Episode 24- A Dive into The Art of History with Jim Ambuske

Today, we discuss the journey of Jim Ambuske! Thank you for joining our journey through the arts. Like we always say "Pursuing your Passions is a Bitch... But it's worth it!"

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His Website- https://www.jamespambuske.com/

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Transcript

The Rogue Scientist Productions (00:01.698)
Thank you and welcome to pursuing your passions as a bitch. I am your host Charles Dock from the owner of the road scientist productions and the author of the world beyond an ongoing story on Kindle Vella. With me I have my guest Jim Ambusty the podcaster and host of the world turned upside down Jim.

Jim Ambuske (00:23.714)
Charles, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (00:27.086)
Great, and I am really happy and excited to have you on our show today. One thing that I saw and was very interested in is based on your podcast details and my obsession of my fiance when it comes to the story of Outlander and the history revolving around the Revolutionary War and the Scottish people's migration towards the Northeast.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (00:55.954)
So we're very excited to kind of get your deed, get some information about your process and everything when it comes to being a historian and being very accurate in terms of flushing out the time period and making sure you're accurate in your deductions on everything that kind of happens.

Jim Ambuske (01:18.798)
Yeah, that sounds great. Happy to talk about all of that.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (01:22.418)
Perfect. So the first thing I wanted to ask so what got you into being a historian in the first place?

Jim Ambuske (01:31.418)
It's a fun question. And originally in a former life, I wanted to be an aerospace engineer. My grandfather worked for Wright-Peterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. And so I grew up around the Air Force Museum and airplanes and he developed and worked on numerous fighters and bombers in his time. And so I wanted to be an aerospace engineer. One of the key things that you need to be able to do as an aerospace engineer is you need to be able to do math.

Jim Ambuske (01:57.89)
I cannot do math very well. And so if you don't do math well as an aerospace engineer, planes might fall out of the sky. And fortunately though, I had a passion for history early on, particularly American history. And when I graduated from high school, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to major in in college and I settled on political science and history. Still wasn't sure what I wanted my career to be, but eventually I ended up becoming a historian after doing a master's degree.

Jim Ambuske (02:27.442)
at my alma mater at Miami University in Ohio, and then I did a PhD at the University of Virginia down here in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (02:36.466)
Oh, perfect. And that's actually one thing I always remember from school is when they say that if you're not good at math or science, you're always good at English or history. Like those two different sides of the brain are kind of connected. So

Jim Ambuske (02:51.402)
Yeah, evidently that was true for me.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (02:54.27)
Yeah, exactly. So one thing that I kind of wanted to ask, so one thing that you've mentioned in the past that you specialize in is the status migration of the people coming from Scotland to the Northeast and the Revolutionary War. So what kind of really kind of drew you to that kind of timeframe in history?

Jim Ambuske (03:20.882)
I was drawn to early American history first. I was always very interested in the founding generation as a kid, and especially in college. And I grew up at a time right around when David McCalla published John Adams, which is a marvelous work in many ways, but it was really inspirational for a lot of people to get into history or to take history more seriously. And for me to contemplate

Jim Ambuske (03:48.442)
studying history and pursuing it as a career. And so I always had that kind of background in early American history, the era of the American Revolution, really interested in why American colonists choose to break from Britain in the 18th century when things seemed more or less to be going their way. You know, what choices do they have to make? How did that affect indigenous populations or enslaved people? Trying to come to terms with the

Jim Ambuske (04:15.134)
Revolution and the war that creates the United States in the late 18th century the Scotland Connection was in a sense by accident. My wife happens to be a historian as well She studies the Tudor period of England. So Henry the eighth Elizabeth the first those sorts of folks and She was a few years ahead of me in her PhD program and I went with her one winter on her first major research trip and we took a

Jim Ambuske (04:43.074)
a side trip to Edinburgh in Scotland. And when we toured the castle, and if you've ever been to Edinburgh, the castle is on the remains of an ancient volcano. It's very prominent and you can see it from all around in the city. In the castle, they interpret the dungeon as it was during the American War for Independence when some American sailors were captured and held there as prisoners of war.

Jim Ambuske (05:09.29)
And on the wooden door to the dungeon, you can see and scrolled that one of the prisoners had drawn an early stars and stripes. And I was kind of hooked. Originally I thought I would do a project about those sailors trying to understand what their lives were like, who they were, and there wasn't a whole lot of archival evidence I could find. But through the process of looking around for archival evidence for that project, I came across.

Jim Ambuske (05:37.542)
all these stories about Scots migrating to the colonies in the second half of the 18th century and of Scots in the colonies encouraging their friends and families back home to come over. And equally importantly, I found documents of politicians and jurists and other people in Scotland and Britain as a whole arguing that immigration to the colonies in this particular moment.

Jim Ambuske (06:05.39)
In the 1760s when the first stirrings of trouble between Great Britain and the colonies emerge, that the immigration of people from Scotland would somehow deprive Scotland and thus Great Britain of labor resources and of potential military resources, all to the colonies benefit. And so I wanted to understand why people were leaving, what their motivations were, where they were going. And as importantly, understanding why people...

Jim Ambuske (06:35.138)
thought that they might need to try to stop them. And that's set me on my journey to my dissertation, which looks at Scottish immigration from Scotland to the colonies as a kind of political and an imperial crisis that is alongside the story that we all know about the Stamp Act and the Tea Party and the Boston Massacre, all taking place at the same time, but all part of a larger.

Jim Ambuske (07:04.302)
transformation of the British Empire in the 18th century that produces a revolution and eventually a war for independence.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (07:13.378)
Yeah. And wow, that's actually really interesting in terms of just Scotland in general, just trying to like just undermine the British parliament in general. But you can kind of see that because, and I apologize if my knowledge on this is a little off, just because it's, my knowledge on it's more based off of what I've kind of seen.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (07:38.082)
published in different ways, but it wasn't that long ago before the Revolutionary War that Scotland had the Battle of Culloden, correct?

Jim Ambuske (07:50.006)
Mm-hmm. That's absolutely right. So, 1745, 1746 is the last Jacobite uprising. And the Jacobite uprising, as some of your listeners may know, was the last major attempt by Scots and some Englishmen who were loyal to the House of Stuart to try to depose King George the Second, so King George the Third's grandfather, try to depose King George the Second.

Jim Ambuske (08:17.446)
and put a Stuart monarch back on the throne. The Stuarts had been deposed, or at least James II had been deposed in the late 17th century. And through various processes, the last legitimate Stuart monarch had died in Queen Anne in the early 18th century. And the throne passed to the House of Hanover, so George I, II, and III.

Jim Ambuske (08:42.77)
Scots, some Scots in 1745, largely concentrated in the Western Highlands and Islands with some allies in England and with the support of the French attempt to take back the throne and install the rightful king in its place. So you're right, it's kind of interesting and ironic that 20 years before the troubles begin between Great Britain and the colonies.

Jim Ambuske (09:09.378)
There is a major rebellion in Great Britain itself that the British army has to put down, and they do successfully and quite brutally at the Battle of Culloden. And then, interestingly enough and ironically enough, in some ways, a lot of these Scots who were rebels in that period, quote unquote, rebels, in the Jacobite uprising, later stay loyal to the crown, either through military service or after they immigrate to the colonies in North America.

Jim Ambuske (09:38.798)
in the 1760s. And so you've got this kind of weird, interesting series of events that seem to sort of all exist alongside of each other, are informing each other, and are shaping the choices that the people that I'm particularly interested are making in the era of the American Revolution.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (09:59.754)
No, that is really interesting. And then to find out that a lot of the people who were originally part of the Jacobite Rebellion stayed loyal towards the Crown during the Revolutionary War, that's a little shocking in my mind, because you would think that the last thing in their mind would be to stay loyal to the Rebellion. Yeah, no. Wow. OK.

Jim Ambuske (10:15.118)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Jim Ambuske (10:19.391)
Yeah. Yeah.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (10:25.942)
But so how do you kind of flush out these kind of stories during that time? Where do you kind of find the information about all this?

Jim Ambuske (10:33.578)
Everything that we do as professional historians starts with a question. And that question is prompted by something another historian has written, prompted by the interpretation that they have made, or it is prompted by something that we see in the archives. So in my case, when I'm studying the Scots immigrants, a lot of what historians had written in the 1980s and 1990s had really been what we call social history.

Jim Ambuske (11:02.55)
So the history of regular people and looking at their lives and trying to understand some of the motivations for why they immigrated, what their lives were like in Scotland at the time of their immigration and where they went in North America, what I thought was missing was how that immigration factored into was shaped by or in turn shaped the broader, what we call the imperial crisis that erupts between great Britain and the colonies.

Jim Ambuske (11:32.178)
And I also wanted to understand how this immigration was a product of both the transformation of Scotland in the 18th century and of Great Britain itself and the empire at large. And so that, that led me to thinking about what Scottish historians in particular had written about the collapse of the Highland clan system by late, the late 18th century. So you mentioned Outlander.

Jim Ambuske (11:58.794)
Right? If there's anything that people know about Scotland, it's whiskey, it's bagpipes, it's probably a haricots, but also the Klan, you know, particularly those of the older generation who watched Highlander. But by the 18th century, that Klan system is collapsing. And the Klan, just very briefly, is a kind of reciprocal relationship between a chief and his people. In the old feudal days, that would be the chief agrees to provide protection for his people in exchange for military service.

Jim Ambuske (12:28.354)
But by the 18th century, that relationship had changed fundamentally. So now that was much more economic. It was much more in the sense that the chief was a landlord, his people were his tenants, and they owed him rent in the form of agricultural products each year. As that clan system, that traditional clan system, is collapsing, there's other economic factors that

Jim Ambuske (12:51.318)
dislodge people from the landscape, the rents get too high, in part because the chiefs themselves have gone into serious debt, so they need to jack up rents and things like that. That clan system is coming apart. And at the same time, there's a critical moment that occurs in North America, particularly in 1763, at the end of what we call the Seven Years War, what we more commonly call North America, the French and Indian War.

Jim Ambuske (13:20.022)
where the French are finally defeated. Everyone is excited about the empire. There's this euphoria that the future is the British future and that North America is a key part of it. And there's a ton of land, often at the expense of indigenous people to be sure, but there is land to be held. And a lot of Scots start looking at this in the 1760s saying our traditional life is falling apart.

Jim Ambuske (13:45.854)
We don't want to be tenants. We want to own our own land and in America we can do that. So a lot of that had been covered, and I added a little bit to it, but what really struck me was what I thought was missing from the literature, from the scholarly conversation and the books and articles that we write, was the question of how people attempted to resist this immigration. Particularly as

Jim Ambuske (14:13.718)
this imperial crisis heats up and the war for independence breaks out. Because as I said earlier, there's this fear that immigration will deprive Scotland and thus Britain of economic and military resources. So what I wanted to understand, and the question I asked was, how did leading politicians and jurists attempt to essentially circumnavigate, circumvent the British constitution and stop people from leaving? How do they try to convince people?

Jim Ambuske (14:43.074)
that it was not in their interest to go. And how did they do so in a ways that they thought was going to benefit Britain and the empire? Because there's a major constitutional question, right? If you think about it today, you know, I'm in Virginia right now. If I wanted to go to West Virginia or any other state, there's no law that can prevent me from going to any state that I want because we live in the same country, although we live in different states. Same thing applies in the 18th century.

Jim Ambuske (15:12.354)
How can you stop a subject of the king from going to one of his dominions to another? And that's the kind of big crisis or political and legal question that some of my figures are facing and how the clever ways in which they try to get around constitutional restrictions or constitutional prohibitions on trying to do something like that. So it starts with that question. It starts with...

Jim Ambuske (15:41.066)
What can I add that's new to the conversation? And then you have to go find the evidence. You have to go into the archives. And in my case, I did research in one, two, three, at least three countries, maybe four. I'm sort of forgetting right now. It's been a while, but primarily in Scotland at the National Records of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland, reading through the correspondence of some of these politicians and jurists.

Jim Ambuske (16:08.662)
reading through the correspondence of estate managers, looking at passenger manifests of the immigrants who were on these ships going over. And then in this country in the United States, going to North Carolina and Vermont and New York and finding archival evidence of what their lives were like and how they were trying to entice their friends and family to come over. And so the choices you make as a historian are shaped by what came before, what your colleagues did before.

Jim Ambuske (16:38.186)
You're building off the foundation of their work, but then you're going into the archives, reading the evidence in a new light, hopefully finding new evidence, which is even better, and trying to make sense of the world that you are actor solid and hopefully trying to render as accurate a portrait as you can.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (16:58.798)
Mm-hmm. No, that's actually a pretty interesting thing, just because, like you said, you're building on the work of everybody else that kind of really kind of came before you. And it be, like I've mentioned in the past or mentioned before, your work then gets translated into fictional work where historical fiction becomes huge.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (17:24.738)
I mentioned Outlander, but Outlander is huge in trying to make sure that they're historically accurate whether or not it's their architecture in the show, the clothing that they're wearing is correct, everything that they're wearing is correct, but then they take that information from the work you do and from the work in terms of, like you said, people moving from one country to another, making sure all that information is correct. And it's...

The Rogue Scientist Productions (17:52.074)
Just looking at it as a whole, it's an amazing engine of information. And then that gets translated to me, where I knew about the Battle of Kaladan because of Outlander, which was because of the work of a historian that came before that. And it's just getting that kind of knowledge and getting all that information being translated through and stuff like that is relatively amazing.

Jim Ambuske (18:19.138)
Well, I like the way you framed it because there are some folks who would complain if something wasn't historically accurate. I mean, it's, it's one thing if you're producing a documentary and you have an obligation to be accurate, but if you are producing a work of fiction, particularly historical fiction, like I'm, I'm less concerned if you take some licenses because inevitably something like you just described will happen. Now you become interested in it. You become interested in the history of say the battle of Culloden and you'll

Jim Ambuske (18:48.354)
have a desire to go out and learn more. And so in a lot of ways, historical fiction is great marketing for us historians. For example, when the movie 300 came out, oh, what, 15 years ago about the Battle of Thermopylae, it was a great marketing tool for ancient history classes and universities because suddenly everybody wanted to know about Spartan life. They wanted to know about the Persian invasion. They wanted to know about ancient Greek hoplite warfare.

Jim Ambuske (19:16.354)
Same thing happens with American Revolution stuff, with Turn or with Outlander because that does factor in, in particular with my work with Scottish American history. So it's great. If it inspires people to learn more about the past, understanding that what they're watching is a work of fiction, but they can go learn the basis of that fiction, then let's do it. The more people learn about the past, the better.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (19:46.862)
Exactly. And that's actually something my fiance immediately picks up when she gets interested in something is that she'll I've watched her actively Watching a show and then immediately going on her phone and researching every bit That goes into the research in terms of the characters the history of the show everything about it She's reading articles on it. And so when it comes to Outlander that it's just been a

The Rogue Scientist Productions (20:13.398)
blossoming effect that got her into Scottish culture, Scottish history, where the entire Jacobite rebellion happened, the Revolutionary War, and just how it inspires people is great. Have you ever had any authors or anybody in the entertainment industry reach out to you to make sure that they're doing anything correctly?

Jim Ambuske (20:38.814)
Not as of sorts in terms of historical fiction. I've been very fortunate to be on a couple of BBC documentaries One about George the third and one about a ship called the Hector in which sailed to Nova Scotia in 1773 But I am not aware of anyone who has used any of my work to do a fictional piece But if anyone's listening out there, I would love to consult that sounds like a lot of fun

The Rogue Scientist Productions (21:02.666)
Yeah, exactly. No, I'll definitely if anybody is writing any stories about fiction in that timeframe, I'll definitely make sure to keep you updated and make sure to pass on any information in terms of making it just getting that correct information through. So I know we're kind of coming towards the end of our podcast right now. Is there anything that you might suggest to my listeners who are

The Rogue Scientist Productions (21:32.302)
who are kind of interested in these subjects.

Jim Ambuske (21:37.062)
Yeah, there's a few books I could recommend. I'll say the historian James Hunter is very good generally on a lot of aspects of Scottish immigration in the late 18th and 19th centuries. So any of his books, my colleague who's at the United States Naval Academy, Matthew Deschic, he has written a really wonderful book about the Highland soldier in

Jim Ambuske (22:02.118)
North America during the Seven Years War and the American Revolution. That's out from Yale University Press. But one of the things I would urge your listeners to consider particularly Scottish history or Scottish American history and in the period we've been talking about is the significance of poetry to Scottish culture, both in terms of Gaelic culture, Gaelic speaking poets and also English poets. And so there is a scholar named Daniel Cook.

Jim Ambuske (22:30.798)
who has just released a really wonderful collection of poems. I think it's out by Oxford University Press. And the title of the book escapes me right now. But I try to use poetry a lot in my work because I think it oftentimes captures the sentiment of people and places at the time, and particularly with Scotland because poetry is such an integral part of Scottish culture.

Jim Ambuske (23:00.278)
It's really an important lens into what's happening in Scottish society. So for, for your fiance, who's watching Outlander, who anyone's interested in Scotland in general, poetry and I'm talking poetry beyond Sir Walter Scott, beyond Robert Burns, but poetry is a really wonderful way, not only to learn about Scotland and its past, but also, you know, quite frankly, to spend a rainy day with a glass of whiskey and reading some great stuff.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (23:29.194)
Exactly. Well, since we're kind of coming to our end, thank you so much for everything. And thank you for being on our show. Are there any social media platforms, any projects that you're working on, any websites that you would like my listeners to be able to follow you on?

Jim Ambuske (23:39.786)
My pleasure.

Jim Ambuske (23:48.478)
Yeah, that'd be great. Thanks for the opportunity. I would say, as you mentioned at the top of our conversation, I am currently in the process of researching and writing a narrative history podcast of the American Revolution called Worlds Turned Upside Down. That will be out this August 2023 from R2 Studios, and R2 Studios is where I work. We are a podcast outfit at George Mason University. Part of our charge is to democratize history through podcasting.

Jim Ambuske (24:17.194)
So you can go check out rtostudios.org where you'll find information about our upcoming show, World's Turned Upside Down. But we also have shows for listeners who are interested in the history of the Appalachian Trail. It's called The Green Tunnel. We also have a podcast on early American diplomacy called Consolation Prize. And we are beginning production actually tomorrow on a new project on the history of American antisemitism.

Jim Ambuske (24:45.61)
which will be out sometime next year. So I'd love it if folks would go check out R2 Studios productions. And then generally you can find me on Twitter at James P. Ambusky. I'm also on Mastodon Social under Jim Ambusky. And my website is jamespambusky.com. So you can learn.

Jim Ambuske (25:09.258)
what I'm up to, what I'm up to with my colleagues at George Mason University and some of the things I've done in the past and will do in the future.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (25:17.774)
Perfect, thank you. And as for me, you will be able to find us at the website, theroadscientistproductions.com where we have our merchandise and links to my story on Kindle Velo, the world beyond. You also have all of our road scientists, social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr. The best way to support us is to like our podcast on your favorite podcast platform of choice and let others know how much you've enjoyed our show. We wanna thank you, Jim, for being on our show guest today and thank all of our listeners for joining us as well.

The Rogue Scientist Productions (25:47.074)
This has been our podcast to all those out there looking to start a new career in the arts such as acting, writing, music, comedy and more. Always remember pursuing your passions as a bitch, but it's worth it.