Abby Epplett, Historian

Look who’s back after the holiday break! For the new year, I am changing my posting schedule to include reviews of the podcasts, books, documentaries, and more that I absorb in preparation for my travels and essays. This style of post will typically appear on Mondays when I am not posting a blog roundup to LinkedIn. My first review of 2025 is on the episodic podcast Mobitituaries hosted by Mo Rocca . Rocca is a humorous correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning who got his start in television as a writer on the PBS children’s show Wishbone , which received its own episode . During each episode, he speaks with experts to uncover the story of a forgotten person, thing, or idea mostly in modern American history, although a few episodes cover Europe and East Asia, and one episode focused on prehistory. Topics might be serious, such as overturning bans on interracial marriage in the United States , but they are equally likely to be frivolous, like the cancellation of the Lawrence W...

Anyone who enjoys the American version of the appraisal show Antiques Roadshow , which just finished its 27 th season on GBH Boston (PBS) and shows no signs of slowing down, will love the podcast companion Detours . Started in January 2020, the podcast is now in its third season. Adam Monahan , who has served as a longtime producer of Antiques Roadshow , hosts the podcast. Frequent guest appearances include executive producer Marsha Bemko , appraisers and antiques experts, and former guests from  Antiques Roadshow . I have so many favorite episodes from this podcast that I cannot describe all of them! Some of the best include  Season 3, Episode 6, “Good Grief” about a Charles Schulz comic strip collection related to a Hallmark greeting cards licensing deal; Season 2, Episode 8, “If It’s Brown, It’s Down” about the downturn of the early American furniture market; and Season 1, Episode 2 “A Soldier for Sale” about a prop from the Laurel & Hardy movie Babes ...

I am a longtime listener to Cautionary Tales , a podcast hosted by Tim Harford and published by Pushkin Industries with the tagline “telling true stories about mistakes and what we should learn from them”. Harford is a multi-talented communicator, blending history and statistics to publish books, host radio shows, and write newspaper articles along with hosting this podcast. His ability to balance the often dark cautionary tales with a sense of humor brings witty charm to each episode. The show is currently in its third season, having debuted back in November 2019. The show follows two standard formats. In the more common format, Harford introduces a main story taken from history and then relates the problems in the historical event to modern issues, often using statistics to compare the two stories. Actors such as Jeffrey Wright and Helena Bonham Carter read letters or newspaper articles from the time period. In the less common format, Harford interviews an expert on a t...