Reunion: A Podcast About Family Histories

Reunion is a podcast about how family history helps us understand the past and why it matters in the present. The series is sponsored by the Center for Family History and Genealogy and the Family History Program at Brigham Young University, which offers the only undergraduate degree in family history. Every two weeks we speak with scholars, educators, and storytellers who use family history to ask large questions about history, kinship, and identity. Studying families shows what mattered most to people in the past and how those values shaped the world we inhabit now. Family history is more than names and dates. It is a way to think about memory, emotion, power, and connection. It gives historians a flexible method for understanding subjects that range from slavery and migration to religious conversion and cultural memory. I am Joseph Stuart, joined by my colleague Christopher Jones. We are assistant professors of history and faculty in BYU

Reunion: A Podcast About Family Histories is a history podcast hosted by jstubyu, with 9 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

jstubyu hosts Reunion: A Podcast About Family Histories, a history show with 9 episodes published.

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  Episode #9

  Reunion 009 Family Legacies and Latter day Saint History with Matthew Bowman and Lisa Olsen Tait

  Sep 9, 202645 min

  In the spring of 1906, a young woman named Leah Dunford stood in the parlor of her mother’s Salt Lake City home, watching her husband, John A. Widtsoe, pack for a trip east. He was headed to Cornell to study agricultural chemistry. She was staying behind with their infant son. Leah’s mother, Susa Young Gates, hovered nearby, offering advice, encouragement, and, as always, a steady stream of opinions. Susa had raised Leah to believe that education and motherhood were not opposites but complements. She herself had published books, edited magazines, and lobbied Church leaders, all while raising a large family. Her legacy was one of ambition, faith, and relentless energy. Just a few blocks away, Joseph Fielding Smith was beginning his own journey into Church service. The son of President Joseph F. Smith, Joseph Fielding had grown up in the shadow of prophetic authority. He was quiet, studious, and deeply committed to preserving the doctrines and history of the Church. His legacy would be one of guardianship, of doctrine, of tradition, of a particular vision of what it meant to be a Latter-day Saint. Today, we’re joined by Matthew Bowman and Lisa Olsen Tait to explore how these two figures—Susa Young Gates and Joseph Fielding Smith—shaped and were shaped by the families they came from, and how their stories help us understand the power of family legacies in Latter-day Saint history.

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  Reunion: A Podcast About Family Histories

  Reunion 008: Young and Hemmer: Family, Power, and American Conservatism

  Apr 27, 202652 min

  In the fall of 1949, a young evangelist named Billy Graham pitched a tent in Los Angeles for what he hoped would be a modest three-week revival. Attendance was sparse, and Graham was discouraged. Then, seemingly overnight, everything changed. William Randolph Hearst, the powerful newspaper magnate, sent a two-word telegram to his editors: “Puff Graham.” The next morning, headlines blazed with his name. The tent filled. The revival stretched for weeks and Billy Graham became a national figure. That moment wasn’t just about media savvy. It was about the convergence of faith, family values, and political ambition, a convergence that would shape the rise of the Religious Right. In We Gather Together, Neil J. Young traces how evangelical leaders like Graham helped build a movement that reached from the pulpit to the ballot box. In Partisans, Nicole Hemmer explores how those media, religion, and family fueled the conservative revolution of the 1990s. Today, Nicole and Neil join us to talk about how political movements are born not just in campaigns, but in living rooms, churches, and family trees and how the personal and the political have always been intertwined in the making of American conservatism.

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  Episode #8

  Reunion 008: Young and Hemmer: Family, Power, and American Conservatism

  Apr 27, 202652 min

  In the fall of 1949, a young evangelist named Billy Graham pitched a tent in Los Angeles for what he hoped would be a modest three-week revival. Attendance was sparse, and Graham was discouraged. Then, seemingly overnight, everything changed. William Randolph Hearst, the powerful newspaper magnate, sent a two-word telegram to his editors: “Puff Graham.” The next morning, headlines blazed with his name. The tent filled. The revival stretched for weeks and Billy Graham became a national figure. That moment wasn’t just about media savvy. It was about the convergence of faith, family values, and political ambition, a convergence that would shape the rise of the Religious Right. In We Gather Together, Neil J. Young traces how evangelical leaders like Graham helped build a movement that reached from the pulpit to the ballot box. In Partisans, Nicole Hemmer explores how those media, religion, and family fueled the conservative revolution of the 1990s. Today, Nicole and Neil join us to talk about how political movements are born not just in campaigns, but in living rooms, churches, and family trees and how the personal and the political have always been intertwined in the making of American conservatism.

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  Episode #7

  Reunion 007: Oral Histories with Farina King

  Mar 30, 202643 min

  In a quiet kitchen on the Diné (Navajo Nation) reservation, a grandmother begins to speak. There’s no script, no microphone, just her voice, steady and rich with memory. She tells of boarding schools, of ceremonies held in secret, of laughter shared under desert skies. Her story isn’t written in books or stored in archives. It lives in her words, passed from one generation to the next. For Farina King, these stories are history. In her work as a historian and citizen of the Navajo Nation, she listens to voices often left out of official records. Oral histories, she shows us, are not just sources. They are relationships. They carry emotion, identity, and the power to connect past and present in deeply personal ways. Today, Dr. King joins us to discuss how oral histories transform our understanding of families, communities, and the significance of history itself. We’ll explore how listening, truly listening, can be an act of scholarship, of care, and of cultural survival.

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  Episode #6

  Reunion 006: Sibling Bonds and Lateral Kinship with Amy Harris

  Mar 16, 202641 min

  In eighteenth-century England, not every family story turned on courtship and heirs. Many households were held together by single adults who managed budgets, cared for nieces and nephews, and kept the letters and ledgers that became a family’s memory. Their lives were both social and practical. Music in the parlor. Trips on the Thames. Decisions made around a shared table rather than an altar. When we shift our view from marriage and descent to the bonds among siblings and cousins, we see a different map of kinship. It is lateral. It is durable. It shapes how families work. In today’s episode of Reunion, we explore that world through Amy Harris’s Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried, a study of the Sharp family across three generations that shows how unmarried kin shaped household economies, caregiving, philanthropy, and abolitionist work; it asks us to see aunts and uncles and single siblings as central actors in family governance and legacy, suggests genealogy is about values as much as property, and invites us to read portraits, epitaphs, and paper trails for the stories singles preserved; and Amy Harris joins us to discuss single sociability, householding beyond marriage, and how re-centering lateral kin changes what family history can do.

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