All Each Other Has
History Podcasts
Two sisters Ellie and Carrie Monahan (the former a millennial, the latter on the Gen Z cusp) analyze topics like fame by proxy, sleep-away camp in the American imagination, their adolescence of Carnegie Hill etiology, Sontag's portents of the influencer economy, dialectical thinking, cyberbullies, the enduring power of Madame Alexander dolls, and more. Done through a sometimes academic, often solipsistic lens. They love each other, and love you for listening.
Location:
United States
Genres:
History Podcasts
Description:
Two sisters Ellie and Carrie Monahan (the former a millennial, the latter on the Gen Z cusp) analyze topics like fame by proxy, sleep-away camp in the American imagination, their adolescence of Carnegie Hill etiology, Sontag's portents of the influencer economy, dialectical thinking, cyberbullies, the enduring power of Madame Alexander dolls, and more. Done through a sometimes academic, often solipsistic lens. They love each other, and love you for listening.
Language:
English
Episodes
Memento Mori: On Discounting, Discarding & Displaying Remains
3/15/2023
The sisters conclude their death and spectacle series with further thoughts on the dead deprived of commemoration. From the repository of graves on New York City’s Hart Island to the erasure of historic Black cemeteries in the American South, they explore the ways in which human remains are stratified, relegated and discarded in ways that lay bare the injustice of life.
Or, in the case of Body Worlds, forever plastinated and displayed for public view—without their owners’ consent—in what...
Duration:01:20:26
The Baddest Mormon: A Conversation with Heather Gay
3/2/2023
In this VERY special episode, Ellie and Carrie speak with The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’s Heather Gay about her brave and beautiful new memoir “Bad Mormon.” The book chronicles Heather’s journey from a devout Mormon to a disillusioned apostate to an ass-kicking mother, businesswoman and reality star. Born in the covenant—a Mormon flex—Gay grew up determined to prove she was a “good girl” worthy of a spot in the celestial kingdom. But time and time again, her big personality and even...
Duration:00:48:18
The Unmarked: Castes of Remembrance and the American Deathscape
2/24/2023
In part three of their Death and Spectacle series, Carrie and Ellie explore the inequity of American commemoration and how it deprives the marginalized, even in death. They discuss the corrupt dealings behind public works projects such as Lake Eufaula, which led to the forcible removal of native peoples and the flooding of their history. In the context of the discovery of countless children’s remains near residential schools and an official record of 9/11 fatalities that excludes the...
Duration:01:06:52
The Politics of Victimhood: Two Sisters on 9/11, National Memory, and Tragedy as a Spectacle
2/9/2023
In Part Two of their series on spectacular death, Ellie and Carrie speak with sisters Jessica and Leila Murphy, who lost their father Brian in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He was 41 years old, Jessica 5 and Leila almost 4. Since that terrible day, Jessica and Leila have had to grow up not only without a father but also with the complexities that come with losing him in the attacks. From their inability to grieve privately to the invocation of their...
Duration:01:40:06
The Memory Museum: Death and Spectacle, Part 1
1/27/2023
CW: Sensitive content regarding 9/11, terrorism, genocide, racial violence, spectacular death, dark tourism.
The sisters return from winter hiatus with an episode about atrocity, human suffering, spectacular death and how we choose to memorialize and regard the pain of others. Focusing primarily on the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, they ask — can we look back on catastrophe without becoming voyeuristic consumers? Can we honor victims without turning them into commodities? Can morbid curiosity...
Duration:01:18:26
TS 10: 3 AM
12/8/2022
In the third and final episode in their Taylor Swift retrospective, Ellie and Carrie examine the seven songs that comprise the 3am Version of the Midnights album. They discuss the artistic differences between songs produced by Swift collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner and the merits of pop versus more naturalistic music. They pull excerpts from Taylor’s highly personal, thoughtfully constructed NYU address and consider the role Taylor continues to play in their sisterhood and...
Duration:00:42:26
We Knew She Was a Mastermind: The "Midnights" Breakdown
12/1/2022
This week, Ellie and Carrie continue their exploration of the Taylor metaverse by dissecting tracks 1-13 of the Midnights album. They discuss Taylor’s favorite images and leitmotifs — cages, towns, rain, the color gold, etc. — that recur throughout her discography and contextualize this album as part of a larger body of work. They mine her sonic imagery to examine how a song’s style might reinforce its substance and search for hidden meaning behind her poetic expression. But most...
Duration:01:12:58
You Grew Up With Me: A Swiftie Bildungsroman
11/18/2022
After a monthlong reprieve, Ellie and Carrie return to discuss their all time favorite artist, Taylor Swift, and her lasting hold over American music and popular culture. The sisters discuss their relationship with Taylor over the past twelve years, from the release of her eponymous album in 2006 to her latest studio album Midnights, which, in the month since it was dropped, has shattered records and quite literally, broken the internet. Or Ticketmaster, at least. They chart a musical...
Duration:00:52:03
Hauntings & Historiography
10/22/2022
In this special spooky episode, Ellie and Carrie discuss the cultural logic of hauntings in both American history and their own lives. They grapple with childhood notions of their late father's ghost, something Carrie feared and Ellie denied. Understanding hauntings as living loss, they bring in the work of historian Tiya Miles, whose book Tales from the Haunted South offers ghost stories as potentially radical works of historiography that often deal with narratives left out of the official...
Duration:01:17:57
Labore et Virtute et Dolore: Trinity School NYC
10/14/2022
Duration:01:05:48
Unscalable: from Prep for Prep to Andover
10/7/2022
For the second-to-last episode in our private school series, our guest Kayla narrates her journey from a New Jersey public school to the total environment of Phillips Academy — Andover. Growing up middle class in the suburbs, Kayla’s entry into Prep for Prep’s “Prep 9” program meant a 90-minute commute to the big city and a newfound sense of class consciousness. Getting to know her Prep peers, largely from low-income backgrounds, was a lesson in economic inequality. When she got to Andover,...
Duration:00:52:26
Table Stakes: Krittika on Prep for Prep
9/30/2022
This episode in our NYC private school series features a very special guest, Krittika, who was Carrie's classmate at Spence. Her pragmatic parents, who met at university in India and raised Krittika and her brother Josh in Queens, always knew they'd have to do the most to circumvent the failings of the New York City public school system when it came to their own kids' education. They found Prep for Prep, a program founded by educator Gary Simons in 1978 to identify New York City’s most...
Duration:00:47:59
Fractured Identity: A Black Spence Alumna Looks Back
9/23/2022
In the third episode of our NYC private school series, Ellie and Carrie speak with Alyssa, a Black Spence alumna whose experience of growing up in uneasy proximity to whiteness was lonely and damaging. Alyssa, whose family represented what Caitlin Flanagan describes as "the bread and butter of these schools... the two-career couple who care greatly about their children’s education and can afford it, but not easily," struggled to fit in with her wealthier white peers. A light-skinned Black...
Duration:01:25:01
NYC Prep: The Middle School Years
9/16/2022
In the second episode of their New York City private school series, Ellie and Carrie move on from the dreamland of Spence lower school to the hell scape of middle school materialism and accelerated adolescence. We start with the joys and horrors of Knicker Bocker, where we, white-gloved, danced with tiny boys who, to us, were gods. Where are Pierre (FKA Peter of New Jersey) and "the lovely Ms. Yvonne" now? With our first-ever guest Jess, we hear about her transition from a city public school...
Duration:00:45:04
Non Scholae Sed Vitae: A Brief Introduction
9/9/2022
In part one of what will be sizable series, Ellie and Carrie introduce the obscene world of Manhattan private schools, using Caitlin Flanagan's 2021 Atlantic article to guide their discussion. Recalling their educational experience, namely at Spence in this episode, is not so simple: these institutions made them who they are by cultivating their creativity, instilling in them a curiosity for the world around them, and igniting in them a love of learning (hey, Carrie still remembers her...
Duration:00:40:23
Boneless Girl
8/19/2022
In another quasi-episode (sorry, we are preparing for a 23-person family reunion at Mom's house), Carrie reads a piece she wrote called "Boneless Girl," named for a disturbing miniclip.com game she played as a child in the aughts. Exploring the scourge of 2000s "bubblegum misogyny" (see Constance Grady in Vox, 2021) and its effect on the minds of young girls like the writer herself, the essay reflects on how the public's dissociative seeing of celebutantes like Paris, Nicole, Mischa, and...
Duration:00:53:39
Doll Play, Part 3: Packaging the Past with American Girl
8/12/2022
In the final installment of Ellie and Carrie's "doll play" trilogy, the sisters discuss the American Girl doll line, from its Pleasant Company origins in the pages of mail-order catalogues to its transformation, with the help of Mattel, into a consumerist behemoth of popcorn machines, solipsistic look-like-me dolls and other forms of late-capitalist foolishness. They focus on "Selling Multicultural Girlhood: The American Girl Doll, 1986 to Present," the final chapter of Molly Rosner's 2021...
Duration:01:02:34
Doll Play, Part 2: Bratz and the New Millennium
8/5/2022
Using Lisa Guerrero's 2009 article “Can the Subaltern Shop? The Commodification of Difference in the Bratz Dolls” as a framework, Carrie and Ellie discuss MGA Entertainment's introduction of the Bratz line in 2001 and the alternative vision of femininity and style it offered young girls in the new millennium. Guerrero explores four spaces of critical inquiry: the Bratz' paradoxical investment in racial identities, gender and sexuality politics, the influence of consumerism/commodity culture,...
Duration:00:52:04
Doll Play, Part 1: The Cultural Logic of Barbie
7/29/2022
Ellie and Carrie recall their time spent world building with Barbie, Ken, Midge, Skipper, Christie, et al. Using Molly Rosner’s “Playing With History: American Identities and Children’s Consumer Culture” (Rutgers University Press, 2021) as a framework, they introduce Barbie dolls as "didactic amusements” instructing girls on what it means to be feminine and introducing them to their identities as American consumers. What do cultural artifacts like Barbie tell us about the world in which they...
Duration:00:47:10
Ellie Getting Married: A Retrospective
7/22/2022
In this quasi-episode, which takes a break from the show's usual history and theory, the sisters recall Ellie's wedding to Mark last summer, with Carrie reading her maid of honor speech once again. Ellie reacts and answers some questions about marriage.
Duration:00:47:40