This week Jack Reid drops in to talk about how hitchhiking came of age in the United States, interactions between people on the road, and some shocking celebrities who have asked for a ride. Check out his new book, Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation.

This week Dr. Kit Heyem visits from across the Pond to talk about their new book, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender. This was an awesome conversation to talk nonbinary histories through time and why that is relevant today.

About our guest:
Dr Kit Heyam (they/them or he/him) is a Leeds-based freelance writer, heritage practitioner, trans awareness trainer and academic.

You can find them on Blue Sky at: https://bsky.app/profile/krheyam.bsky.social

What are you wearing this fall? Or rather, why are you wearing what you're wearing this fall? Those are the questiond Dr. Rachel Gross and I are pondering in this episode of Reckoning. Dr. Gross joins in to talk about her new book: Shopping All The Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America. We talk about the rise of outfitters as outdoors marketers, and just exactly why I can't decide between Patagonia, L.L. Bean, and Columbia.

About our guest:
Dr. Rachel Gross is an environmental and cultural historian of the modern U.S. and an assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver. In 2019 she was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and a Postdoctoral Teaching, Research, and Mentoring Fellow at the Davidson Honors College of the University of Montana.

For her doctoral research, she wrote about the history of outdoor clothing and gear in the U.S. from the Civil War to the present. The project was awarded the 2018 Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History from the Business History Conference. She works with university and community partners to bring history into the public realm. In 2019, She curated an exhibit at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula on “Outdoor Gear Stories From the Treasure State.” From January – July 2017 she served as the managing editor of Wisconsin 101, a collaborative history project that uses material culture to tell stories about Wisconsin’s past. Read a recent post she edited. In 2016-2017, she also served on the editorial board of Edge Effects, the digital magazine of environmental humanities of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.