My New Book!

My New Book!
My New Book!

Saturday, October 5, 2024

October 5-6, 2024: My New Podcast!

[200 years ago this week, “Father of Baseball” Henry Chadwick was born. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Chadwick and other 19th century baseball histories, leading up to this special weekend post on my new podcast on 19th century baseball and much more!]

This Sunday I’ll drop the sixth Inning (episode, but y’know) of my weekly narrative history podcast, The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America. If you haven’t had a chance to listen yet, you can catch up on all the prior Innings at that hyperlink! Here I wanted to reflect on a few quick takeaways from my first experience with podcasting:

1)      Brevity: When I was initially planning the podcast, I anticipated something like 45 minutes for each Inning, and honestly was expecting that they might end up more like an hour long (as y’all know I’ve got a lot to say, and this is a story I really want to tell in full). But in writing and especially in recording them, I found that about 25 minutes was much more of a sweet spot, not only for me but also for my ideal audience experience. There’s always more to say, and I very much hope listeners will continue to research and read and learn about all the histories and issues that I’m highlighting. But I also believe it’s far better to leave them wanting a bit more than to overstay my welcome, and I hope I can keep applying that lesson to all my public scholarly work, where I’d say it’s a universally good goal. Soul of wit and all!

2)      Honesty: There are various reasons why the book project that was my longstanding expectation of how I’d tell this story never quite came together, some of them entirely outside of my own control. But one significant factor is that there’s a dearth of information on some of its core histories, including the details of the Celestials themselves (both in their New England semi-pro league and in their 1881 final game in San Francisco). I couldn’t quite figure out how to frame that in a book manuscript, at least not without creating overtly fictionalized sections which just wasn’t how I wanted to approach it. But in a podcast, I could simply talk about those limitations, share how I was hoping to fill in some gaps with educated speculation, and hope that listeners would appreciate my honesty and be willing to go on this journey with me.

3)      Storytelling: That ability to share honest reflections was one nice effect of creating my first oral scholarly work, but even more exciting was the way in which it felt like I could lean into storytelling as a central goal. I’ve long argued that stories, narratives, offer us ways to learn about our histories, our communities, our identities that at the very least complement, and in many ways transcend, more informational or pedantic modes of communication. That’s why I wanted to create a narrative history project for my 7th book—and when that book transformed into a podcast, I was able to lean into that emphasis on stories and storytelling even more fully and happily. I hope the results speak to you as much as the process has to me!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Hope you’ll check out the podcast!

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