doing-trans-history-despite-it-all-billund-phibbs/

Music: King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band’s Mabel’s Dream, 1923

X: @thejamhist | Facebook: The Journal of American History

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In this episode, Lara Vapnek (Professor of History at St. John’s University, in Queens), Tracey Deutsch (Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota), and Natasha Zaretsky (Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham) discuss the interesting intersections of their three articles, all recently published by the Journal of American History, which talk to each other on the histories women’s labor, energy, and food.

During this lively and generative conversation, Vapnek, Deutsch, and Zaretsky respond to questions like: How has the recent scholarly turn to care work shaped labor history and vice versa? What is the relationship between histories of care work and histories of capitalism? How does energy fit into new scholarship on labor and women’s history? How can self care manifest in simultaneously liberative/resistant and oppressive ways throughout history?

Music: King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band’s Mabel’s Dream, 1923

X: @thejamhist | Facebook: The Journal of American History

#JAHCast

This special panel debrief edition of the Journal of American History Podcast features a conversation on “New Histories of Enslavement,” held at the 2025 OAH Conference on American History in Chicago. In this episode, panel chair Andrea Mosterman (University of New Orleans) and panelists Christy Clark-Pujara (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Gloria Whiting (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Cory Young (University of Iowa), and Max Speare (Saddleback College) explore new directions in the field of U.S. slavery history. Host Kasha Appleton guides the discussion through key questions: How did the myth of a free abolitionist North became embedded in national memory? What methodologies best serve the sources used tell freedom seekers’ stories? The conversation highlights different approaches to studying enslavement in the United States while showcasing each panelist's unique contributions to this evolving field.

Music: King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band’s Mabel’s Dream, 1923

X: @thejamhist | Facebook: The Journal of American History

#JAHCast