Sky High

and dead tired

Rolled into the house this afternoon after three days at Walt Disney World and I was exhausted. I’ll write more on this later¹ but it was a great trip that offered me more questions about how American history is memorialized at the parks and how in turn, American history shaped the rise of the Walt Disney empire.² I had just enough time to run to the new Publix across the street since seeing the manatees at EPCOT reminded me that I needed to lose weight.³ Nevertheless, I persisted in getting HATM going tonight, even if I’m at levels of exhaustion that I haven’t felt for at least a week.⁴

I hadn’t planned on showing Air tonight, but I saw it last week and thought it was really good. Besides, any chance to get Viola Davis in front of the audience is a good thing. I’m thinking about movies like this also as an opportunity to provide a resource for our viewers and maybe anyone who might read this substack. So what can I do here? Well, this movie is about capitalism and marketing and relationships, so I figured I’d create a reading list from HATM viewers. Suggestions on books you can check out. The being said, here is the first HATM History of Capitalism reading list (with links attached):⁵

• Hannah Farber, Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding

• Thomas Pinketty, Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021

• Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire

• William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

• Timothy D. Taylor, The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture

• Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

• Bart Elmore, Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet

• Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

• Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

• Nan Enstad, Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism

If you’ve got suggestions, folks should be reading, post them below- we’d love to see them!

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This week on HATM Podcast

Good lord did I bite off more than I can chew. But I’ve got some tremendous podcasts lined up to record this week including films such as The Witch (Mikki Brock), Ray (Michael Hattem), and Kingdom of Heaven (Thomas Lecaque, John Wyatt Greenlee, David Perry, and Matt Gabriele in what should be a Royal Rumble of medievalists, which me the lone Americanist, ready to offer a chair if someone needs it).

Speaking of Lecaque and Greenlee, we released our 25th episode last week, talking about 1999’s The 13th Warrior. This podcast was so much fun and in a lot of ways what I want it to be: using movies as a way to talk about history in ways that vary between serious, silly, and everything in between.

Here is the Spotify link (Apple link not working tonight but you can find it there too) if you haven’t checked them out yet. I hope you enjoy.

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HATM

This week we celebrate the 40th birthday of Return of the Jedi, so I hope you’ll join in at 8pm eastern this Sunday, May 28 on twitter to livetweet the film, which you can find on Disney+.

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Alright, that’s all I got in me tonight. Thanks for sharing this substack and continuing to support the pod. If there’s films you want on the pod or on the Sunday night HATM nights, let me know! Ciao for now.

1. Mostly because I want a tax write off.

2. Do not expect balanced reporting here; I’m a Disney homer for life.

3. I realize now that manatees pretty much eat only salad and still weigh a bazillionty pounds and that’s before I add bacon to mine so I might be in trouble here. Stay tuned.

4. Welcome to your 40s, kids!

5. As always, no profit here on these links. Just sharing with you. :)