How the Hell Did We Get Here?

🎧 Listen wherever you get podcasts: Search How the HELL Did We Get Here? or Past Is Prologue on your favorite podcast app. America turns 250 years old this week. That milestone got me thinking—not just about where we've been, but about what patriotism actually means after spending more than twenty years teaching American history. I love this country. I always will. But I don't believe loving Amer...

🎧 Full episodes available wherever you get podcasts. When Americans think about the Market Revolution, they usually think about canals, railroads, factories, banks, and the rise of capitalism. But what if the most important change wasn't economic at all? In this episode of How the HELL Did We Get Here?, we explore Charles Sellers' argument that the Market Revolution transformed not only the Ameri...

🎧 Full episodes available wherever you get podcasts. The Supreme Court is often presented as one of the few institutions in American government that stands above politics. A body of impartial legal experts applying the Constitution without regard to ideology, partisanship, or public opinion. But a closer look at American history tells a very different story. In this episode of Past Is Prologue, I...

🎧 Subscribe to How the HELL Did We Get Here? for long-form U.S. history that connects the past directly to the present. Andrew Jackson is one of the most important — and controversial — figures in American history. To supporters, he was the champion of the “common man,” the war hero who democratized American politics and challenged entrenched elites. To critics, he was a violent authoritarian who...

Note: An earlier upload accidentally contained an unedited audio export. This version contains the finalized episode audio. 🎧 Full episodes available wherever you get podcasts. From the partisan newspapers of the Founding Era to yellow journalism, wartime propaganda, cable news, and the algorithm-driven chaos of social media, the American media has never been as objective or neutral as many peopl...

If you want to understand what the Market Revolution did to Americans—not just how they worked or what they earned, but how they understood the world—you have to look at religion. In the 1820s and 1830s, Americans weren’t just reacting to capitalism politically. They were reacting to it spiritually. As markets expanded, communities fractured, and economic life became more unstable and impersonal,...

If you’ve ever heard someone say “the Founding Fathers would have…” — there’s a good chance what follows is wrong. The Founders didn’t agree with each other. Not even close. This isn’t a typical scripted episode. It’s something a little different—and something I plan to do more often. If you’ve spent any time in American political discourse, you’ve heard some version of this argument: “The Foundin...

In the early decades of the 19th century, Americans did something extraordinary: they tried to build perfect societies. Not metaphorically. Not just politically. Literally. Across the young republic, groups of men and women abandoned ordinary life and set out to construct entirely new communities — places where property would be shared, labor would be organized cooperatively, religion would purify...

When politicians rail against elites, corrupt institutions, rigged systems, and the betrayal of ordinary people, it can feel like a uniquely modern style of politics. It isn’t. In this episode of Past Is Prologue, I trace the long history of populism in the United States — from Andrew Jackson and the expansion of white male democracy, to the Know-Nothings, the Populist Party, Huey Long, George Wal...

The Election of 1824 is usually remembered for one phrase: the “corrupt bargain.” But that’s not really what made it a turning point. In 1824, Andrew Jackson won more popular votes and more electoral votes than any other candidate — and still lost the presidency in the House of Representatives. Constitutionally, the system worked exactly as designed. Politically, millions of Americans concluded th...

Look, I don’t like expanded police powers, surveillance, emergency declarations, suspension of normal rules… but this is an emergency. We can deal with civil liberties later. That logic isn’t new. It’s a recurring pattern in U.S. history — and almost every time, the rollback never comes. A crisis hits, government claims extraordinary authority, and when the crisis fades, the powers don’t fully ret...

The Missouri Compromise is often remembered as a clever fix — a temporary truce, a line on a map, a way to “save the Union.” But that’s not what it really was. In 1820, Congress faced a choice it had spent decades trying not to make: confront the future of slavery now, while the country was still small and fragile — or postpone the reckoning and keep the system expanding. Congress chose postponeme...

The “Era of Good Feelings” is usually sold as a moment of national calm — a post-War of 1812 breather before Jacksonian chaos. But when the boom ends, that calm turns out to be thin. In 1819, the United States hits its first nationwide capitalist crash. Credit evaporates, paper money destabilizes, foreclosures spread, and debtors’ prisons fill — while the institutions most responsible for the spec...

Think America’s current immigration freak-out is some unprecedented modern breakdown? Nope. It’s one of our oldest political habits. In this episode of Past Is Prologue, John walks through the “greatest hits” of American immigration panic — from 1798 and the Alien & Sedition Acts, to the Know-Nothings, Chinese exclusion, the 1920s quota system, post–World War II crackdowns, the 1965 pivot, and...

The “Era of Good Feelings” is usually sold as a victory lap after the War of 1812 — unity, calm, and confidence in the American experiment. But if you zoom in, it’s less a victory lap than a stress test. Republican leaders are trying to build the tools of national development — banks, internal improvements, professional administration — while ordinary voters are demanding the opposite: lower taxes...

Older generations have been dragging “kids these days” for at least 2,000 years. From Cicero whining about Roman youth to boomers roasting Gen Z on TikTok, the script barely changes: lazy, entitled, soft, ruining the country. In this episode, I walk through how every major wave of change in American history – the Market Revolution, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the Jazz Age, the 1960s, all...

America has tried the “tiny federal government” experiment before. After the War of 1812, Jefferson’s minimalist republic simply couldn’t handle a big-power world—so a new generation rebuilt the state. This episode traces how Calhoun, Clay, Jackson, Adams, and the Marshall Court turned a weak agrarian republic into a nationalist market power between 1815 and the early 1820s. America has tried “sma...

In this episode of Past Is Prologue, John looks at more than 200 years of American economic history to answer a deceptively simple question: Why does the United States keep crashing its own economy? Starting with the Panic of 1819 and running through 1837, 1873, 1893, the Great Depression, and the 2008 financial collapse, John shows how the same boom-and-bust pattern repeats with stunning consiste...

In this episode of How the Hell Did We Get Here?, John digs into Chapter 2 of Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 — a pivotal moment when the United States was pushed, pulled, and coerced into a radically new economic order. Rather than a smooth evolution into a “modern” market economy, Sellers shows a far more turbulent reality: political battles over surplus cap...

In this episode of Past Is Prologue, John looks at what 250 years of American history can teach us about the rise of artificial intelligence. Rather than treating AI as a totally unprecedented rupture, John compares it to five earlier waves of technological and economic transformation: 1. The Market Revolution of the early 1800s 2. The First Industrial Revolution and the rise of wage labor 3. The...

What did the United States look like before canals, factories, and cash wages rewired everyday life? In this episode, John explores Chapter 1 of Charles G. Sellers’s The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846, reconstructing a largely cashless “subsistence” order where independence meant owning land, bartering with neighbors, and avoiding debt. We trace why profit was suspect, how recipr...

This episode is something different. After a year of tracing U.S. history from the pre-Columbian period through the War of 1812, I wanted to step back and talk about  why  I’m doing this — and what I think history can actually teach us about the world we’re living in now. In this manifesto, I lay out the purpose behind  How the Hell Did We Get Here? : to cut through the noise of hot...

In this episode, John discusses the social, political and economic evolution of the United States from the late 1700s to the end of the War of 1812. John talks about the evolution of the U.S. from a limited democracy with a decidedly agricultural bent toward a bustling trade hub and nascent manufacturing sector with a huge middle class that starts to flex its political muscle. This episode serves...

John gives everyone an update about what's been going on and what they can expect from the next season of How the Hell Did We Get Here?

In this episode, John discusses how the War of 1812 continued and ultimately came to a conclusion. John talks about the campaigns of 1813 and the British offensives of 1814, how things continued to linger in a position of stalemate and how the U.S. managed to survive despite a serious financial crisis and the capital city of Washington D.C. being burned to the ground by the British. John covers th...