Think Back

Think Back is a podcast about American history. www.thinkbackpod.com

Think Back is a history podcast hosted by Richard Kreitner, with 27 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Richard Kreitner hosts Think Back, a history show with 27 episodes published.

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  Think Back

  'Badass' Harriet Tubman's Most Daring Deed

  Jun 2, 202651 minS0

  <p>Has the Civil War’s single largest emancipation event been hiding in plain sight?</p><p>In this episode of Think Back, I speak with historian Edda L. Fields-Black about her book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (2024), co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History. The book reconstructs a remarkable and underexamined chapter of the war: a Union gunboat raid up South Carolina’s Combahee River, led in part by Harriet Tubman acting as scout and spy, that liberated more than 700 enslaved people in a single night.</p><p>We discuss how...

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  Think Back

  What the Frontier Myth Gets Wrong—and Why It Matters

  Apr 23, 20261h 1mS0

  <p>Why does the frontier myth refuse to die?</p><p>In this episode of Think Back, I speak with historian and writer Megan Kate Nelson about her new book The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. The book takes direct aim at one of the most durable stories Americans tell about themselves: the frontier myth, codified by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, which cast the westward march of white pioneers as the engine of American democracy. That myth, Nelson argues, has never really loosened its grip. When whole communities are erased from the national story, it becomes easier...

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  Think Back

  The Unfinished Business of 1776

  Mar 25, 202657 minS0

  <p>In this episode of Think Back, I speak with historian Thomas Richards Jr. about his new book The Unfinished Business of 1776: Why the American Revolution Never Ended. Richards opens with a deliberately provocative contrast: was the Revolution an inspirational fight for freedom, or a vicious struggle for power? His answer sets up a book that refuses easy celebration or outright dismissal.</p><p>Rather than focusing on the Revolution itself, Richards trains his attention on the decades that followed, tracing how the fights ignited in 1776 continued to reshape American life long after the guns fell silent. We move through...

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  Think Back

  How Slavery Ended

  Feb 24, 202637 minS0

  <p>In this episode of Think Back, I talk with historian Tom Zoellner about his new book The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War. We dig into a dimension of emancipation that often gets overshadowed by presidential proclamations and congressional acts: the ground-level pressure created by enslaved people themselves. Zoellner traces how thousands of self-emancipated men and women forced the Union to confront slavery not as an abstraction, but as an urgent reality. The Underground Railroad, in effect, became “above ground,” and the war’s meaning began to shift.</p><p>Our conversation explor...

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  Think Back

  The Forgotten Movement for a Black State

  Jan 28, 202651 minS0

  <p>This episode looks at one of the strangest political experiments in American history: a late-nineteenth-century movement to create an officially Black state in the land that would become Oklahoma. At its center was Edward McCabe, a charismatic but elusive figure who envisioned Black self-government within the United States at a moment when Reconstruction had collapsed and white supremacy was hardening across the country.</p><p>My guest is Caleb Gayle, professor of history at Northeastern University and the author of Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State (2025). We talk about the nature and...

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