History from inside the dissertation grind.
Making of a Historian turns the process of becoming a historian into a running record of research, dissertation pressure, parenting, and academic uncertainty. Its interviews move from British clubs and Soviet sexuality to anime fandom, feminist household labor, empathy, Havana, dams, and working parents.
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Making of a Historian is a history podcast built around the unfinished work of becoming a historian. Its running frame is plain: a graduate student is trying to write a dissertation, survive the surrounding chaos, raise a child, and maybe get a job. That personal thread gives the show an unusually candid academic texture. It is not a polished lecture series. It sounds like research being tested in conversation. The episodes move through subjects that look separate at first and then start to rhyme: clubs, households, fans, parents, empires, development projects, psychology, sexuality, and political institutions. A discussion of British gentlemen's clubs becomes a story about access, money, printed literature, and the changing machinery of elections. A conversation about anime turns stickers, chocolates, bedrooms, school stationery, and Astro Boy into evidence for how fandom and consumption reshaped daily life. The episode on feminist household labor challenges the narrow image of feminism as only professional ambition, showing how housework, childcare, fatherhood, and state support became central political questions. Soviet sex and housing appear through the material conditions of communal apartments, migration, domestic service, and the claims of ordinary intimacy. Empathy is treated not as a timeless virtue but as a word with histories in art psychology, phenomenology, psychiatry, sociology, therapy, and civil rights thought. The show also reaches into Atlantic history through the Seven Years War and the British occupation of Havana. It takes late 20th-century policy seriously as history, especially where environmentalism, development, and the World Bank intersect. The host's style is informal, self-aware, and often funny, but the questions stay anchored in scholarly work. Guests are allowed to explain their terms. The pace can wander, yet the wandering is part of the method: a casual aside often becomes the way into a larger historical problem. Making of a Historian is best for listeners who enjoy the intellectual workshop as much as the finished argument. It offers history as a discipline in motion, full of partial answers, sharp examples, and the human logistics behind academic life.
Made for: For listeners who like academic history explained through lively, conversational interviews rather than finished textbook summaries. It especially suits graduate students, historically curious readers, and anyone interested in how scholars turn everyday details into arguments.
What sets it apart: The show keeps the historian's working life in the frame, so dissertation stress, parenting, job anxiety, and intellectual curiosity sit beside the research itself. That makes the scholarship feel provisional, human, and unusually transparent.
A podcast exploring one graduate student's quest to study for his comprehensive exams in history.
A chocolate-sticker craze becomes your doorway into fandom, capitalism, and how historians build an argument.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
British clubs emerge as political machinery, linking social access with fundraising, literature, and election logistics.
Clubs come through as active pieces of British political life, not just comfortable rooms for well-connected men. The discussion shows how their selective openness gave newer political participants a way to form useful acquaintances, while the franchise changes of 1867 and 1885…
Astro Boy's stickers show how anime fandom could reshape children's rooms, school supplies, and spending habits.
Astro Boy becomes a clear case study in how anime and manga fandom moved into children's everyday spaces in Japan. Dr. Andrea Horbinski connects anime, manga, consumer habits, and the stickers sold with Meiji chocolates, including the striking detail that children sometimes…
Kirsten Swinth connects household labor and fatherhood to the history of second-wave feminism.
Making of a Historian puts housework, baby care, and child care at the center of a familiar story about second-wave feminism. Kirsten Swinth, Professor of History and American Studies at Fordham University in New York, explains how feminist thinkers questioned the idea that…
A grounded conversation about Soviet housing, sex, privacy, and the everyday limits of classless ideals.
The Soviet Union's sexual revolution comes into focus through a blunt, practical question: where could young people have sex when private space was scarce?
A thoughtful history of empathy, from German philosophy to therapy, civil rights, and the limits of knowing another mind.
Empathy comes through as an idea still in motion, not a settled virtue. Dr. Susan Lanzoni follows it across German philosophy, art psychology, psychiatry, sociology, Carl Rogers's postwar therapy, and Kenneth B. Clark's challenge to white liberals in the civil rights era.
History from the field, not the pedestal.
Historians' shop talk, from the Báb to Boston's artisans.
Phoebe Judge narrates true crime history and interviews the authors who uncovered it.
Dramatized deep dives into American history, from the Galveston hurricane to Harper Lee's Mockingbird.
Dana Schwartz narrates the violent lives of monarchs, warlords, and queens.
Making of a Historian speaks with Seth Bevos about the history of British clubs, from St.
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Kirsten Swinth argues that second-wave feminism fought over housework, child care, welfare, and breadwinning from 1963 to 1978, not just office jobs.
["Brendan McElmule, a University of Washington PhD candidate researching the Soviet Union and comparative gender and sexuality, talks from Russia after getting stuck there during the pandemic.", "He traces the Soviet Union from the Russian Empire, the October 1917 Bolshevik takeover, and the 1922 founding after civil war, then explains how republics like Poland, Finland, Kazakhstan, and Armenia fit inside it.", "The episode defines the thaw as the post-1953 shift after Stalin's death, Beria's execution, Khrushchev's rise, and the 1956 Secret Speech, with Olga Smarova and Vladimir Pomerantsev opening up culture and literary criticism.", "From stairwells and basements to dvor courtyards, dachas, Komsomol trips, and factory dances, McElmule shows that sex in the thaw was shaped by space, housing, and social life."]
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A graduate student interviews Professor Elena Schneider about her book on the British occupation of Havana during the Seven Years War.
A graduate student interviews a historian about her dissertation on the history of working parents and 20th century feminism.
A graduate student interviews a fellow historian about studying late 20th century U.S.
A graduate student interviews a colleague about his path to studying history and his music career.