Nostalgia Trap is a podcast that features interviews with historians, journalists, artists, teachers, friends, and family. The hosts, David Parsons, are also an adjunct professor and a historian of the Vietnam War Era. They started Nostalgia Trap in 2014 as a place to present long-form interviews with academics, from big famous historians to graduate students and adjunct professors, about their research and ideas and politics, since theres not much space in legacy media (or really, anywhere else) for that sort of thing. The guests on the show dive into a wide range of historical topics, from the environmental impact of the Civil War to the politics of sex work, from Great Depression-era collective housing experiments to 1990s grunge culture, from Charles Manson’s CIA connections to the political economy of mega celebrities like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. One subject that comes up frequently on the show is the jobs crisis in higher education. They are part of a growing generation of Ph.D.s, particularly in the humanities, who have been left out of stable, full-time employment, as schools depend more on part-time, contract labor to teach courses. Like many others, they work as an adjunct instructor at a number of different institutions, an experience that may not be lucrative but at least produces the occasional viral tweet.
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