Civics 101

Recently, news about Justice Clarence Thomas's decades-long friendship with a wealthy Republican megadonor, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts and generosity he's received from that friendship, has led to increased scrutiny into whether Supreme Court justices are as unbiased and uninfluenced as they claim. It's also revealed how, unlike most other federal officials, we rely on...

The federal government has always had debt. How much is too much, and how do politicians exploit it? This episode originally dropped in August 2022, but since the subject is in the news, we've been getting lots of questions about it! SUPPORT OUR WORK - DONATE TO CIVICS 101 TODAY! Since our nation's founding, the federal government has borrowed money from other governments, private investors, and b...

What can we do with these invisible magnetic waves in the sky?  Today we explore what we can say on the air. Are radio and television stations allowed to air their opinions in addition to the news? From 1949-1987 all broadcast media was beholden to the Fairness Doctrine; a law that enforced impartiality and civil discourse. So why did we have this law? How did it work? Why did it end? And finally,...

Ryan Willard is the co-host of The Ten News, a news podcast created for 8-12 year-olds. He shared some of the ways his team frames complex and controversial topics so that they're appropriate and comprehensible to younger ears. You can hear their show wherever you get your podcasts, or at their website. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for ou...

While Black citizens fought for their civil and human rights in the Reconstruction era, state and federal governments alike passed law and policy pertaining to them. Courts ruled. Legislatures made law. These are the legal shifts that both supported the Black freedom struggle and actively worked against it. Our guides to the last part of our Reconstruction series are Gilbert Paul Carrasco, Kate Ma...

Reconstruction has long been taught as a lost cause narrative.  The true story is one of great force. The great force of a powerful activist Black community that strived to establish a multiracial democracy and achieved great successes and political power. The great force of a violent white community that exploited, abused and murdered those of that Black community who would assert their civil and...

The Reconstruction Era, a period in American history at the end of and immediately following the Civil War, is one of the single-most important and instructive periods in American history. It has also, historically, been one of the least taught. Why is that, and what are we missing when we don't learn about it? A lot. In this, the first in a three-part series on Reconstruction, we speak to Mimi Ei...

What is defamation? Libel? Pre-trial discovery? Actual malice? Today we go into everything tied to the recently settled Dominion Voting Systems vs Fox News Network defamation lawsuit; including slander, libel, discovery, settlement, and the "whackadoodle email."  Our guide through the world of defamation legalities is Jane Kirtley, Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the Hubbard School of J...

How free are we? Are some countries more free than we are? What does freedom even mean? In this episode in our "US vs" series, we talk with the co-author of the Human Freedom Index, Ian Vasquez, about how we rank in our measure of liberty. Then we do a deep dive into Freedom of the Press with Jenifer Whitten-Woodring, co-author of the Historical Guide to World Media Freedom: A Country-by-Country A...

A social media app with 150 million American users is under intense scrutiny by the U.S. government. The threat is "sell or be banned," but how and why can the government do that? What does this kind of business restriction look like? We talked to Steven Balla of George Washington University to get the low down on regulations and bans in the United States. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all...

What are grand juries? Who gets picked for one? What does an indictment mean?  What's next? Why does it seem like this process is taking so long??  Today we explain all the legal processes surrounding the recent indictment of former president Donald Trump, as well as what the Constitution has to say about all of this. With us is Albert "Buzz" Scherr, professor of Criminal Law and Justice at UNH La...

On this episode, you've been summoned to learn about jury duty. Do the reasons some people want to avoid jury duty have merit? How do you even get on a list to get summoned to begin with? What should you expect with you get summoned to serve? And should you embrace this particular opportunity to participate in the democratic process? (Spoiler alert: We really think you should!) Our guest is Sonali...

If you've learned about things like Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances, you know the tried and true notion that Congress makes the laws, the executive branch enforces them, and the judicial branch interprets them. But would it surprise you to hear that's not how it goes most of the time? Today we explore who really writes the majority of legislation in the US, and how it got to be that w...

The idea that the more you have, the more you’re expected to contribute in taxes, is a foundation of our income tax system. And there is one government agency that oversees it all: the Internal Revenue Service.  However, the tax code itself, and the IRS, are subject to the will of politicians - who might have special interests of their own. We talk about how politics, wealth, and power influence h...

For decades, one state has had the privilege of going first in the presidential primary process. But New Hampshire’s “stranglehold” on the way we pick presidents could be losing its grip. The Democratic Party changed its presidential nominating calendar to give voters of color more sway. But New Hampshire isn’t backing down, setting up a major test of the stranglehold and its power. Today, we pres...

If you own land in the United States, do you own the air above it, too? Justine Paradis, Senior Producer at Outside/In from NHPR brings us the airy truth of property rights in air and space in this special collaboration.  The answer will take us from Ancient Rome (as it occasionally does) to the United States courts, from a world when air travel was science fiction to the world where we know there...

In this episode, we ask how the actions of various American financial institutions caused a global recession and destroyed the livelihoods and homeownership of millions of American people. Then we figure out what the federal government decided to do about it. This is the 2008 financial crisis as told by Amy Friend, Chief Counsel to the Senate Banking Committee as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform...

Most Americans need help to file our tax return each year - about 90% of people use technology like Turbo Tax, or hire a human tax preparer.  Why does it feel like it takes degree in accounting, or the money to pay someone with a degree, or computer software, just to comply with the law?  We talk about why our income tax system is the way it is: full of complexity, difficult to navigate, and extre...

Many Americans were taken by surprise when a whole new branch of the military - the U.S. Space Force - was launched during the Trump administration. But this branch of the military wasn't created on a whim, and its mission is more complicated than you might expect.  On this episode, we unpack the history of the militarization of space, the creation of the Space Force, and ask the question: is it h...

"Public housing" did not exist prior to the Great Depression. So it wasn't until Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal that the government had the chance to impose segregation at the highest level. The effects of segregation policy in housing continue to this day in the United States. Akira Drake Rodriguez and Richard Rothstein are our guides to how and why the government did it. CLICK HERE: Visit...

Atlanta was the first city to erect public housing in the United States. It started with Techwood Homes, an all-white development that went up in 1936. Sixty years later it would be torn down, along with others of the now-neglected developments that were the promise of FDR's New Deal. Akira Drake Rodriguez leads us through the story of how residents of public housing in Atlanta worked with, agains...

This episode is the culmination of our series on famous federal court trials in US history.  In April of 1967, Muhammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay) refused to step forward at a draft induction ceremony in Texas. His opposition to serving in Vietnam launched a sequence of trials and appeals that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It's a case about conscientious objection, protest, America's shi...

Today Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is publicly revered across the nation, a symbol of civil and human rights worthy of a memorial holiday. Federal and state legislatures have agreed to honor this man. That agreement took awhile. The final state to acquiesce, New Hampshire, resisted the holiday until 1999. The story of that resistance reveals a public sentiment about King and the Black Freedom Strugg...

Ever wonder what life is really like for those who work to support a politician’s career?  In September 2022, Hannah McCarthy sat down with Huma Abedin for a show called Writers on a New England Stage. This is an excerpt from their conversation. Huma discusses her memoir, Both/And, and describes what it's like to work alongside and advise a former First Lady, Secretary of State and presidential no...

You've probably heard about The Red Scare - the panic around the perceived threat of communism during the Cold War. But The Lavender Scare is lesser known. This was a time when the federal government investigated, persecuted and fired thousands of LGBTQ+ employees, calling them security risks and threats to the country.  In this episode of Civics 101, we'll dive into the origin and timeline of the...