Colin E. Woodward's Official Site

Occasionally, we see the future. The Wright Brothers taking off in Kitty Hawk. The invention of penicillin. Seeing man walk on the moon, or getting our first look at free internet porn. Today, the future has arrived in the form of legalized marijuana. A few weeks ago, I was visiting…

In this mini-series, American Rambler talks about one of the two classic movies he saw on the big screen this summer. Jaws is one of Colin’s favorite movies, but he had never seen it at a theater before. What did he notice this time around? Does it matter, when you’ve…

A self-described blasphemer and bewildered pilgrim, writer and novelist James Morrow was doing long-form fiction at age seven. But it was a high school literature class in his native Abington, Pennsylvania, that changed his life. There, he read greats such as Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Camus. He went on to study…

Originally from Michigan, Aaron Sheehan-Dean now makes his home in Baton Rouge, where he is a professor of Civil War history at Louisiana State University. An undergraduate at Northwestern, he went on to do his master’s and doctoral degree at the University of Virginia. A proud member of the “UVA…

A native of Northern Ireland, Stephanie McCurry moved to Canada while in high school before settling in the United States. She studied under renowned slavery scholars Eugene and Elizabeth Fox Genovese as a grad student. She made a big splash with her first, prize-winning book, Masters of Small Worlds, which…

Colin saw the newest Quentin Tarantino movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The film explores the lives of a struggling actor, a stunt double, Sharon Tate, and the Manson family in a reimagining of 1969 Los Angeles. But is it any good? How does it carry on the Tarantino…

Frank Kirkpatrick is a theologian and former religion professor at Trinity College, where he taught for 47 years. He was also Colin’s advisor, overseeing his thesis on Soren Kierkergaard. Frank’s class on major religious writers made Colin want to be a double major in religion and history as an undergraduate.…

Originally from Iowa, Jim Stramel is a longtime resident of Richmond. As a college student in Florida, he hopped in a van bound for Virginia and hasn’t looked back. Jim started making films on 16mm, work that culminated in his first full-length movie Thrillbillys (2001). Since then, Jim has moved…

Court Carney, a professor at Stephen F. Austin University, returns to the podcast to talk about a course he recently taught on the late, great AMC show Mad Men. As Court makes clear, the show is a rich text that tells us a lot about 1960s history. Mad Men first…

A professor at the University of Georgia, Scott Reynolds Nelson is the author of several books and recently was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. But as he tells Colin, he was not interested in history as a young man enamored with comic books and computers. Still, history proved a much safer…