Civics & Coffee: A History Podcast · Alycia Asai

Predator or Prey: The Real Jaws with Rachel Lee Perez

·37 min·2 clips

Jaws turned sharks into human-eating machines and created the summer blockbuster.

Alicia opens the show by welcoming Rachel Lee Perez, a longtime friend of the podcast, for the first interview of 2026. Perez is an independent historian, author, and podcaster. The conversation centers on her book, The Real Jaws, which revisits the 1916 shark attacks along the New Jersey shore. The episode treats the attacks as both a historical event and a human tragedy. Alicia keeps bringing the discussion back to the people who lived through it, and Perez keeps meeting that point head on. She argues that history is made of human lives, not just dates and places, and that this is a big part of what makes it worth telling. The episode pushes back on the way shark history has often been flattened into myth. Perez explains that a lot of the most persistent ideas about sharks came from the media. She also says misinformation was already circulating among world-renowned shark experts in April of 1916, before the attacks took place. That detail widens the story beyond the headlines. It also shows how uncertainty can harden into public belief. Alicia and Perez then turn to the way stories become legends. The episode lingers on the gap between what happened and what people later believed happened. That gap is one of the central concerns of the conversation. The human cost never disappears from view. Perez and Alicia talk about victims who were on vacation. They also note people who were doing heroic things, including trying to save a little boy from the creek. Those details keep the discussion grounded in ordinary lives rather than disaster spectacle. Perez's answers carry the emotional weight without losing clarity. Alicia gives her room to explain the historical context in full. The tone stays warm, measured, and curious. It leaves space for the listener to follow the argument as it develops. By the end, the episode has connected shark fear to media framing and expert uncertainty. It also suggests that the story's endurance says as much about how stories are told as it does about sharks. The final impression is less about a monster than about how a nation retells fear. It is a careful conversation about why some events become legend while the people at their center are nearly forgotten.

As heard by us

A human history of shark fear, press distortion, and the summer that made a legend.

Rachel Lee Perez uses the 1916 shark attacks along the New Jersey shore to show how a real event became a larger public story. Alicia keeps the focus on the people involved, which gives the episode its strongest footing and keeps it from slipping into novelty.

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Why you'd press play

You want the story behind the 1916 Jersey Shore shark attacks and The Real Jaws.

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