Saturday, December 20, 2025

657. Scott Tilton, Part 1.

657. Part 1 of our conversation with Scott Tilton. Scott is the Co-Founder and Director of the Nous Foundation, a platform for exchange between Louisiana and the French-speaking world. He lived the past several years in Paris where he worked as a consultant at Ernst & Young France on projects for the European Union, the UN, and the French Government. While in Paris, Scott launched and spearheaded an initiative that saw Louisiana become the first U.S. state to join the International Organization of the Francophonie (La Francophonie).

Friday, December 12, 2025

656. Joseph Makkos, part 2.

656. Part 2 of our conversation with Joseph Makkos. Joseph is an archivist who manages a rare collection of some 30,000 historic New Orleans Times Picayune newspapers dating from 1880s-1929. Joseph has worked as a printmaker and preservationist, having salvaged and restored historic printing equipment from over a dozen print shops to date. Using these resources he actively runs a design studio in New Orleans that focuses on artful print production and independent book publishing.

Saturday, December 6, 2025

655. Joseph Makkos, part 1

655. Joseph Makkos returns to the porch to talk about his work and an archivist and researcher. He manages a rare collection of some 30,000 historic New Orleans Times Picayune newspapers dating from 1880s-1929. 

Friday, November 28, 2025

654. Liberty in Louisiana Presentation

654. Today we post our presentation on Liberty in Louisiana at the 2025 Louisiana Studies Conference. Liberty in Louisiana by James Workman is the oldest known extant play about Louisiana. Workman wrote the play in 1803 with the goal of supporting the impending Louisiana Purchase.

Friday, November 21, 2025

653. Kathleen DuVal, part 2.

653. Part 2 of our conversation with Kathleen DuVal about her book, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America. “Pulitzer Prize Winner - National Bestseller - A magisterial overview of a thousand years of Native American history” (The New York Review of Books), from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today. Winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Cundill History Prize, and the Mark Lynton History Prize. Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally.

Friday, November 14, 2025

652. Kathleen DuVal, part 1

652. Part 1 of Kathleen DuVal's return to the podcast to talk about her book, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America. “Pulitzer Prize Winner - National Bestseller - A magisterial overview of a thousand years of Native American history (The New York Review of Books), from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today. Winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Cundill History Prize, and the Mark Lynton History Prize. Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.”

Thursday, November 6, 2025

651. Skye Jackson

651. This week we talk to Skye Jackson about her poetry. Skye was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She writes about love, femininity and the challenges of navigating our modern world as a young Black woman. Her work has appeared in Palette Poetry, The Southern Review, RHINO, RATTLE and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook A Faster Grave (2019) and her debut collection of poetry, Libre, which was recently published by Regalo Press and distributed nationally by Simon & Schuster.