Reckoning with Jason Herbert

In this episode of Reckoning, historian Andrew Wehrman, author of Contagion of Liberty, explores how smallpox and inoculation shaped the American founding—and ignited some of the earliest debates over liberty, risk, and public health.
Long before COVID-19, Americans wrestled with questions of bodily autonomy, religious belief, communal obligation, and government authority, all in the shadow of a deadly disease and without modern medical knowledge. From local resistance to inoculation to George Washington’s controversial decision to mandate it in the Continental Army, this conversation places early American public health in its full moral and political context.
By looking closely at how Americans responded to smallpox, this episode shows why vaccine controversy is not a modern anomaly—but a recurring feature of American life—and what our past can (and cannot) teach us about navigating public health crises today.

In this episode of Reckoning, we speak with author and journalist Jack El-Hai about the new film Nuremberg and the deeper questions it raises about justice, memory, and moral responsibility.
Drawing on his book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, El-Hai examines the relationship between Hermann Göring and Dr. Douglas Kelley during the Nuremberg Trials, and what it reveals about psychology, power, and the human impulse to explain evil. The conversation considers how early efforts to diagnose Nazism continue to shape the way we understand perpetrators—and the limits of that understanding.
This episode asks what it means to reckon with history honestly, without turning the past into either monsters or myths.

About our guest:
Jack El-Hai is an author and journalist whose work explores psychology, history, and the moral complexities of the twentieth century. He is the author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, which examines the psychological interrogation of Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg Trials and the uneasy questions those encounters raised about evil, responsibility, and human nature.
El-Hai’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and other publications, and he is known for bringing rigorous historical research together with narrative clarity and ethical depth.

In this episode, I’m joined by Cherokee scholar and author Julie Reed to talk about her powerful book Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History.
We explore how Cherokee women have shaped—and continue to sustain—relationships to land, community, and language in the face of colonial violence and dispossession. Reed shows how land is not simply territory, language is not merely words, and women are not peripheral to history, but are instead central to cultural survival and meaning.
Our conversation moves between history, storytelling, gender, and Indigenous knowledge systems, asking what it really means to belong to a place—and what is lost when those relationships are broken. This is a conversation about memory, resistance, responsibility, and the enduring power of women to carry culture forward.
About our guest:
Julie L. Reed is an associate professor in history at the University of Tulsa. She is a historian of Native American history, with an emphasis on Southeastern Indians and Cherokee history, and American education. She is also a member of the Cherokee Nation.

There is probably no historian working today more influential in shaping how we think about the way in which humans and animals engage with each other and the environment than Dan Flores. Today, Dan joins in to talk about his epic work, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History, on the eve of its 10th anniversary release, along with discussions on wolf reintroduction, bison on the plains, the American Serengeti, and his relationship with Steven Rinella and the crew over at Meateater. 
About our guest:
New York Times best-selling author Dan Flores is one of America’s most celebrated historians, renowned for his deep explorations of the country’s landscapes and the remarkable figures who shaped them. While he has 11 acclaimed books to his name, Flores is first and foremost a teacher. He served as Professor Emeritus of Western History at the University of Montana. This year, Flores brings a lifetime of expertise and storytelling to the MeatEater Podcast Network with his new podcast, The American West with Dan Flores.

This week Jason Socrates Bardi joins in to talk about about the rivalry between three mathematicians that defined the fifty years surrounding World War I.
About our guest:
Jason Socrates Bardi is an award-winning journalist in DC who has written two books about the history of math: The Calculus Wars and The Fifth Postulate. He has published hundreds of articles about modern science and medicine in outlets including the San Francisco Chronicle, Good Morning America, US News & World Report, and The Lancet. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.