Perhaps the most sampled podcaster in my daily blog posts is historian/professor Brion McClanahan. I am not an historian but in my own academic writings I pride myself on my readability, originality, nature and scope of detail (especially familiarity with original sources), and interdisciplinary approach. I see some of the same things in McClanahan's work. He shows an encyclopedic knowledge of American history beyond what I learned in school and college. Whether we are talking debates over the adoption of the US Constitution and its amendments, nuances of the Confederacy, or a hundred other topics in his daily podcast, I learn things I didn't know listening to Brion, even though I had a decent background in American history.
It's difficult to explain the distinction. My own academic discipline looks at behavioral aspects of IT design, management and use. So, for instance, we might attempt to measure constructs like computer user satisfaction. The applied psychology literature might, among other things, include construct measures and validation/reliability assessments. Generally, most doctoral students learn the basics of research design, statistical analysis and power. This doesn't mean all study aspects are transparent, or you have, for example, a background in psychometrics. Even journal reviewers may lack that level of expertise. Now in a research seminar. you might be analyzing scores of key empirical research studies in your disciplines and really don't have the time to white-box everything (you rely on the competence of the reviewers and editors, to require details of study materials); . But it really wasn't until I started designing my own measures, ordering copies of dissertations through inter-library loans, and contacting other academics over their studies, that I realized "the emperor is wearing no clothes". I once wrote a related (but still unpublished) paper, concerned that other researchers were using dubious measures; I suspect that the paper got reviewed by others vested in the measures; it got rejected with reviews filled with cheap shots at me personally, e.g., "instead of criticizing the user satisfaction scales of other people, why don't you do something constructive like develop one of your own?" Yes, academicians can be petty. I had, of course, considered that separately, but I was in a tenure-track position my first 4 years as a professor and was job hunting my last 3 years in academia. But my paper was solid, and I stand behind it (I'm tempted to republish it, I would have to dig it out from storage, and I've been out of academia for a while, so I would probably need to update it.)
So why am I mentioning McClanahan? I have no doubt with his superb mastery of detail he could have written scores of scholarly articles in key academic journals. I don't know much about his academic career beyond his doctorate at South Carolina; I think his day job is teaching at a community college. I suspect some of his areas of expertise, i.e., Southern heritage, are politically incorrect, but I suspect top university openings are very limited and competitive even without PC culture in academia. My first love is philosophy, but despite a perfect GPA in a challenging discipline, as a 19-year-old college senior, I was given "the talk": there was little demand for professional philosophers and limited demand for professors, mostly openings for attrition (like retirements).
I changed my opinion of St. Abraham Lincoln growing up, in large part to facts presented by McClanahan, DiLorenzo, and others. I think I may have been aware that Lincoln abused constitutional rights in office, but the inferred context is crap happens in a civil war. But you can't explain away facts like his first inaugural address made it clear he was more concerned about losing Southern tariff revenue than abolishing slavery in the South, that the guy who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation had only "freed" slaves in states he didn't control (not in the Union slave states) and had earlier noted he had no constitutional authority to free slaves. You have a President responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1M Americans.
But McClanahan went beyond the criticisms of just 1 President in a "popular non-fiction" book published a few years ago: "Nine Presidents Who Screwed Up America—And Four Who Tried to Save Her". Unlike many of his peers, McClanahan evaluates Presidents by fidelity to their enumerated powers of the Constitution and a limited general government, not the elected monarch for life Alexander Hamilton argued for before the Constitutional Convention.
In Sunday's podcast, he identified his 5 worst Presidents (no, Lincoln isn't rated #1, and he doesn't list either Obama or Trump).
We have some questionable choices for federal holidays (Labor Day vs. Capital?), but it also seems odd in our democratic republic where all men are created equal that we single out one of the 3 branches of government. And to be honest, not one President in my lifetime (and I'm probably older than most readers) is worthy of recognition. Reagan probably comes closest, at least from a standpoint of political philosophy, but his Administration betrayed serious liberty principles.
