Think Back

“a history of repeated injuries and usurpations” King George III’s crimes against the colonists fill most of the Declaration of Independence. Yet almost nobody reads that part of the famous document. Robert G. Parkinson is a historian at Binghamton University and the author, most recently, of Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence . Parkinson argues that the Declaration’...

Has the Civil War’s single largest emancipation event been hiding in plain sight? In this episode of Think Back , I speak with historian Edda L. Fields-Black about her book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (2024), co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History. The book reconstructs a remarkable and underexamined chapter of the war: a Union gunboa...

Why does the frontier myth refuse to die? In this episode of Think Back , I speak with historian and writer Megan Kate Nelson about her new book The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier . The book takes direct aim at one of the most durable stories Americans tell about themselves: the frontier myth, codified by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, which cast the westward marc...

In this episode of Think Back , I speak with historian Thomas Richards Jr. about his new book The Unfinished Business of 1776: Why the American Revolution Never Ended . Richards opens with a deliberately provocative contrast: was the Revolution an inspirational fight for freedom, or a vicious struggle for power? His answer sets up a book that refuses easy celebration or outright dismissal. Rather...

In this episode of Think Back , I talk with historian Tom Zoellner about his new book The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War . We dig into a dimension of emancipation that often gets overshadowed by presidential proclamations and congressional acts: the ground-level pressure created by enslaved people themselves. Zoellner traces how thousands of self-emancipa...

This episode looks at one of the strangest political experiments in American history: a late-nineteenth-century movement to create an officially Black state in the land that would become Oklahoma. At its center was Edward McCabe, a charismatic but elusive figure who envisioned Black self-government within the United States at a moment when Reconstruction had collapsed and white supremacy was harde...

In this episode of Think Back , I’m joined by the historian Kathleen DuVal to talk about her extraordinary 2024 book Native Nations , a sweeping thousand-year history of Indigenous North America. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize, fundamentally reframes American history by restoring Native peoples to the center of the story, not as passive victims of conquest but as powerful political actors...

In this episode of THINK BACK , I speak with the political scientist Stephen Skowronek about his book, The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience . The book traces large-scale patterns across American history to understand how political change actually happens. As American democracy has expanded to include more people, Skowronek contends, the constitutional system...

In this episode, I speak with journalist Matthew Davis , author of the new book A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore . Davis’s deeply reported narrative traces the contested history of the monument, from its carving into the sacred Black Hills to the political battles that have shaped its meaning ever since. Drawing connections between the monument’s origins, the dis...

In this episode of Think Back , I talk with historian Richard Bell about his fascinating new book The American Revolution and the Fate of the World —a work that completely rethinks the Revolution as a global story, not just an American one. As the 250th anniversary of the Revolution heats up, Bell’s book stands out for how boldly it connects the struggle for independence to events unfolding in pla...

In this episode, Scott Ellsworth talks about Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America . We revisit one of the most dramatic and transformative periods in American history and consider its resonances in the present. Why, 160 years later, does studying the Civil War still yield new insights? How does Ellsworth’s framing challenge...

On this week’s episode of THINK BACK , I speak with author Eden Collinsworth about her new book The Improbable Victoria Woodhull , a lively and surprising biography of the first woman to run for president. Woodhull’s 1872 campaign may have been a long shot, but it set off a national sensation—especially when she accused famed preacher Henry Ward Beecher of adultery, sparking one of the Gilded Age’...

In this episode of THINK BACK , I talk with writer J.C. Hallman about his 2023 book Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women’s Health . The book tells the story of J. Marion Sims, the 19th-century doctor often hailed as the “father of modern gynecology,” who carried out cruel and nonconsensual experiments on enslaved women—most notably a young woman na...

In this episode, I talk with historian Nicole Eustace , winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for History, about her book Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America . The book explores the aftermath of a violent clash on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1722, a moment that reveals the early formation of American political culture. Though set three centuries ago, Covered...

This episode turns toward the Wild West—not the one of dime novels and Hollywood shootouts, but the murkier, more fascinating version uncovered by journalist and historian Bryan Burrough in his new book The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild . Burrough brings his sharp storytelling to a cast of gunslingers, gamblers, killers, and showmen, exploring how the mythology of the American frontier...

In the fall of 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman led his infamous “March to the Sea,” a military campaign long mythologized—especially in Gone With the Wind —as a brutal assault on the white South. But over the past several decades, historians have chipped away at that Lost Cause narrative, revealing it as a distortion that casts Confederates as victims rather than instigators of wartime viol...

This episode is the second half of my conversation with George William Van Cleve. Last week , we explored the chaos of the 1780s following the American Revolution, as told in Van Cleve’s 2017 book We Have Not a Government , and how the U.S. Constitution emerged as a last-ditch attempt to hold the country together. We then began discussing his follow-up, Making a New American Constitution (2020), w...

Historian and legal scholar George William Van Cleve has written some of the most provocative and underappreciated works on the American constitutional tradition. His 2010 book A Slaveholders’ Union examined slavery’s central role in the framing of the Constitution, but it was his follow-up, We Have Not a Government , that made a lasting impression on me. That book explores the collapse of the Ame...

I’ve always had a soft spot for what you might call “year books”—not the high school kind, but those immersive histories that zoom in on a single calendar year to show how change unfolds in real time. Some years lend themselves especially well to this treatment, and 1963 is one of them: the year of Birmingham and the March on Washington, of Dr. King’s “Dream” and JFK’s assassination. In his new bo...

What do most of us really know about the history of Chinese Americans? For many, it begins and ends with the railroads or the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That’s what makes Michael Luo’s new book, Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America , such an essential work. It tells the sweeping, often harrowing story of a community that faced violence, disc...

Donald Trump recently said he wasn’t sure if a president is obligated to uphold the Constitution—a striking admission from someone who’s twice sworn an oath to do just that. Trump’s indifference to the Constitution continues to pose a serious threat to American democracy. At the same time, this moment invites deeper reflection on the document itself: What exactly are we defending, and does the Con...

The 250th anniversary celebration of the American Revolution is about to get underway in Lexington and Concord, the towns just outside Boston where British redcoats first clashed with colonial rebels. But just a day later and hundreds of miles south, a more complicated and perhaps more consequential clash occurred between the royal governor of Virginia and leading revolutionaries like George Washi...

We seem to be living in a reenactment of the Gilded Age: tariffs, territorial expansion, oligarchic control of politics, assassination attempts, a democracy that is straining at the seams. Overlooked and misunderstood, it’s an important period to reconsider. What did it take to leave that tumultuous, surprisingly violent period behind—and what were the costs of the reforms adopted to end it? The p...

I am wildly excited that publication day is finally here for my new book, Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery . It’s a very strange feeling to have worked on something, largely in solitude, for so long, and now for it to finally be made available to the world. In this episode I share some thoughts about the book’s origins and the six main characters whose li...

Amy Greenberg, a historian at Penn State University, talks about the role of masculinity in the idea of Manifest Destiny, both today and in the era when that phrase originally became popular, the 1840s, a time of falling economic mobility for men and new opportunities for women. Greenberg is the author of several books about American history, including Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American...