Episode 15: Jeremiah Johnson with Jacob Lee

This week Jacob Lee joins Historians At The Movies to talk about the myth of the mountain man on film via 1972's Jeremiah Johnson and 2015's The Revenant. Basically, these films are beautifully shot and largely full of shit. But that doesn't mean we can't enjoy them. Jacob and I talk a lot about the borderlands, sexual representation on film, and the role movies like these have in shaping the ways people think about American history. And of course, THE GIF.

About our guest:
Dr. Jacob Lee is  historian of early America and the American West, focusing on colonialism and borderlands and assistant professor of history at Penn State University.  His first book, Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi embedded intertwined Native and imperial histories in the physical landscape of Middle America, a vast region encompassing much of the central Mississippi River valley. His second project returns to the region, which is a history of the Louisiana Purchase, tentatively titled An Empire Without Bounds: How the United States Conquered the Louisiana Purchase. In 1803, when the U.S. purchased claim to more than 800,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River, it possessed only the most tenuous hold on the region. This project explores the decades of negotiation and compromise, conquest and violence that followed, the processes by which the U.S. established and maintained authority over its western claims, and the ways that Native peoples and colonists limited imperial power in the American West.