Reckoning with Jason Herbert
Reckoning with Jason Herbert is a long-form conversation podcast about history, the outdoors, and the stories that shape who we are.
Each episode features historians, writers, scientists, and thinkers in wide-ranging conversations about wild places, forgotten pasts, cultural memory, and the forces—human and natural—that continue to shape our lives.
This isn’t a news cycle show or a debate podcast. It’s a space for reflection, curiosity, and serious conversation—meant to be listened to slowly.
If you’re interested in history beyond textbooks, the outdoors beyond recreation, and stories that linger long after they’re told, this show is for you.
Reckoning with Jason Herbert
Episode 61: 1883 with Sarah Keyes and Josh Garrett-Davis
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This week Sarah Keyes and Josh Garrett-Davis drop in to talk about settlers, Native Americans, the Overland Trail, and yes, dysentery via Taylor Sheridan's 1883. We also talk about the West on film, how the West has been portrayed in movies, books, tv, and video games, as well as question why the West is in a pop culture revival in current moment. This is a really fun conversation. Hope you dig it.
About our guests:
Sarah Keyes is a historian of the United States. She specializes in the 19th century and the history of the U.S. West with a focus on the environment and intercultural interactions between Indigenous peoples and Euro-Americans. Her current work explores these topics along the overland trails to Oregon and California in the mid-19th century. Her first book, American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in October 2023. Keyes has also begun work on her second project, a regional and transnational study of suffrage in the U.S. West, for which she was recently awarded a Mellon-Schlesinger Summer Research Grant from the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.
Josh Garrett-Davis is a writer, historian, and curator. His work focuses on the American West, Indigenous histories, and art/media history. He is the author of two books: What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), which won the Outstanding Western Book award from the Center for the Study of the American West; and Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains (Little, Brown, 2012), a personal geography of his home region. His article “The Intertribal Drum of Radio: The Indians for Indians Hour and Native American Media, 1941–1951” appeared in Western Historical Quarterly in 2018 and won the Oscar O. Winther Award. He has written for numerous other publications.