Today we’re bringing you a really interesting episode from our friends at This Guy Sucked, a podcast hosted by historian and writer Claire Aubin about the worst people in history. Each episode, Claire sits down with an expert to pull back the scholarly curtain on a terrible person from their research. Because, as they say on the show, it’s never too late to have haters, and you can’t libel the dead.

This particular episode is about the early 20th century filmmaker D. W. Griffith whose 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” led to the resurgence of the KKK among other cultural repercussions we’re still feeling today. Africana studies scholar Kellie Carter Jackson joins the episode to tell us exactly why this guy sucked.

If you like what you hear, you can listen to the rest – and dozens of other great episodes – by searching for “This Guy Sucked” wherever you find podcasts.

Guest

Our guest Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College and host of This Day from Radiotopia. Her book We Refuse is available here.

Sensitive Themes & Topics

Racism and racial violence, slavery, sexual violence

Credits

- Host & Executive Producer: Claire E Aubin.

- Editor: Julia Schifini.

- Music: Marshall Dean Williams

- Multitude: multitude.productions

When Silent Spring came out in 1962, it was an instant best-seller and led to the establishment of the EPA, as well as the ban of harmful pesticides such as DDT. But Rachel Carson’s seminal work also shifted our way of thinking about nature. For the first time, the environment was not just something out there that could be tracked and measured, but something that lived inside all of us.

You can read a transcript of this episode on our website, and visit learn more about the topics brought up in this episode.

• Check out our booklist with books recommended for this episode.
• This episode was a collaboration with the podcast Thresholds. You can listen to Jordan Kisener’s full interview with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson here. And check out Johnson’s new book, What If We Get It Right?
• Read Bob Musil’s book, Rachel Carson and Her Sisters, and learn more about the Rachel Carson Council.
• Read Rachel Frazin’s book, Poisoning the Well, which she co-wrote with Sharon Udasin.
• Watch Rachel Carson’s full speech to the National Women’s Democratic Club in 1962.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer who documents the extremes, from nightclubs to war zones. She’s also the author of several books, including Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun, a memoir of the Syrian War co-written with Marwan Hisham. We sat down with Crabapple to talk about the difference between words and images, making art in the world, and the power of cartoonists to disrupt fascism.

You can read a transcript of this episode here. And check out the following links:

• Check out our booklist with books recommended for this episode.
• Read Molly Crabapple’s Drawing Blood, and you can pre-order her new book about the Jewish Labor Bund.
• See Molly’s drawings and articles about the Dallas Six and the NYC taxi driver strike. You can also read Molly’s interview with Art Spiegelman.
• Art Spiegelman’s comic collaboration with Joe Sacco was published in The New York Review of Books earlier this year. You can check out Sacco’s Palestine and his more recent War on Gaza from the library.