Ep. 18 For the Record
Humanities on the High Plains
In March 2023, The Canadian Record — the weekly newspaper of rural Canadian, TX, population 2,300 — suspended publication after 130 years in print. Ryan’s guests this episode are Laurie Ezzell Brown, longtime editor and publisher of The Record, and Heather Courtney, the award-winning director and producer of the 2023 documentary short For the Record, which streams from May 6th to July 31st as part of PBS’s “Reel South” series, as well as airing on Panhandle PBS at 1PM on Sunday, May 12th. Beginning in 2019 and ending in 2022, the film follows Brown, reporter Cathy Ricketts,...
info_outline
Ep. 17 George Saunders
Humanities on the High Plains
Before he was a MacArthur Genius or a Booker Prize-winner, George Saunders was a songwriter, an oil-field worker, and a slaughterhouse “knuckle-puller,” not to mention an MA student at what was then West Texas State University. In this in-depth interview, Amarillo College’s Chris Hudson joins me, Ryan Brooks, as we speak with the author of Lincoln in the Bardo, Tenth of December, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and many other books. We chat with Saunders about his roots in the Texas Panhandle and how his fascination with Custer has stretched from his first published story (written in...
info_outline
Ep. 16 Shadow of the New Deal
Humanities on the High Plains
The history of public media is the history of fidelity to an idea: access to public education is “not only a service but a right.” On this episode we’re joined by Dr. Josh Shepperd, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (University of Illinois Press, 2023). Josh describes how this democratic ideal evolved, clumsily, into the material and institutional practices we’ve come to associate with NPR, PBS, and other public media. We discuss how the Communications Act of 1934...
info_outline
Ep. 15 The Thirsty Llano Estacado
Humanities on the High Plains
Ryan’s guests this episode are Dr. Timothy M. Foster, former WT prof and currently a Spanish teacher in Oskaloosa, Iowa, and Dr. John Beusterien, Professor of Spanish at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Tim and John come on the podcast to discuss their article, published in 2022 in The Great Plains Quarterly. This piece includes a thorough appendix of transcriptions, translations, and recordings — several of which can be heard in this episode — of the Nuevomexicano ballad of Manuel Maés, a real-life, twenty-one-year-old cibolero (buffalo hunter) who was killed while hunting in 1873...
info_outline
Ep. 14 The ERA in the West
Humanities on the High Plains
Our guest this episode is WT history professor Dr. Chelsea Ball, author of “‘I Oppose the ERA, but I Do Approve of Equal Rights for Women’: Gender and Politics in the Aftermath of the Equal Rights Amendment Campaign in the U.S. West.” This piece can be found in The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink and published by the University of Nebraska Press. In our talk, Ball explains how the ERA came to symbolize more than just “equality” and how this symbolism prompted resistance among ‘70s-era conservatives, especially in the West. She...
info_outline
Ep. 13 Dirty Knowledge
Humanities on the High Plains
Ryan’s guest on this episode is Dr. Julia Schleck, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Schleck joins us to discuss her book, Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism, published in January 2022 as part of the University of Nebraska Press’s “Provocations” series. The book critiques traditional defenses of academic freedom, which tend to be based on the idea that universities serve the public good by being separate from the public, producing knowledge that is therefore “clean,” or, other words,...
info_outline
Ep. 12 You Will Never Be One of Us
Humanities on the High Plains
In this episode, Ryan speaks with his WT colleague Dr. Timothy Paul Bowman, historian and author of You Will Never Be One of Us: A Teacher, a Texas Town, and the Rural Roots of Radical Conservativism, published in 2022 by the University of Oklahoma Press. Bowman’s book tells the story of Wayne Woodward, who in 1975 was fired from his job as an English teacher at La Plata Junior High in Hereford, Texas for founding a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Bowman argues that Woodward was fired because both he and the ACLU — with its reputation for fighting for...
info_outline
Ep. 11 Running Out
Humanities on the High Plains
On this episode, Ryan is joined by two of his WT colleagues — Dr. Nathan Howell, Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering, and Dr. Erik Crosman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences — and Dr. Darryl Birkenfeld, executive director of the nonprofit organization, Ogallala Commons. We discuss anthropologist Lucas Bessire’s Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains, a National Book Award finalist published in 2021. Running Out concerns the High Plains’s most important source of water, the Ogallala Aquifer, which for decades has been depleted by agricultural...
info_outline
Ep. 10 Chicana/o Uprising
Humanities on the High Plains
In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dr. Joel Zapata to discuss his essay “The South-by-Southwest Borderlands’ Chicana/o Uprising: the Brown Berets, Black and Brown Alliances, and the Fight against Police Brutality in West Texas.” The piece emerged out of Zapata’s involvement with the groundbreaking and appears in Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas, published in 2021 by the University of Texas Press. The interview covers a range of topics, including: the social contradictions of the Jim Crow and Juan Crow systems in West Texas (as exemplified...
info_outline
Ep. 9 The Great Cowboy Strike
Humanities on the High Plains
On this episode, Ryan is joined by Mark. A. Lause, Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati and author of The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West (Verso, 2017). Taking its title from a major strike led by ranch hands in the Texas Panhandle in 1883, the book traces the broader history of post-Civil War labor radicalism and third-party insurgency in the American West.
info_outlineIn March 2023, The Canadian Record — the weekly newspaper of rural Canadian, TX, population 2,300 — suspended publication after 130 years in print. Ryan’s guests this episode are Laurie Ezzell Brown, longtime editor and publisher of The Record, and Heather Courtney, the award-winning director and producer of the 2023 documentary short For the Record, which streams online from May 6th to July 31st as part of PBS’s “Reel South” series, as well as airing on Panhandle PBS at 1PM on Sunday, May 12th. Beginning in 2019 and ending in 2022, the film follows Brown, reporter Cathy Ricketts, business manager Mary Smithee, and other staff members as they hustle to keep the paper afloat during an oil bust, a global pandemic, and a contentious presidential election.
Currently, The Record continues in a scaled-down form online, but — as Brown and Courtney stress in the documentary and in these interviews — the print version’s demise reflects a broader trend, as the country has lost a fourth of its newspapers in the past 20 years. Ryan speaks first with Laurie, who updates us on the status of The Record and her role in covering the March 2024 wildfires; describes her experience being in front of a documentarian’s camera; and reflects on the challenges of sustaining a family-owned business in the Panhandle (where young people are hard to attract and often eager to leave). She also shares her views on how distrust of journalists has been intensified by the erosion of the boundary between news and opinion, and discusses the causes, consequences, and possible solutions to the growing news deserts in rural America.
Next Ryan speaks with Heather, who explains why her last two films (including 2023’s Breaking the News) have focused on the work of reporters; discusses the difference between news-writing and documentary filmmaking; and describes the logistics of filming journalists in the middle of a pandemic and an election year. Finally, she discusses some of her artistic decisions in For the Record and why she has never made a “true vérité film.” At the end of the interview, Heather issues a call to action and describes how listeners and civic organizations can get involved in the broader effort to support community-oriented news.