Civics In A Year

A First Lady can’t sign bills, command troops, or issue executive orders, yet Jacqueline Kennedy still reshaped American civic life. We sit down with Barbara Perry, presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and author of *Jacqueline Kennedy: First Lady of the New Frontier*, to look past the fashion headlines and get into the real mechanics of Jackie’s influence.  We talk...

Dolly Madison is famous for saving a portrait, but that’s the smallest part of her story. We sit down with Dr. Lindsay Cormack, political scientist and Director of the Diplomacy Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology, to look at Dolly as a builder of American civic culture and one of the most influential figures of the early republic. She didn’t hold office, she didn’t sign founding documents, and...

A sitting vice president shoots a Founding Father, the Constitution gets rewritten because of a botched election, and a rivalry that starts as professional respect ends in blood. That’s the real historical arc behind Hamilton and Burr, and it’s even more complicated than the musical makes it look. We’re joined by Dr. Stephen Knott, historian and author who studied Hamilton long before pop culture...

Your city is not just where you live. It is a political education you walk through every day. We sit down with Dr. John Harner, professor of geography and environmental studies, to connect cultural geography to civic engagement in the United States. We unpack what “place” really means, including place identity (the image a community projects through architecture, branding, and design rules) and se...

A map can look clean and still be unfair, and a “weird” map can exist for reasons most people never learn. That’s why we sit down with Dr. Rebecca Theobald, an associate research professor at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, to unpack geocivics and the real mechanics behind redistricting and gerrymandering. We walk through what geocivics looks like in practice: learning the US Census a...

A president’s first job after a national trauma is to lead the story people tell themselves about what just happened and what must happen next. After 9/11, George W. Bush had to name the enemy, promise action, and still convince Americans that daily life could continue without surrendering to fear. We talk with historian Dr. Stephen Knott about how Bush framed the attacks in his address to the nat...

Memorial Day gets marketed like a party, but the real story is heavier and more human. We’re joined by Allison Finkelstein, Senior Historian at Arlington National Cemetery, to trace Memorial Day back to its first name: Decoration Day. From Arlington’s creation during the Civil War to the first official annual observance of National Decoration Day in 1868, we talk about how public rituals, flowers,...

Power rarely looks like a speech. Sometimes it looks like a phone call, a vote count, and a president who knows exactly how the Senate works. We’re joined by LBJ Foundation Chairman and CEO Mark Updgrove for a clear-eyed conversation about Lyndon B. Johnson, the skills that made him so effective, and why his story still belongs in every serious discussion of American civic education. We dig into t...

A dog on the White House lawn can do what a policy speech can’t: make power feel personal. We’re taking a sharp, surprisingly civic look at presidential pets and why these “small” stories shape how Americans see leadership, character, and credibility. From carefully curated photo ops to messy headlines that remind us the White House is also a home, pets have become part of modern political communi...

I can still picture the classroom TV, the countdown, and the way excitement turned into silence 73 seconds after liftoff. The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster wasn’t just a news event for a lot of Americans, it was something we witnessed as kids, especially because a teacher was onboard. When that kind of shock hits a country in real time, the next question becomes painfully simple: what do you s...

The I Have a Dream speech is one of the most recognizable moments in American history, but the version most of us carry around is often the shortest and safest one. We sit down with returning guest Dr. Michael Butler to rebuild the speech from the ground up: the Birmingham campaign, the political pressure on President John F. Kennedy, and the urgency created by Medgar Evers’ assassination in Jacks...

A campaign firestorm pushed Barack Obama to a crossroads in 2008: offer a quick political defense or step into the country’s oldest argument about who “We the People” really are. We choose the second path and unpack “A More Perfect Union,” his Philadelphia speech that threads together constitutional language, American history, and the unresolved realities of race and citizenship. If you care about...

A truck bomb in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, including 19 children, and left the country grasping for words that wouldn’t make the wound worse. Four days later, President Bill Clinton delivered a memorial address that still feels like a blueprint for how leaders can face domestic terrorism without feeding panic, revenge, or division. We treat that speech as more than a historical artifact and...

Check Out the Civic Literacy Curriculum ! School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership Center for American Civics

A timeline can tell you what happened. It can’t always tell you what it meant, or why the meaning keeps changing. We’ve spent months building a foundation in civics: the Declaration of Independence and its claims about equality, unalienable rights, and consent; the Constitution and its structure; and the core mechanics of American government like separation of powers, checks and balances, federali...

The Great Depression isn’t just history. It’s the moment we keep dragging into today’s fights about stimulus, deficits, inflation, and what government should do when millions can’t find work. We sit down with Dr. Nicholas O’Neill from Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership to make the Keynes vs Hayek divide clear, concrete, and rooted in the world that shape...

A “test” to vote that has nothing to do with reading, a restaurant that can legally turn you away, a ballot box protected on paper but blocked in real life. The early 1960s weren’t just tense, they were engineered, with Jim Crow rules that controlled public space and political power. I walk through how that system finally met federal force, and why the story still isn’t finished. We start with the...

Eisenhower doesn’t leave office with a sentimental goodbye. He leaves with a warning: a free country can win a global struggle and still lose itself at home. We sit down with Dr. Beienberg to unpack Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address, the Cold War assumptions behind it, and why it remains one of the richest texts in American political history. We trace how Eisenhower’s path from World Wa...

One signature from a president turned suspicion into policy and forced about 120,000 people to leave their homes. We sit down with Dr. Stephen Knott, emeritus professor of national security affairs and a longtime scholar of presidential power, to unpack Executive Order 9066 and the Japanese American internment that followed Pearl Harbor. Along the way, we ask the uncomfortable question that civics...

The United States doesn’t wake up one morning and “enter World War II.” It inches, argues, legislates, and then gets jolted into a decision that reshapes the modern world. We walk through 1941 as a chain of cause and effect, starting with a country still haunted by World War I and protected, at least on paper, by the Neutrality Acts. First, we unpack Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech an...

He wasn’t a president, but he may be the most dangerous almost-president in modern American political history. We’re joined by  Sean Beienberg to unravel Huey Long’s rise in Louisiana and the seductive promise behind “Every Man Is A King” and “Share Our Wealth.” Long sells himself as a plainspoken champion, yet operates with a level of tactical brilliance that even his enemies struggle to dismiss....

The most powerful political tool FDR wielded wasn’t a bill or a bureaucratic agency, it was a voice coming through the radio at the right moment. We’re joined again by Professor Weinberg to unpack how Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats turn fear into patience, panic into process, and complex policy into plain English during the Great Depression. Along the way, we connect that media shift to a...

Franklin Roosevelt is usually introduced as the New Deal president, but we wanted to rewind the tape and look at the receipts. With Dr. Sean Beienberg joining us, we walk through FDR’s pre-1933 record and the political path that takes him from New York power circles into the 1932 nomination. The deeper we read, the clearer it becomes: the “standard story” omits a lot of inconvenient text. We dig i...

“Rugged individualism” gets thrown around like a simple definition of Herbert Hoover, but the real story is far stranger and far more useful. We start with the parts of Hoover’s life that don’t fit the usual caricature: an Iowa orphan who makes it into Stanford, becomes a brilliant mining engineer, builds a global career, and earns a reputation for competence by coordinating World War I food relie...

A president in 1926 stands in Independence Hall and argues something that still feels like a dare: you can modernize policies, but you can’t “upgrade” the Declaration’s core truths. With Dr. Beienberg, we walk through Calvin Coolidge’s 150th anniversary address on the Declaration of Independence and why it deserves to be read as a serious meditation on American political philosophy, not just a pat...