Reckoning with Jason Herbert

In this episode, I sit down with cultural geographer Rashad Shabazz to dissect the 1984 classic starring Prince — and ask the uncomfortable questions.
Is The Kid a tortured genius… or a young man replaying generational trauma?
Is the final performance redemption — or dominance?
And what does Minneapolis represent in a film about Black masculinity, ambition, and control?
We unpack race, space, violence, desire, artistic genius, and the myth of upward mobility — all through the lens of one of the most iconic soundtracks of the 1980s.
This is Purple Rain as you’ve never heard it discussed before.
🎧 Press play.

In Episode 183 of Reckoning with Jason Herbert, historian Heather Cox Richardson joins the show for a lively and surprisingly sharp conversation about the film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter—and what it reveals about American mythmaking.
What happens when we place a fantastical, axe-wielding Abraham Lincoln alongside the real political crises of the 1860s—and our own? We explore the Civil War, Reconstruction, the endurance of the “Lost Cause,” and the power of storytelling in shaping national memory. Along the way, we ask whether some myths refuse to die… and whether that might be the point.
Smart, funny, and unexpectedly timely, this episode blends pop culture with serious history—reminding us that the stories we tell about the past often say more about the present than we realize.

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.