🗳️ YOU VOTE on the Future of Unruly Figures

It's just one poll with three choices, we got this 💪

This photo of two women at a reenactment of the Battle of Puebla in Mexico City has nothing to do with this post except that I like it. Image credit: Gerardo Vieyra/NurPhoto.)

Helloooo history lovers,

This post has been a long time coming. In addition to literally promising it on Sunday, I have been thinking about what comes next for a while.

First and foremost: I love making this podcast. And I love getting to know all of you through emails, comments, social media, etc. But for a while now, this podcast *in its current form* has been unsustainable for me. The sheer amount of research I have to do to produce a single episode is too much on top of my actual job. At the same time, the landscape of podcast production and sponsorship has changed a lot the last several months and it’s been a huge pain figuring out how to make sure I’m not losing money making Unruly Figures.

So though I’ve known this for a bit, I haven’t been able to decide how to move forward. I know that there are a lot of you out there who love this Substack/show as it is. I want to move forward with you and make sure that you’re part of the conversation about how things shift so that I don’t have to stop all together.

I’d like to hear your thoughts about future episodes. My options right now are either to do shorter episodes every other week (the frequency I aim for now) or to keep the episode length but only put out one a month (so half as many as I am for now).

Without further ado, a poll:

With one of these changes, my workload can shift so that I can produce this podcast without worrying about the financial cost of it. Which also means paid subscriber stuff will be changing soon. (More details tba.)

Psst—! if you’re already a paid subscriber, yesterday I comped you for the next few months as a thank you for sticking with me through this rough patch!

No matter what, I plan to continue the weekly history news roundups. That’s not changing!

I am planning to introduce a new section called Writing History. Since writing my own book, I’ve become increasingly interested in historiography, or the writing of history and the study of that writing. I’m going to begin reviewing history books I read—popular and academic—and talking about the ways that people write history. What tools do we use and how? How is it that two historians can arrive at wildly different opinions of a moment in time? And—because who can escape it?—how do big moments like the upcoming US presidential election impact how we talk about history?

Thanks in advance for voting! I’ll be watching the comments for any other ideas you all may have.

Oh, and if you’re in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, tomorrow (Saturday, August 3rd), I’ll be signing copies of Unruly Figures at Talking Animals Books from 2-4 pm! Swing on by.