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Frank Smyth is a journalist with a long and impressive career covering war-torn places such as Central America and the Mid-East. His resume includes articles and stories for The Village Voice, The Nation, and The Washington Post. He is also the author of The NRA: The Unauthorized History (2020), the…

James Oakes is a two time winner of the Lincoln Prize for Civil War studies. But as he tells Colin, he initially went to college for business. An English teacher at Baruch College wisely turned him away from the world of international finance. Since then, he has made a name…

Movie detectives are as old as movies themselves. So what could a 2020 film add to the genre? Michael Scott, co-host of cinema podcast The Dana Buckler Show and his own film podcast Adkins Undisputed returns to American Rambler to discuss the recent crime noir/comedy/thriller The Kid Detective. It’s a…

Dan Gullotta is the host of the popular Age of Jackson history podcast. A relatively recent arrival in the U.S. by way of Australia, Dan is a Ph.D. student of religious studies at Stanford University, though he is currently residing in Kansas. Dan is working on a dissertation that focuses…

Michael Gorra is a native of Connecticut who has taught at Smith College since the 1970s. A professor of English, his most recent book is The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. This book builds on a career dedicated to examining writers such as Henry James and V. S. Naipaul.…

I am sincere, and my sincerity is my credential. –Malcolm X Johnny Cash considered prisoners his best audience, and he performed for them for a long time. In October of 1959 at the annual rodeo at Huntsville prison in Texas, Cash first strummed his guitar for inmates. Cash was only…

Colin gives a sneak peak at his January 6 “Legacies and Lunch” talk for the Central Arkansas Public Library in Little Rock. His talk will be on his upcoming book Country Boy: The Roots of Johnny Cash, coming out in the fall of 2021 from the University of Arkansas Press.…

It’s not often that Colin has a poet warrior on the podcast. It’s been twenty years since Dr. Farrell taught at Hampden-Sydney College, where he was a professor of modern languages. He spent 27 years at HSC before moving on to VMI, where he was fired from being a dean…

Historian Jean Baker is a lifelong resident of Baltimore, so it makes sense that her most recent book is Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Her book on Latrobe is only the latest in a long and productive career that began as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins…

Happy Halloween! Movie guru Michael Scott returns to the podcast to talk about his love for the Friday the 13th films. How did a low-budget 1980 horror movie spawn a franchise and draw in millions of fans? Is it all about the hockey mask? As it turns out, Michael’s first…