Reckoning with Jason Herbert

• Episode 169: Is Pompeii the best bad movie/good history ever made?

  2014's Pompeii is all over the place. Designed to be a Roman apocalypse story with a star making turn by Game of Thrones' Kit Harrington, Pompeii fizzled at the box office. But strangely, it's a phenomenal film to talk about the Roman empire and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Historian and archaeologist Dr. Steven Tuck joins in to talk everything this film gets right and wrong about Roman history. Easily one of our best episodes ever.About our guest:Steven L. Tuck is a professor of classics, who is currently head of classics at Miami University. He teaches many classics courses at Miami University, especially those relating to the arts.He received a Ph.D. in Classical Art and Archaeology from University of Michigan in 1997, and he is the author of the textbook A History of Roman Art. In addition to his teaching, he has lectured the general public at Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder, Yale University, the University of Puget Sound, Baylor University and for the Getty Villa. He has also appeared in the media discussing classics, including in a 2019 feature for Atlas Obscura on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. and its impact on refugees and migration in the ancient world. For the Vergilian Society, he managed the Villa Vergiliana in Cumae, and organized educational programs there. He is also the author of the brand new book Escape from Pompeii: The Great Eruption of Mount Vesuvius and Its Survivors.

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• Episode 168: How Colorado Springs became the epicenter of evangelical capitalism with Will Schultz

  How did a small town south of Denver emerge as the center of evangelical capitalism after World War II? Historian Dr. William Schultz explains how evangelicals' faith intertwined with a specific interpretation of Americanism, especially during the Cold War era, and how this allowed them to transition from the margins of society to the epicenter of conservative dialogue.About our guest:William Schultz is a historian of American religion with an interest in the intersection of religion, politics, and capitalism.  Schultz is currently finishing his first book, Jesus Springs: Evangelical Capitalism and the Fate of an American City (under contract with UNC Press), which explains how the confluence of evangelical Christianity and free-market capitalism transformed the city of Colorado Springs into an epicenter of American conservatism. His next project, The Wages of Sin: Faith, Fraud, and Religious Freedom in Modern America, uses cases of financial fraud between the 1920s and 1990s to explore how Americans have struggled with questions of religious authority and authenticity. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, Schultz was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a faculty fellow at Harvard University. He received his B.A. from the University of North Carolina and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. 

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• Episode 167: Ken Burns' The American Revolution (Historians' Commentary)

  It's a special podcast here at Reckoning. Early American historians Dr. Liz Covart, Dr. Michael Hattem, and Dr. Craig Bruce Smith joined me to live stream Ken Burns' new series The American Revolution and answer questions from people around the world. It's kind of like a Director's Commentary, only if the director was actually four people with degrees in history. This was a blast.About our guest:Dr. Liz Covart is a historian of the American Revolution, and the creator and host of the award-winning podcast Ben Franklin’s World.  In 2022, she co-founded Clio Digital Media, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that uses digital media to foster better, more robust understandings of history. And in 2026, she will launch Scholar.DIY, a public benefit company that empowers scholars to transform their expertise into compelling digital stories— building trust, promoting media literacy, and strengthening democracy along the way.Dr. Michael Hattem is an American historian, with interests in early America, the American Revolution, and historical memory. He received his PhD in History at Yale University and has taught at The New School and Knox College. He is the author of The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History (Yale University Press, 2024), which was a finalist for the 2025 George Washington Prize, and Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2020). He is currently the Associate Director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.Hattem’s work has been featured or mentioned in The New York Times, TIME magazine, The Smithsonian Magazine, the Washington Post, as well as many other mainstream media publications and outlets. He has served as a historical consultant or contributor for a number of projects and organizations, curated historical exhibitions, appeared in television documentaries, and authenticated and written catalogue essays for historical document auctions.Dr. Craig Bruce Smith  is a professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norfolk, VA. He authored American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era, Securing Victory 1781-1783 (out soon), and co-authored George Washington’s Lessons in Ethical Leadership. Smith earned his PhD in American history from Brandeis University. Previously, he was an associate professor of military history at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), an assistant professor of history, and the director of the history program at William Woods University, and he has taught at additional colleges, including Tufts University.He specializes in American Revolutionary and early American and military history, specifically focusing on George Washington, honor, ethics, war, the founders, transnational ideas, and national identity. In addition, he has broader interests in colonial America, the early republic, leadership, and early American cultural, intellectual, and political history. Smith was named a Jack Miller Center Scholar in 2025 and also serves as a member of their History Advisory Council. He is also the co-host of National Defense University's JAWbone podcast. 

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• Episode 166: Apollo 13 with Jeffrey Kluger

  Houston, we have a podcast. Today, Apollo 13 author Jeffrey Kluger drops in to talk about the Apollo missions, what really made it on the film, and his new book, Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story.About our guest:Jeffrey Kluger, editor at large, oversees TIME's science and technology reporting. He has written or co-written more than 40 cover stories for the magazine and regularly contributes articles and commentary on science, behavior and health. Kluger is the co-author, with astronaut Jim Lovell, of Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, which was the basis of the Apollo 13 movie released in 1995. He is the sole author of seven other books, including The Sibling Effect, published in 2011, and two novels for young adults. Other books include Splendid Solution, published in 2006, which tells the story of Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine; and the 2008 Hyperion release Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and Why Complex Things Can Be Made Simple). Before joining TIME, Kluger was a staff writer for Discover magazine, where he wrote the "Light Elements" humor column, and he was also an editor for the New York TimesBusiness World Magazine, Family Circle and Science Digest.Kluger, who is also an attorney, has taught science journalism at New York University.

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• Episode 165: How the United States failed Puerto Rico with Ed Morales

  Puerto Rico is the oldest colony in the world, something that must change, says Ed Morales. Today Ed drops in to talk about the history of Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican diaspora, and how colonialism has hurt the island over the last 500 years.About our guest:Ed Morales is an author and journalist who has written for The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and the Guardian. He was staff writer at The Village Voice and columnist at Newsday. He is the author of Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico (Bold Type Books), Latinx: The New Force in Politics and Culture (Verso Books 2018), The Latin Beat (Da Capo Press 2003) and Living in Spanglish (St. Martins 2002). In 2019 Latinx was shortlisted for the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding by the British Academy in London. In 2009, while a Columbia University Revson Fellow, Morales wrote and directed Whose Barrio? (2009) an award-winning documentary about the gentrification of East Harlem. The film was inspired by “Spanish Harlem on His Mind,” an essay published in The Best of the City Section of the New York Times (NYU Press 2005). Morales is also a 2022-23 Mellon Bridging the Divides Fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York.

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