History usually remembers the rock stars—Lincoln, Washington, the giants—but Death by Lightning shifts the camera toward the hustlers, dreamers, and delusional outsiders who actually move the machinery of history. In this episode, we explore how the series turns the assassination of James Garfield into a strange and revealing thought experiment about fame, failure, and the fragile human ecosystem behind American history.

History doesn’t sit still in The Testament of Ann Lee—it moves, sings, and repeats itself through bodies in motion. This week, we explore how belief becomes choreography and how cinema turns the past into a living performance.

Listen as we explore Richard Linklater's latest film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard's radical masterpiece Breathless.

We end 2025 with a discussion on Chloe Zhao’s new film Hamnet, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s historical fiction novel.

In this episode, we discuss Ken Burns’s recent PBS documentary The American Revolution. Listen as Robert, Kim, and John talk about the rich complexity the film adds to the history and how Burns brings in new voices that challenge the traditional understanding of America’s founding.

In our latest episode, we discuss the new Netflix series House of Guinness, a historical drama set in 19th century Ireland, from the creator of Peaky Blinders.

In our latest episode, we dive into the Netflix series American Primeval, directed by Peter Berg and starring Betty Gilpin and Taylor Kitsch. In light of recent assaults on higher institutions and the attempts to erase competing histories of America's past, this episode and Berg's series grapples with a complex and haunted past and present-day debates over national identity through a retelling of the 1857 Utah War.

In our new episode, we look at Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza's 2025 Iraq War film Warfare (2025).