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I have a new title: head of studio. At RRCHNM we’ve just spun off a new unit, which we’re calling R2 Studios. Its purpose is to create deeply researched historical audio stories, which you might call “history podcasts.”

As the person at the Center with the most podcasting experience, I’ve been tapped to lead this effort. I’m very excited for all of the opportunities this new studio will bring to folks at the Center, particularly graduate students.

So what is my actual job? Most of it is doing what I already do: produce and create podcasts. Consolation Prize is still going (new episodes out at the end of October), and I’m also helping to produce a new show, The Green Tunnel, about the history of the Appalachian Trail.

Thankfully, I’ll be leaving behind some of the tasks I currently do: the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given RRCHNM a large grant, a portion of which is going to hire someone to work with me on podcast production and someone else to do marketing and community engagement. Hopefully that means that I’ll be able to hand off some of the technical work and almost all of the marketing (which I’m very bad at). That will free up my time to focus on making the very best stories we can make.

I also get to help bring new shows into the studio. We’re open to pitches for shows from both folks internal to the center and outside the center, and I’m hoping we’ll be able to greenlight some great new shows in the coming months.

All shows that we greenlight will get lots of hands-on training, much of which will either be taught by me or facilitated by me.

I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say about the studio in the upcoming weeks and months. You can check out our website, and soon we’ll have more ways that you can support our efforts. In the meantime, the best way to support R2 is to go and listen to our shows!

Eric Nuzum, whose podcasting work I greatly admire, wrote recently that he thinks that episode narrative podcasting might be on its way out. He means narrative podcasts that have a clear beginning and end, like a miniseries, rather than a series like Consolation Prize, which could theoretically go on indefinitely. He made some very compelling arguments for why these types of shows have a hard time getting off the ground, and why only a few of them succeed. We can’t all be Serial, after all.

Eric listed a series of statements about why these kinds of shows succeed and why they fail. This read was tough for me because I’m in the very, very early planning stages of a show just like the ones he described. So I guess now’s the time for me to justify to myself why I want to make my show, and how I’m going to make it work.

For starters, it’s important that you know that I’m an academic. (If you read this blog on the regular, you already know that.) I approach podcasting from the perspective of an academic. This means that I never expect anything I do to “make money,” for example. It also means that podcasting is only a part of my job; I also teach, research, write, and administer grant-funded projects.

To be more specific, I’m a historian—a historian who studies the First Barbary War. And that’s going to be the focus of the show I want to create. I’m going to take a risk here and spec it out so you know where I’m going with it, but I really am in the very, very early stages (like, still in the focus sentence stage), so it’s subject to change a lot.

The show

If you know one thing about the First Barbary War, it’s either (1) the burning of the USS Philadelphia in February 1804, or (2) William Eaton’s march across the desert in the spring of 1805 that has been immortalized in the Marine Hymn (yes, that “shores of Tripoli”). It’s this march that is the topic of the show I’m beginning to develop. The current focus sentence is this:

William Eaton documented every part of his scheme to reseat Hamet Karamanli on the throne of his usurping younger brother Yusuf Karamanli because he understood the historicity of what he was doing, but his journals reveal a richer and more complex history than even he knew.

In other words, the jumping-off point for this series is the journals of William Eaton, which are basically our only source for much of his historic journey. By layering on the history of the people and places Eaton encounters, we can accomplish two main goals:

1. We can de-Americanize this story. This story is often told with a hefty dose of American exceptionalism (see previous note about the Marine Hymn). But Americans were actually a very small part of this story, and the other folks have received almost no focus in the past.
2. We can explain how and why this whole journey could even happen. The response I have every time I think about this story is “How in the WORLD did he pull this off?” Not surprisingly, it’s not all about the triumph of the human spirit (though it is a little bit about that). It’s about politics, economics, geography, imperialism, and so much more.

I’m not going to go into detail here about the structure of the show or how I intend to pull this off, but it’s not going to be as straightforward as it might seem.

There’s a lot more to say about my ideas for the show, but suffice to say, I’ve done a lot of thinking about this. It’s not a true crime story (everyone’s favorite podcast genre); it’s not a hero’s journey, despite the fact that some people in the story thought it was; if it fits into any genre, it’s really a tragedy. You’ll have to wait for the show to see why.

I already have some of the research done (this project is an offshoot of my book), but I also just got a new set of documents that I was planning to read today instead of writing this blog post. So this is happening, by hook or by crook, and I’m already off to the races.

So that’s the show. Now here’s why I think it’s worth doing, and why I’m going to do it, even though the episodic narrative is a real challenge.

Eric argues that these kinds of shows most likely succeed if they come from an established podcast shop. This show will likely be under the aegis of the studio at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, which is not an established shop. Yet. But I do already have a show there, and we’ve got several more in development. So by the time I’m ready to launch this Eaton story, I hope RRCHNM will indeed be an established shop.

Eric also argues that these shows only work if their revenue is established already. This is where my academic side kicks in. Money-making isn’t the goal here; if we generate any money at all, we need it before release, in order to fund the making of the show. Where does that kind of money come from? In academia, it comes from grants, which fund research trips and course releases and stuff like that. I’m very familiar with this process. RRCHNM is almost entirely grant-funded already.

Ideally, a show like mine wouldn’t have ads at all. To be honest, this kind of show isn’t one that a lot of advertisers would even be interested in, I’m guessing. So I know straight out of the gate that the standard revenue streams aren’t going to work anyway. I produced Consolation Prize only through the good graces of my boss, who gave me some time from a number of folks at the Center, and by using part of my “administrative” time. I don’t want to do that for this show, but I will be looking for funders who fund academic work, not normal ad-type funding.

I realize that this is going to be a hard sell for some funders. Many fellowships, grants, etc., for scholars are meant to lead to a monograph or a journal article. Funders for digital projects often expect results in the first year of work. I think this project is going to take me at least three years of solid research (hence I’ll need the traditional funding streams), and two full years to actually produce the show (at which time I’ll need the digital project funding). These two timeframes overlap, though. So I don’t know where I’m going to get the money. But I’m going to get it somehow.

Eric’s next marker of success is “They took the time to make it right.” I would like to release the first episode of this show in March 2025, and I imagine that it will be a significant part of my research work from now until then. I’ve got a lot of research to do—even though this story is one I’m very, very familiar with already. I also want to push the form in interesting ways, and some of those ideas are going to require some experimentation. So while I’m doing the research, I’ll also be playing with the method. I’m hoping that I’ll have some help in both of these arenas—if I get grants, I’ll be writing in both undergraduate and graduate students as research assistants and producers.

Eric’s final marker of success is that they understood their audience. This is something that I intend to spend a lot of time figuring out. We did a bad job of this with Consolation Prize, but we’re going to do better in future shows. And I think there is an audience out there for this show. People like early America. People like underdog stories. People like the Marines (ha). So the audience is out there—and I will figure out how to get this show into their ears.

Now, Eric also has a few ideas about what makes episodic narrative podcasts fail. The first one is the biggest one, I think. He says that these podcasts fail because it’s not clear why they exist as an audio story.

This is something I’ve thought about a lot. I happen to think that audio is the perfect form for historical stories (and thousands of storytellers across the millennia agree with me, for what it’s worth 😉 ). Audio is an intimate, story-driven medium, able to connect an audience to something that’s completely foreign to them. History is foreign. And it’s important for people to feel both connected and disconnected from the past—connected because it helps us to understand ourselves better, but disconnected because the lessons of the past do not inherently shape the future.

At its heart, history is a story. It’s a story that can be told from dozens of perspectives; it’s a story that can be told from an earth-sized view, or from the view of one person, or even one aspect of one person’s life. Of course, most historians write their stories down in books, articles, or some other written medium. I’m not here to knock that. But I think people sometimes connect to someone telling them a story better than they connect to reading it. (And let’s face it, most people don’t go around picking up historical monographs.) Podcasting is meant for a non-academic audience, which is the audience I like talking to.

In addition, podcasting is a brilliant way to tell historical stories because podcasting can be immersive–but not TOO immersive. It can be hard to really communicate the vibe or atmosphere of the historical story in a monograph. But in a podcast, you can use sound and music to help the listener feel like they’re there, or at least they’re in a similar place. However, done well, podcasts give off a vibe without being too specific, too pedantic. (Every historian has their love-to-hate documentary/movie/TV show that takes on their historical area and does a very bad job of setting the scene or doing things with historical verisimilitude.)

For my own show, and others that deal with any historical period that’s before, say, 1920, there’s no audio on tape. There’s no video that can give us a glimpse into what things looked like and sounded like. There’s only written sources, and in my case, really there’s only one man’s recollections. That means that setting the scene and telling the story will require imagination, creativity—and lots of judgment calls. But no more so than any other historian who decides what to leave in, and what to leave out.

I want to tell William Eaton’s story in audio because I want it to feel like we’re traveling along with him. I want to follow Eaton’s progress temporally, releasing an episode every day starting in March 2025 until the 220th anniversary of the Battle of Derna. I want the listeners feeling the chaos and frustrations all around him, hearing the many voices that clamored for his attention, and imagining the endless drudgery of marching across a dry and inhospitable desert toward a goal that may or may not actually succeed. There’s a lot of tension in this story; there’s a lot of twists and turns. I don’t want you to be able to read ahead to see what happens. (Kidding…sort of…since you could actually just go read a book about this event.) But I want to play up the tension. I want to slow down the story and make it impossible to skip the stuff that doesn’t seem important. I want you to feel, not just learn.

Eric’s next reason for failure is that these shows have attempted an “if you build it they will come” approach. I hope I’ve already demonstrated that that’s not what I plan to do. But I’ll also say that in the academic setting, isn’t that pretty much exactly what most people do with all of their work? We do the work and then we just hope people will read it. To be honest, if more than 500 people listen to this show, that will probably dwarf the number of people who read my book. So while I hope people will listen, and I’m going to do my darnedest to get my work in front of the right people so they do listen, at the end of the day this is a piece of scholarship for me. It’s worth doing even if not that many people listen.

In terms of my academic career, doing a podcast instead of a monograph is a huge risk. However, I would argue that the amount of work that I intend to put into this show, and the creativity that will be required in order to pull it off with scholarly integrity while also making it interesting, should put it right up there with a scholarly monograph.

From a podcasting perspective, this is also a risk. Episodic narratives are hard and maybe don’t get the rewards that other types of shows do. Making a show without being able to interview ANYONE who was there or has personal knowledge is tough. I don’t want this show to sound like all the other shows out there, either. This is a unique story and I want it to sound unique.

The bottom line is, this is going to be a ton of work. I’m going to do much of the research on my own, but I’m going to be assembling a team to do the production because there’s no way I can do this alone. But that’s also part of why this is worth doing even if it doesn’t “pay off” financially: working on a show like this teaches students so much about narrative, research, audience, and approach. So even if there’s no other reason to do this, the pure pedagogy of it is enough.

So, while I share Eric’s concern about episodic narratives, I’m going to do it anyway. If you want to follow along as I work on the show, feel free to follow me on Twitter @abbymullen; I’m sure I’ll be tweeting about it. 🙂

Today we released the final episode of Season 1 of Consolation Prize. The whole team is going to have a debrief session sometime later this summer, but I figured I should get my thoughts down while they’re still fresh. So here’s a few random thoughts about this first foray into narrative podcasting, for me and for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.

I’m a better writer because of podcasting.

I was a decent writer before starting this project. But I’ve thought about the *craft* of writing more in the past 10 months than perhaps in my whole previous life as an academic, because writing for a narrative podcast is a whole different beast than dashing off a conference paper or even writing a book. Writing for podcasts is a skill that takes a lot of practice, but the work I’ve done to learn this new skill has actually improved my for-reading writing.

The host of a podcast is only as good as her team.

I have an awesome team. Have I said that before? I have an awesome team. Without them, Consolation Prize would never have made it off the ground. Having people to bounce ideas off, letting other folks do quite a lot of the research, relying on other folks to edit and clarify your work—it’s all what makes a good podcast run. I love that our team for this season was made up of a faculty member (me), a postdoc, an advanced graduate student, a less-advanced graduate student, and an undergraduate student, along with a former adjunct. We’re all in different places; we study different things; we have different ideas. This diversity makes the show so much better.

Podcasting takes a ton of work.

Anyone who says “Podcasting is easy, just pick up a mic and talk into it” is going to make a bad podcast. We spent about an hour of work for every minute in our show, and we could easily have doubled that (but everyone on my team, including me, has a full-time job in addition to working on the show).

Metrics are dumb.

I don’t make any claims that Consolation Prize is the best at anything, but I would say it’s in the top half of history podcasts in terms of its content and its production. It’s definitely NOT in the top half in terms of listenership. This has been an area of intense frustration for me. I never had any illusions that we’d be Throughline or anything like that—but I do think that a lot more people (even historians) ought to be listening. This isn’t because I want people to hear my voice. It’s in part because we work super hard on every single episode, and it feels like our investment isn’t paying off. But more importantly, it’s because I think the content is worth knowing. I think we do a super job of connecting these obscure public servants’ stories to larger themes in American history, and our episodes are a great way to learn about those themes.

It’s also frustrating that so few people interact with the show on the socials. There are a handful of folks who retweet us, like our posts on Facebook, and comment on things on Instagram (and we appreciate you all!!). But the vast majority don’t. So it feels like we’re flying in the dark a lot of the time. We WANT to know what people think of our show, positive or negative. But podcasting kind of feels like Zoom teaching sometimes: just talking into the void, with anonymous black boxes as an audience, instead of a conversation, which is what we were hoping for.

I didn’t do a good job of audience research before we started the show, so that’s part of the problem. We’re hoping to rectify some of these issues in Season 2, but some of the people who would actually enjoy our show don’t listen to it (or others like it) because they don’t see it as real scholarship. (I’m not making this up; people have said this exact thing in my presence.) That’s a real bummer.

This is only the beginning.

Season 2 of Consolation Prize is already under development. I’m excited. I also have a million other podcast ideas bumping around in my brain, and now the job is to figure out which one to pursue. Now that my book manuscript is under peer review and nearing completion(ish), I can turn my attention to my next long-form scholarly project. I’ve already decided that I don’t have another book in me right now—but I do have a podcast. So I’m really excited to get started on a new idea that’s pretty different from Consolation Prize that will, by its completion, have easily as much research and writing in it as a monograph.

I’m not a fully disinterested observer here; as you know, I am the host and executive producer of a podcast, so of course I want more people to listen to my podcast. But I think there’s a lot of value in assigning podcasts for students of history, of any age or schooling status. Here are a few reasons I think that.

Reason #1: Audio literacy

I wrote a whole blog post about this. Students receive a lot of news and information in audio format, and they need to be able to understand what they’re listening to. Listening is a skill—and one that transfers for listening to live events as well.

Reason #2: Difference

Listening to things can be fun, and podcasts often take a more approachable, conversational tone than the typical monograph. I’m not advocating that we remove all readings in favor of podcasts, but sometimes it’s nice to have a change of pace.

My students have said repeatedly this semester that, especially now, it’s really nice to have something that they don’t feel bad about not looking at. It’s not a video. It’s not a screen. They can fold the laundry or cook dinner while they listen.

Reason #3: Entrance into the historical discipline

You might think that podcasts are a lesser introduction to the historical discipline than a monograph or journal article. But many of my students need a ramp to get into the discipline, rather than a staircase. I don’t teach a lot of history majors; I do teach a lot of students who are just trying to escape other classes. I want the historical discipline to feel not-so-scary. And listening to a historian talk—even in historian-speak, as some historians do when they’re being interviewed—can be more approachable than reading that same historian’s written work. Best-case scenario is, of course, that the student then becomes interested in the book and goes and reads it (or you assign it! and talk about the differences).

And in our current moment of the collapse of humanities in higher education, it’s worth using our assignments to demonstrate that a book or article isn’t necessarily the pinnacle of historical achievement. There are other ways to be a historian; other ways to tell historical stories; other ways to teach.

Podcasts can also be a tool to introduce the craft of history without being explicitly “historical,” which is great for helping students see the connections between disciplines, and between past and present. I have a few podcasts that are go-tos for some topics like that (like Reply All, which I LOVE and I assign every semester when we talk about sources and proper attribution), but I keep an eye out for new podcasts all the time. I listen to a lot of podcasts.

But not all podcasts are created equal. I have a few parameters for the kinds of podcasts I tend to assign, though no hard and fast rules. Here are a few things that I consider before I put a podcast on my syllabus.

#1: Accessibility

This is the number one concern for me. Some students appreciate having something to listen to instead of watch or read, but some students aren’t able to listen to things, whether it’s because they have auditory processing issues, or, more likely, a loud and chaotic environment where concentrated listening is impossible. So I almost never assign a podcast that doesn’t have a transcript (and we model this at Consolation Prize).

#2: Interest

Some podcasts are boring. I almost never assign podcasts that I didn’t find personally interesting, because if I didn’t find it interesting (and I’m a historian), then I can’t really expect my students to maintain interest. I’m also one of those people who ditches podcasts very quickly if they’re not interesting, so if I don’t make it to the end of an episode, I don’t assign it.

#3: Challenge

I really like assigning podcasts that challenge a narrative or introduce something that will make students think about their ingrained beliefs. This doesn’t have to be extreme, but I want the students to have more questions when they finish the episode. This is why I tend more toward narrative podcasts than historian-interview shows, where it can sometimes feel like the historian has already said all there is to say about the topic at hand. We know that they haven’t, but generally they literally wrote the book on it, so it can feel very authoritative.

That’s it. I’m sure there are a lot of other reasons to assign podcasts, and a lot of other considerations when picking which ones to assign. I’m still working on how I get feedback and responses from students when I assign podcasts, but overall, between this semester and last semester, the response to podcasts has been overwhelmingly favorable. And the nice thing about podcasts is that new ones come out with much more rapidity than books or articles, so your syllabus can become quite dynamic as new stuff is released!

I’d love to hear how you’ve incorporated podcasts into your classroom!

(Yes, I’m avoiding doing work on my actual monograph right now, along with a hundred other things.)

I’m deeply invested in the idea of creating (and learning) history through not-monographs. And in the past several months and years, I’ve been trying to put my money where my mouth is about this. I’ve been teaching not-monograph history for a while now, but this past year I’ve had a lot of opportunities to create my own history work that isn’t a monograph (though, full disclosure, I’m also writing a monograph).

I want to highlight just two things I’ve been involved in recently that highlight the really fun ways history can be done in a not-monograph. For one I’m the principal driver, but still part of a great team; for the other, I’m only the incidental consultant for another person’s great brainchild.

Consolation Prize

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has recently given me the go-ahead to start a podcast! If you read this blog at all, you know I’m really into audio as a medium, but the time hasn’t been right to do more than just dabble. But the opportunity presented itself this summer to develop a podcast on a topic that I am interested in, and when I polled a few networks of historians, I found out that there’s quite a bit of interest out in the world too.

So Consolation Prize is a narrative podcast that investigates the lives and work of nineteenth-century American consuls. Diplomatic history might seem dry and boring (and to be honest, some parts of it kind of are), but consuls were the front line of diplomatic action. They engaged with the common Americans of all races that spread across the globe. We’ll be telling stories about murderers, cheats, liars, traitors, lovers, writers, naturalists, politicians, and so much more (and that’s only in the first few episodes!). Even if you think diplomatic history isn’t for you, I’d love it if you checked it out here.

The Shores of Tripoli

A while ago (I can’t even remember how long now), I was approached by a board game designer named Kevin Bertram. He was developing a new board game about the First Barbary War, and he was wondering if I’d play-test it for him.

Well…how often do you get to see a board game that’s about the exact historical event that you study? Unless you study World War II, probably not that often, if ever. So of course I said yes. And after play-testing it, I became a sort of unofficial adviser/consultant on the project. I ended up writing a very brief history of the war, which will be shipped with the game, and I offered advice about small things here and there.

This isn’t my game in any sense of the word, but I’m irrationally proud of it. It’s so fun to see a board game of the First Barbary War! You can watch the unboxing video here.

[Like my new word?]

I’ve decided to stop posting Twitter threads and instead use the tool God intended: blog posts.

I’m starting to knuckle down on course prep for the fall. You all know I’m 100% into asynchronous teaching, and I really don’t think there’s anything anyone could say to dissuade me. (This is, by the by, what I tell my students “bias” is: a belief that you hold, no matter what, even in the presence of countervailing evidence, though I don’t believe there is much countervailing evidence in this case.) But there’s one part of asynchronous teaching that I’m struggling to find a solution for: flexibility.

Flexibility within the semester

One of the great joys of teaching F2F is in pivoting your class time to discuss a topic that’s come up, or going off on a tangent based on a student question, or reframing your next lecture on the fly in response to current events. But in async teaching, you need a bit of lead time to get your materials prepared; you post them as completed pieces.

I’ve just been reading Joshua Eyler’s book How Humans Learn, and the first part of the book talks about using curiosity as a driving force for good teaching. The book has been tremendously thought-provoking and I’ve already thought of ways I’m going to increase the presence of curiosity in my courses. But in some ways, async teaching feels like it limits curiosity because of its nature.

Async teaching feels a little bit like the First Barbary War. In the war, the commodore was given instructions by the Secretary of the Navy to go do some stuff, and he was expected to do it. But by the time the commodore got to the Mediterranean, things looked very different. The commodore then had two choices: (1) try to follow his outdated orders, or (2) make his own plan, which may or may not be what the federal government wanted. Both of these options could be disastrous. If he followed his outdated orders, he might stumble into serious diplomatic crises. If he made his own way, then when the next set of orders arrived, he might be so far off the original track that it was impossible to obey the new ones.

This is kind of like async teaching. I spend a day or two recording my podcast lecture, developing the ways I want students to respond, and then I post it on the course website. But I try not to be recording and editing my talks at midnight the night before class, so sometimes–really, often–I have to record my next materials before I’ve seen my students’ responses to the previous chunk of material. Thus, I am writing my students’ new “orders” before I’ve received much feedback from them telling me what things I need to respond to. So I have to plow ahead with my original plan, and they have to either plow ahead with me, despite having turned in a different direction intellectually, or they have to go off on their own.

In this analogy, I’d prefer that the students took option 2, where they made their own choices and went down the paths that seemed right to them. But without knowing what they’re doing in real time, it’s hard to then craft the next set of “orders.” In 1802-1803, when multiple captains did what was right in their own eyes, they ended up going completely opposite and contradictory directions and made a lot of big errors. I, as the professor/SecNav, can’t possibly reel in ALL the threads.

Then there’s the time lag. If I’m not having these discussions in class, but as a discussion later on a board or in a chat room, that doesn’t leave much time for me to change tack for the next time I give them materials, sometimes no time at all. If a student responds in a thought-provoking way, but to materials we’ve already moved on from, how do I address it?

This problem is exacerbated because the students who do respond quickly are usually the ones who need the least direction from me. They’ve figured things out on their own. It’s the ones who don’t respond till the last minute–till it’s too late–that show me they need more help; they need me to revisit things or come at them from a different angle. But by the time I know that, we’ve already moved on.

So…how do you give students the opportunity to do their own inquiry while still maintaining at least nominal control on the class’s mission? (The class I’m especially concerned about has 45 students at present; the smaller the class, the easier to reel in all the threads, I’d imagine.)

Flexibility semester to semester

This problem is related to the idea of recyclability. Even though I’m pretty proud of most of the podcast episodes I made last semester, I don’t think I’m going to reuse any of them wholesale, because it’s a different time now. Things are really different for the students; they’re different for the world; they’re different for me.

So I bridle at the idea that online teaching is thus infinitely recyclable, which is how some higher ed pundits have been characterizing it. It’s infinitely recyclable only if you fully intend for your course to not speak to anything your students are dealing with, or any way in which your course materials speak to the present. If you don’t want your students to find your course memorable, or relevant, then sure, you can keep using exactly the same thing semester after semester. (I took a correspondence course in college that fits this description exactly; it probably hadn’t been changed in 10 years when I took it.) But I DO want my students to feel like I’m teaching to them, not to a nameless and faceless mass.

That said, developing an online course is a huge amount of work. I definitely don’t want to reinvent the wheel every single semester. So how do I maximize the use value of what I create this semester for subsequent semesters, without letting go of the flexibility I feel is needed to create a compelling course that speaks to students’ needs?

I don’t know if I’ve done a good job of explaining myself here, but I hope my point is clear: I want to be responsive to my students’ curiosity and needs. I’m struggling with how to do that effectively in an asynchronous environment. I would welcome any suggestions you have.