Welcome to the age of discourse dumping, are you dizzy? Do you study emoji eyes to find your facial recognition? Does the world look like a Cubist painting? Is the phrase ‘rubber baby buggy bumper’ starting to make sense? Not to worry. We are here to reassure you that the White Knight is, in fact, talking backwards and the inmates are indeed running the asylum. Our prescription: put the lime in the coconut and drink them both together, listen to Episode 72, and then you’ll feel better. HAG is, after all, the Harry Nilsson of history podcasts, and our very special guest today is Moritz Mihatsch, Cambridge scholar and co-author (with Michael Mulligan) of Shifting Sovereignties (available now). Their terrific new book offers an illuminating journey through the global history of what power has forever wanted you to believe, i.e. that the right folks are in charge. Excavating the meaning of sovereignty from the sedimentary layers of the human past, our guest explains why governing has always relied on a Wizard of Oz-like control over sound and color, equal parts legal pretense and quasi-religious authority, to create cover for whatever power wishes to do. So click your heels twice, repeat “there’s no home like HAG, there’s no home like HAG,” and settle in for more therapeutic historical analysis of a world trying to make us crazy.

Website: History Against the Grain

Opening Theme by Jessie DeCarlo

Music Interludes:

Gil Scott Heron and Makaya McCraven: "Running"

Darkside: "American References"