My guest today is Dr. Marshall Poe. He’s the founder and editor of the New Books Network, a podcast network that each month features at least 125 podcasts on a variety of topics, from genocide studies to folklore to Jewish studies to science, technology, and society...and many, many more topics in which to browse freely. Recently NBN has started to "republish" previous episodes from the Historically Thinking archive on their New Books in History podcast.

But, even if Marshall hadn’t been kind enough to do that, I have long wanted to record a conversation with Marshall for at least three reasons. For one thing, he has one of the most interesting Wikipedia bios of any historian, and that presents a way of talking about history and how someone can fall in love with it; and it says something about higher education, as well. He's also recently published a book called How to Read a History Book, which is something every HT listener is interested in doing, sometimes a lot. So I certainly wanted to talk with Marshall about the book, and what's in it.

But most important of all, he’s just as passionate about communicating to people about history and ideas as I am. This might be a little too much of what some people refer to disparagingly as that type of podcast which is just “dudes chatting.” But what we’re chatting about are some of the foundational ideas behind Historically Thinking, and the New Books Network. So, I think it's important, and I certainly enjoyed it. I hope you do as well.