The Last Best Hope?

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was an outsized media event. No one in America in the 1850s could avoid knowing something of its characters and themes.  It brought into the homes and hearts of millions of Americans a dramatic and heartrending story about an enslaved family. White people who wanted to avoid thinking about the reality of human enslavement found it harder to...

A week after election day in 2020, Joe Biden has won the election with a margin of at least 5 million votes but President Trump hasn't conceded and may never do so. A defeated incumbent, an election that underlined the deep partisan polarisation of the American nation and a President-Elect who appealed in his acceptance speech to the "better angels" of the country -- quoting, once a...

In September 1960 Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban revolution and hipster lodestar for the countercultural left visited the belly of the beast, New York City, to attend the UN General Assembly. It was a visit that exposed the contradictions and tensions within the United States' efforts to present itself as the last best hope for the free world at the height of the Cold War. Adam talks to Si...

In this special episode, Oxford historian Charlotte Moberly tells the story of how the French intellectual and pioneer of second-wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir was personally and intellectually transformed by her visit to America in 1947. This is the first of a new occasional series of short podcasts exploring individuals' encounters with America -- both the idea and the reality.  In this...

We can't imagine a political campaign without music -- whether it's an election rally, a protest movement or a TV ad, music is essential. In this episode, Adam talks to Billy Coleman, author of a recent book about music and politics in the nineteenth century United States and asks him what music brings to politics and what we can learn from it about how politics works.  Hosted on Acast....

In this episode Adam talks to Heather Cox Richardson about how the values the South fought for -- oligarchy, and racial and gender inequality -- outlived the Confederacy. Heather argues that American history can be understood as a conflict between oligarchs and masses. Adam asks her why that is. How does a "democracy" become an oligarchy? And is the politics of today an echo of the polit...

"We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth" -- Abraham Lincoln's phrase in his message to Congress in December 1862. What did he mean? In this episode, Adam talks to Rachel Shelden of the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State. They talked about Lincoln, his opposition to slavery, his vastly more complex view of racial equality... and why he coined that m...

Does America and the world need a new New Deal? If so, what lessons can we learn from how old orthodoxies in economic policy-making were challenged in the interwar period? In this episode, Adam talks to Eric Rauchway about the year 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office and immediately set a course that challenged some of the sacred shibboleths of economic policy-making.    Hosted on Ac...

Is a country that’s had a successful revolution doomed to endlessly re-enact it? In this episode, Adam talks to Professor Margaret Weir (Brown University and Oxford) about why anti-lockdown protests take the form they do in America: armed men entering legislatures and the waving of flags with the slogan "Don't Tread on Me".  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informatio...

Dividing power between the Federal government and the states may have seemed a good idea in theory to the founding fathers but in practice it's led to confusion and conflict. Donald Trump claims that his power is "total". State governors -- and constitutional experts -- beg to differ. In this episode, Adam talks to Grace Mallon of Oxford University, an expert in the reality of Feder...

What is the difference between a "crisis" and a "not-crisis"? How do crises happen and how have they shaped history? Adam talks to Jay Sexton of the University of Missouri, author of "A Nation Shaped by Crisis: A New American History" who thinks we're now in a crisis that, unlike previous crises, will leave the United States weaker.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.co...