Podcaster
Her career goal is to be a “history communicator” by getting her research about social history into the world through classroom teaching, writing articles and books and podcasting, to affect change.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
NMP is of Jewish and Argentine descent.
CHILDHOOD
As a child, NMP was a voracious reader, especially involving culture and its history: how and why did modern thinking develop?
EDUCATION
NMP, always an excellent student through her years in elementary, middle and high school, attended an Ivy League university, where she chose to major in history courses due to her continuing fascination with how society has evolved over time. She graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in history.
After two separate career attempts, neither of which NMP found sufficiently interesting as a lifetime vocation, she returned to academia as a student at the graduate level, first earning a Master’s degree in history, followed several years later by a PhD in history.
FIRST JOB IS NEVER A BINDING CAREER COMMITMENT
History teaching positions in high schools and colleges are rarely available. NMP needed to work to support herself financially, so her first job following college graduation was an investment banking analyst. Researching business issues was too narrow a daily work focus for her.
SECOND JOB IS NEVER A BINDING CAREER COMMITMENT
NMP thought that a more interesting, daily future for herself would be in the world of education. Fluent in both English and Spanish, NMP found that jobs as Spanish teachers were more available than teaching history. So, she next found employment teaching Spanish in a large city’s public school system.
Working with children in a classroom was certainly more interesting than sitting in an office, in front of a computer, analyzing businesses, but NMP felt that her brain was too limited by teaching one subject. Her ideal job would be to research history and teach its complexities to a broad audience.
COMBINING AN INTEREST – HISTORY – WITH MULTIPLE WAYS OF TEACHING – IN THE CLASSROOM AND ON SOCIAL MEDIA – CREATES AN UNIQUE CAREER PATH
Demonstrating the persistence which would be one of the positive adjectives describing NMP’s career journey, she finally found an opening to teach history at the university level.
Teaching at the college / university level often involves less classroom time in front of students than in a high school setting. While keeping up with her responsibilities as a college professor, NMP also carved out time to perform research on issues within history which she published for peer review comment, in conformance with the high standards of academic research. But complying with the high standards of academic research and peer review comment does not prohibit the researcher from also writing a book with a title to attract a wider readership. For NMP, this resulted in her first published book, “Classroom Wars: Language, Sex and the Making of Modern Political Culture.”
Within her book, author NMP studied the controversies over the inclusion of sex education and Spanish language bilingual education in California public schools from the mid-1960s through the 1980s. She connects these issues to the popular sentiment against property tax in California and the state’s political, rightward trend during the 1970s, culminating in the passage of the 1978 California Proposition 13 (an amendment to the state constitution, to limit property taxes).
In addition to her university classroom teaching, NMP has engaged in substantial public communication about topics in American history. Since 2015, NMP has hosted the weekly podcast “Past Present” with male and female historians, discussing recent events in American political history. She was the creator and presenter of The History Channel’s 2018 web series, “The Unlikely History of Everyday Things.”
NMP regularly contributes written articles to media outlets including The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She was featured in the C-SPAN Lectures in History series.
CHALLENGES – SOCIAL MEDIA COMMENT GETS CAUGHT UP IN CULTURAL ‘WARS’ AND UNAUTHORIZED USE BY OTHER MEDIA
Within a magazine interview, NMP briefly mentioned her research indicating that in the early 1900s, amid an influx of immigrants into the U.S., some exercise proponents encouraged White women to exercise so that they could be strong enough to populate the country with White babies. NMP didn’t state or infer that she agreed with that view expressed by others more than 100 years earlier, but the NY Times highlighted that reference within a news story, followed quickly by politicians relating NMP’s one comment within a long interview, to issues such as climate change and other controversial, political positions.
Later, NMP and others involved in her podcasts were struck by the similarities between a Hulu show and their podcasts. In short, they believe the web series stole – or at least borrowed – the history they had researched and presented, without proper attribution. There were just too many coincidences to conclude otherwise.
NMP found herself “really flabbergasted by this whole situation,” she said. “But then again, I come from a world of footnotes and source citations.”
CAREER SATISFACTION
A history professor who advised NMP on her Ph.D. thesis, describes NMP as “a very serious scholar and a public intellectual who is quite unique in imagining how to get scholarship out into the world and affect social change.”
As a result of finding her history research co-opted by Hollywood, NMP realizes that while “No one owns history, the lines of intellectual property can be really blurry.” Maybe it’s easier to ‘stay within (my) lane’ in the classroom, but (she) will continue to try to bring well researched history of social change into a broad audience via articles, books and social media.
This career story is based on several sources: an article about Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, written by Katherine Rosman, published within the NY Times on 3/12/23 and by online research including Wikipedia.
