103 - History: Everyone is Terrible and Revere was a Quitter
Dear lord this was a hard one for me. I have a degree in history and obsess over it regularly, so naturally I felt like I needed to "strut my stuff." Ryan and Josh were awesome/flexible and set me up as a host that evening because they recognized how much this subject meant to me. If you've listened you now realize how excited I get, which often leads to incessant, high-speed ramblings.
One of the challenges of this episode for all of us was how to shorten it. We ran two hours, over double our usual target time. It taught us a lot about how to treat each subject and how many topics to pick for them. In the case of history, we learned that 5+ "myths" is just too many. With that fact in mind, we look forward to further refining our show.
Personally, I had to deal with the fact that I'm used to writing papers and having historical debates. What does that mean? Covering. Your. Tracks. And covering your tracks takes a LOT of time and sourcing. There's this strong temptation in every debate or discussion I have to fend off opponents or critics before they even step forward, which leads to dry spells and a break in flow, even if it is sometimes (and often it isn't) effective. This show was very fun for me, but it also showed a lot of flaws in applying how I "do" history to a radio show - I REALLY look forward to working on my methods and improving them for our next show.
Lastly: The subjects. I hope you all enjoyed what we covered. We are very proud of one potential pitfall we planned for: being too broad. We focused on a particular time and location for our first history-focused episode of Rumor Flies. The subjects were meant to be fun and generally known. Paul Revere was particularly fun to cover because of how well-known and totally inaccurate Midnight Ride reads (Yeah yeah yeah poetic license whatever WE DEMAND THE TRUTH!).
Anywho, we hope you enjoyed the episode and this blog post. Let us know what you think and thanks for checking us out!
-Greg