During the spring 2026 semester, Department of History lecturer Shannan Mason surprised students with a special project for the 250th anniversary of the United States. Instead of writing papers, they would create a podcast.
They called it The Fine Print: Framing the American Revolution and Republic at 250. Students worked in groups to create 12 educational episodes across two courses taught by Mason: HIST 371: American Revolution and HIST 372: American Republic. Mason said the 250th provided the perfect frame to explore and demystify the narratives surrounding the formation and early years of the nation.
Each episode explores a point of change in early American history, examining topics like native sovereignty, westward growth, slavery, land and labor policy, and more. Instead of presenting simple stories with obvious heroes and villains, students tracked how ideas like freedom, citizenship, democracy, land, and power were argued and reshaped over time. They also had to learn how to present the nuances of those ideas within their historical context, how to construct historical arguments, and how to present research to a public audience.
The project was a prime example of the transferrable skills that a degree in history provides: the ability to understand complex ideas and communicate those complexities to others. Students also practiced skills in audio recording, editing, script writing, production planning, timeline creation, and transcription.
Mason designed the project as an opportunity to practice another key career skill: the ability to create something without many guidelines. She gave students a broad framework, milestones to meet, shared workspaces, and tutorials on software, but the rest was up to them. She said some students found the freedom daunting and had to learn to lean into the challenge.
“I think a lot of times they think that discomfort is a bad thing instead of resting with it and pushing themselves beyond it,” said Mason. “And to me that is when you do the best work.”
For Brenden Crowson, a senior majoring in history with a minor in political science, the project was an opportunity to diversify his abilities as a historian. He worked on episode eight, National Debates Over Money, Land, and Sovereignty in the Era of Jackson, with Grant Bossler, Marcie Baron, and Elly Cruz.
“I think these types of classes are really fun because they break up the monotony [of history papers] and they force you to do a different style of research, a different style of writing and researching,” said Crowson.
For JP Moore, a senior majoring in history and political science, the project was an opportunity to practice communicating nuance to a non-expert audience. His group, which also included Peyton Brehm, Noah Schroeder, and Wesley Connell, chose to cover the Lincoln-Douglas Debates because they thought the debates would create a compelling narrative for the listener and were representative of the questions the country was facing at the time.
Moore’s section of the episode examined the rhetoric of Lincoln and Douglas and he said he was careful to present the complexities of their positions and the responses to them within the context of their time, a challenging needle to thread when presenting work to a public audience.
“I honed in on my process of bringing my thoughts together in a way that is palatable and that works towards a more of a narrative ... and not just an argument I'm telling on a piece of paper to a professor who knows everything about my topic,” he said.
Both Moore and Crowson said they enjoyed collaborating with their fellow historians and gaining more experience working in a group, noting that it’s not an opportunity that history students get often. In addition to collaborating within their own groups, students also provided feedback on other groups’ work, creating more cohesion across all episodes of the podcast.
In the future, both students think the skills they gained in the course will help them throughout their careers. After serving in the military, Moore eventually hopes to become a history teacher. Crowson plans to go to law school.
Mason said she wanted students to come away from the project with an understanding of how transferrable the skills of history are to other fields and be able to communicate that value to future employers, which she sees as increasingly important in a time when the humanities are devalued.
“I want to create opportunities for them to know exactly what outcomes they are capable of producing,” she said. “Even if it's not the best product on the face of the planet, they're still showing, I can do this thing and I can work with other people as a team and I can build something because that is what you have to show people to get a job.”
She hopes to repeat the project in future courses and might pair it with creating a museum exhibit.
“I think it worked out really well. They did a great job,” she said.