The Night I Almost Killed The Whole Damn Thing....and What Comes Next

Our Community and the Future of Historians At The Movies

I’ll burn it all to the ground.

Those were my thoughts in June of this year. Reeling from a breakup that damn near killed me, I decided to bring #HATM to a close.

After all, if I am expendable, then shouldn’t the same be for what I have created?

Four years in, and I was tired. I joke about how I had no plans for Historians At The Movies to take off like it did, but it’s true. I thought on July 15, 2018 that we’d watch National Treasure and that would be the end of it. Maybe show something again in a month. I did not anticipate every week, sometimes more than every week. I did not anticipate this community.

I was ready for a break. Some nights even I didn’t want to watch the movie. But I came back, as I expect many of you did, for the community.

This community got me through a lot. First through the loneliness of being in Lake Placid, Florida (population: my ex-wife and kids, a Golden Corral, and a bunch of gopher tortoises). Then through losing things I’m not prepared to address here.

Even so, I was ready to walk. #HATM felt stagnant. I was lazily updating the website, weekly numbers seemed to plateau, I worried my schtick was getting old. I wanted my Sunday nights back to fish but really to just be alone.

I’d end things in July. I announced we’d be done after our fourth birthday. One last go at National Treasure.

But this community. The outpouring of support was more than I expected too. Many of you asked that I continue HATM. Others congratulated me on the run. Others said you understood.

I’m being an asshole.

Somewhere I knew that my desire for self immolation was poor in choice. That torpedoing the thing that we created was the decision of a child. And bastardly one at that. So the show, as they say, will carry on.

However, the summer allowed me time to reconsider what HATM is, has been, and can be. I’ve always said that first and foremost this is a community and it belongs to all of us. It is and does. But after four and a half years we must grow. We must evolve. If only, if you don’t mind, so I can find out what we can be.

I was in bed before I got up to write this. But knew that this message had to go tonight. Now.

So what comes next? This post probably represents the most obvious change. I’ll be writing. A lot. For a guy trained in a completely different field of history, leaning into pop culture and memory and how those forces change us and affect the decisions we make can be a frightening idea. Good. Let us be scared. Let us do the things anyway.

The HATM website will soon be revamped. I want a new level of functionality to it. I want to use it as a way to promote other scholars who have become such an important part of this community. For some, such as jake Blackwell and Rachel Gunter, become doesn’t even begin to describe them, since they have been here since the beginning.

And then there is the podcast. You’ve heard me trumpeting this idea recently. I’d been toying with it for about 18 months and had yet to try because I felt maybe it might be cliche. There are lots of podcasts. What makes this one different? The answer is this community. I was simply afraid of failing. Of investing the time that HATM is demanding of me.

That’s alright. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. By that I mean that we cannot be afraid of what could happen. There is only what we have before us.

The Historians At The Movies Podcast will aim to launch on December 7, 2022. We have a slate of awesome people and movies coming up. I think if you’ll give us time, you’ll like what we come up with.

There are other projects I’m considering as well. We are going to change things around here. We are going to push this.

As hard as we can.

I’ll have more thoughts in the future to share with you, but for now allow me to share one thing: I’m glad you’re along for the ride. Buckle up.