Jeff Roche

speaker

654 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 20 Dec

Jeff Roche’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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New Books in History · Jeff Roche, "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025) · 20 Dec 2025 podcast

So I messed around with a bunch of different approaches, a historiographic essay, and I've written a couple of those, and I didn't like it.

Then little sort of paragraph essays for each chapter.

And then I finally thought, what if I just boiled everything down?

to the five things that made the biggest impact on me in subjects, but most particularly in chapters.

And then I thought, well, what if I just have the top five books that influenced my thinking?

These aren't necessarily the five...

essential books that someone needs to read about anti-communism in the 1950s.

Instead, the top five books that influenced my thinking as I put that chapter together.

And then I expanded it out to another list of five alternative kinds of sources.

Because one of the things that I found myself

relying on and and um enjoying were different kinds of cultural artifacts that made me think differently so so a quick example so for example um in the in the chapter in the dust bowl i was really influenced by the paintings of alexander hogue and the poetry of archibald mcleish

These aren't necessarily the kinds of sources that historians would go to to find out about the Dust Bowl, but they had a really serious impact on the way I viewed the Dust Bowl.

So I organized a bibliography around these top five lists, the first one for every chapter and then a few more lists for larger subjects like conservatism in general and Texas politics in general.

And once I got there, I found the challenge to create a working bibliography a really enjoyable exercise because it forced me to go back and say, you know, what really did impact my thinking on these subjects?

And, you know, what were the books that sort of – or the articles that turned my head in a way?

So it became personal, almost biographical in terms of the biography of the relationship that –

historian has with their sources and with the book at large.

And recognizing the limitation of that and also desirous of producing something

valuable to other historians, especially historians of this part of the world where the historiography is, you know, less full than something like, you know, politics in Georgia or something.

I took the massive Zotero bibliography that I had created and put it all on my website.

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