Welcome to the CAN'T GO BACK, WON'T MOVE ON podcast blog
Introducing the podcast and setting expectations for our first season
Welcome to the historical jungle
Can’t Go Back, Won’t Move On is a paranoid historical storytelling podcast about the history of the Americas.
The idea for Can’t Go Back, Won’t Move On came to me in a dream. I had been teaching a history unit to middle schoolers on the Conquest of Mexico as a historical event. Not wanting to simply reiterate the myth-laden hagiography of the event as one of Cortés and his band of merry Spanish men overthrowing an entire empire through sheer European grit, I recast the event as one in which students would try to understand the perspective of two individuals involved: Moctezuma II (leader of the Aztec Empire at the time of the Conquest) and La Malinche, an enslaved Nahua woman acquired by Cortés after defeating Maya in the Yucatán who served as an essential translator for the Spanish.
The goal of the unit for the students was that they would sit through the history, examine the context and motivations for Moctezuma and Malinche’s actions and then be split up into debate groups who would assume the perspective of either one of these historical figures and attempt to justify their decisions for an audience of their fellow students.
I wanted the students to understand history not only as a sequence of events to memorize, but the sum total of actions taken by real people attempting to navigate that event in real time with only ambiguous, incomplete information at the time. I wanted them to understand history as lived experience.
In the course of teaching this unit, I myself took on an enormous amount of research—reading as much as I could to have as complete an understanding of the event so that I could help guide my students into forming their own nuanced opinions on the matter. For weeks, I lived and breathed this content to a degree that far exceeded what I usually did for my job.
It became something of a small obsession, so much so that one night I had a dream that I was in Tenochtitlán in the Palace of Axayocatl, the palace built by Mocteczuma’s father when he was huey tlatoani (“high speaker”) of the Aztecs and the palace where the Spaniards were housed when they finally arrived in the capital city in November 1519.
In my dream I wandered the rooms of the great palace and found myself slipping in and out—in the manner one does in a dream—of various personas and characters involved in the conflict, finding myself not only in discussion, but gripped by a very real sense of fear knowing that the uneasy alliance of Cortés and Moctezuma during this period was to end in dramatic fashion with the deaths of millions through war and disease.
This sense of fear stuck with me after I awoke, and I found it sticking with me as my students and I went through the rest of the unit. I never mentioned my dream to them, but it stuck with me that what we were discussing in the abstract was the living dream (either fantasy or nightmare) of the people who lived it—something which many of the principal people involved acknowledged.
Once the unit was over, the class moved on. But I didn’t, couldn’t do the same. And so a nagging thought, an unresolved idea sat within me and began to grow.
What is a “paranoid historical storytelling” podcast?
Undoubtedly one of the most difficult tasks in history is separating the subjective impressions of the people giving primary accounts—the most valuable data we have of any event—from the objective “reality” of what happened, if such a thing is possible.
In the case of the Conquest of Mexico, much of our primary evidence is either accounts of the conquest written by the conquistadores themselves (who often were attempting to justify their actions in legal or moral terms or argue for more compensation of their “services” to the Crown of Spain) or indigenous scholars re-creating their own history in either written Nahuatl (using the Latin alphabet introduced by the Spaniards) or in Spanish. Much of this supervised by Catholic priests who both encouraged this kind of cultural preservation and pressured indigenous writers to code it in terms acceptable to a Judeo-Christian-centric interpretation of cosmology and history.
This creates a kind of tension that is simple to understand when researching this event. At any point, what you are reading is both history and mirage, a sleight-of-hand trick to make what happened appear not as it did, but as its practioners wanted it to be seen. Conquistadors contradict themselves and each other, as do the indigenous sources. Many people’s perspective—including crucial ones like Moctezuma and La Malinche—have very little preserved in their own words, if anything, leaving our entire understanding of them subject to others who, as a rule, weren’t always sympathetic.
This makes the process of historical recreation something inherently paranoid, in the sense that we were are learning about these figures is contradictory, irregular and subject to an intensely-subjective perspective whose relationship to the truth is driven by the extreme emotions of men and women living through a catastrophic shift in history.
My intent with this podcast is to utilize this inherent paranoia in the process of history-making to do in audio form what I did in curriculum form for my students: present history as the produce of lived experience, with all the stickiness and nastiness that comes with that. Not to sensationalize, but the foreground the emotions of the people in involved as the primary driver of what led them to making the decisions they did.
In short, an “emotional history.”
The limits of history
But I also want to be careful with the use of “history” as a term here. For reasons that are outlined above and below, I am calling this a “historical storytelling” podcast rather than a “history” podcast. This is because:
I’m not a historian, nor would I ever claim to be one; and
The subjective nature of this podcast means that I will occasionally need to take liberties in the way that information is presented, meaning that it would be disingenous to present this as straight history. Like I qualified above, this is meant to be a podcast about history as it feels, rather than as it strictly happened. This is important to remember.
How the show will be structured
Each season will be dedicated to following one major period or event in the history of the Americas. The intent of focusing on “American” history (interpreted as the history of the continents known as America) is to a) put a practical limit on the scope of this podcast, and b) play to my strengths as someone who has quite a bit of the hemisphere and has been interested in its historical development as for years.
The seasons will be broken down into individual episodes of at least 30 minutes. These episodes—which will be sequenced in chronological order—will each specifically focus on one figure from the event in question and demonstrate that period of time from their perspective, prioritizing their interpretation and ideology at the expense of others. What they felt, how they described it, where they came from (both geographically and ideologically)… all of this will inform the history as it is presented.
Where contradictions occur between people who see an event through different lenses (or simply refused to acknowledge the reality), they will be noted. But the point is not to play “Gotcha!” with these moments, but to try and show the ways in which—as historians often do—that the truth can sometimes be surmised as the space in between differing testimony and evidence.
Beyond that, as episodes release and seasons begin and end, I’ll be maintaing this blog to keep people updated on what’s to come, introducing historical facts or sidebars, add suplemental information that I couldn’t fit into the relevant episode or explain specific decisions I made in the process of creating the podcast. I may also, from time to time, write other things here as the motivation strikes me.
When will the show release?
I’m knee-deep in the pre-production of the first episode. Having mostly completed my initial research, I’m in the process of organizing my notes and writing outlines and scripts.
The introduction to the first season will drop sometime in June, with the first true episode to follow in July. After that, I’ll be using a brief break to examine what is working and what needs work to retool before dropping the remaining episodes biweekly starting again in October, meaning the first season should finish sometime in early-to-mid 2026.
This schedule is subject to revision, of course, but given that it’s all brand new I’m trying to set realistic expectations.
In the meantime, signing up for this newsletter to keep up with the blog is the best way to stay informed, and sharing it with others that might be interested is the best way to support me as I move forward with this very large project.
I appreciate anyone who gives their time and attention to helping me along. Thank you and see you next time.