Andrew Knoll, Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard, discusses A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters
UpFront's Rethinking History Collection
A dozen conversations to change the way you think about the past.
Pre-history:
- Geologist-Paleontologist Andrew Knoll on the first 4 billion years of Earth’s history.
- Archaeologist David Wengrow on the book he co-authored with the late David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
- Anthropologist Brian Fagan on Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival From Our Ancestors
- Science writer Annalee Newitz on her book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age
- Mark Bittman on Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal
Native peoples and colonialism:
- Damon Akins on We Are the Land: A History of Native California
- David Silverman author of This Land is Their Land, on the real history of Thanksgiving
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her book Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion
Black life and liberation:
- Frederika Newton with a personal history of the early years of the Black Panther Party
- Berry Reid Soskin on the book about her remarkable century on this planet, Sign My Name to Freedom: A memoir of a pioneering life
- Malik Al Nasir on Gil Scott-Heron
- David F. Walker on The Black Panther Party
- David F. Walker on Frederic Douglass
Photo by Benigno Hoyuela on Unsplash
David Walker discusses his first foray into graphic nonfiction, The Life of Frederick Douglass: A Graphic Narrative of a Slave’s Journey from Bondage to Freedom
David Walker’s latest book is The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History.
Malik Al Nasir is a journalist, filmmaker, academic and performance poet, and now author of Letters to Gil
Betty Reid Soskin is the oldest living national park service ranger–she just turned 100. Her memoir is Sign My Name to Freedom: A Memoir of a Pioneering Life. (This conversation is from when it came out, in 2018)
Fredrika Newton, former member of the Black Panther Party, and the widow of its co-founder, Huey P. Newton.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, radical historian, author of many books. The latest is Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion
David Silverman is a professor of history at George Washington University. His most recent book is This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.
Damon B. Akins, professor of history at Guilford College, co-author of We Are the Land: A History of Native California
Mark Bittman, long-time food journalist who spent over 30 years at the New York Times. Now the author of the new book Animal Vegetable Junk: A History of Food From Sustainable to Uuicidal.