What’s the backstory to the ingredients and dishes that find their way to your Thanksgiving table? This holiday season, you’re invited to join us in the kitchen for a heaping helping of history because food can be a portal to the past. Cook along with us as we use old recipes from historic cookbooks. We’ll travel back in time and feel a connection to the people of the past and the worlds in which they lived.

Host: Andrew J. Falk

Past is Prologue is a humanities podcast that provides the public with the background behind the day's headlines, and offers much-needed context to understand the significance of current events that people observe around them. It seeks to contribute to the public conversation in an engaging, informative, accessible, and constructive way. It's produced by the Department of History in the College of Arts & Humanities at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. We welcome your inquiries and feedback at pastpodcast@cnu.edu.

In this final installment in our miniseries on the election of 2024, we use history to understand the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris and the strategic decisions her presidential campaign has made. Labeled by the Trump campaign as an “extremist” and the “antichrist,” do themes of patriotism and religion affect the way Harris campaigns for the presidency under a banner of “joy and freedom”? A generation younger than Trump, and seeking to become the first woman and woman of color to serve as President of the United States, how do generational, gender, and racial dynamics shape the contest? In other words: In this age of identity politics, how does Kamala Harris make her case to the people?

Host: Andrew J. Falk

Guest: Elizabeth Wood

Past is Prologue is a humanities podcast that provides the public with the background behind the day's headlines, and offers much-needed context to understand the significance of current events that people observe around them. It seeks to contribute to the public conversation in an engaging, informative, accessible, and constructive way. It's produced by the Department of History in the College of Arts & Humanities at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. We welcome your inquiries and feedback at pastpodcast@cnu.edu.

This is the second episode in our three-part series on the election of 2024. Today, we’re looking at voters in the battleground states. In a nation of “red” states for Trump and “blue” states for Harris, what are voters thinking in the “purple” bellwether states of the “Rust Belt” and “Sun Belt”? We'll get the historical backstory to shifting political coalitions, economic and racial insecurities, and the selections of J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. If you want to understand why your fellow citizens sometimes view the world so differently from yourself, then maybe this episode is for you. In other words, let’s go to the battleground to find common ground on what matters most to these voters. As always, we’ll ground our discussion in the historical record.

Host: Andrew J. Falk

Guest: James Allison, III

Past is Prologue is a humanities podcast that provides the public with the background behind the day's headlines, and offers much-needed context to understand the significance of current events that people observe around them. It seeks to contribute to the public conversation in an engaging, informative, accessible, and constructive way. It's produced by the Department of History in the College of Arts & Humanities at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. We welcome your inquiries and feedback at pastpodcast@cnu.edu.