Episode 86: National Treasure with Joanne Freeman and The Wibberleys

Historians At The Movies

Happy 6th birthday to HATM! This week we have something special for you: the film that started it all! And as a bonus, we asked the screenwriters of National Treasure, Cormac and Marianne Wibberley to join me and Joanne Freeman to talk about the creation of the film, what it has to say about history, and the movie's legacy. This is a fun time.
About our guests:
Cormac and Marianne Wibberley are a screenwriting team with multiple credits to their name including National Treasure, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and Bad Boyz II.
Joanne Freeman is is Professor of History at Yale University and specializes in the politics and political culture of the revolutionary and early national periods of American History. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press), won the Best Book award from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and her edited volume, Alexander Hamilton: Writings (Library of America) was one of the Atlantic Monthly’s “best books” of 2001. Her current project, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America, explores physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830 and the Civil War, and what it suggests about the institution of Congress, the nature of American sectionalism, the challenges of a young nation’s developing democracy, and the longstanding roots of the Civil War.