Trials That Shaped Us

In Part 3 of Religion in the Courts: Galileo, Scopes and Dover, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas turns from Galileo to the origins of the Scopes case. The episode begins with Genesis and the creation of mankind, then traces the rise of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, the publication of On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, and the broader social ideas that came to be associated with Darwin...

After centuries of debate over Earth’s place in the cosmos, Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope at the night sky — and saw a universe that no longer fit the old order. In Part 2 of Religion in the Courts: Galileo, Scopes and Dover, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas follows Galileo from respected mathematician to scientific celebrity. With his telescope, Galileo discovered mountains and valleys on the moon,...

Before Galileo pointed his telescope at the night sky, the universe already had an order. In Part 1 of Religion in the Courts: Galileo, Scopes and Dover, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas begins with the ancient and medieval ideas that shaped how educated Europeans understood the cosmos. From Genesis and Joshua to Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Islamic scholarship, and the universities of medieval Europe, this...

In Part 5 & 6 of America’s First Anti-Terrorist Campaign: The Ku Klux Klan Trials of 1871 , Judge Stephen J. Sfekas follows the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Redemption movement, as white political control returned across the South through voter suppression, violence, Jim Crow laws, and the collapse of Black political power after events like the Wilmington coup of 1898. The episode...

After the federal government’s successful prosecutions against the Ku Klux Klan in 1871, Reconstruction briefly seemed to be moving toward real protection of Black voting rights and civil rights. The 1872 election saw extraordinarily high African-American turnout and one of the fairest elections in U.S. history up to that point. But that progress did not last. In Part 4, we follow how economic cri...

In Part 3 of America’s First Anti-Terrorist Campaign: The Ku Klux Klan Trials of 1871, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas turns to the federal government’s direct campaign against Klan violence in South Carolina. He follows President Ulysses S. Grant’s use of the Enforcement Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus in nine counties, and the mass arrests that broke the Klan’s power. The episode also examines the...

In Part 2 of America’s First Anti-Terrorist Campaign: The Ku Klux Klan Trials of 1871, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas examines the rise of the original Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War and separates the reality of the 1860s Klan from the later mythology created by The Birth of a Nation. He traces the Klan’s beginnings in Pulaski, Tennessee, its rapid spread across the South, and its campaign of violence...

In Part 1 of America’s First Anti-Terrorist Campaign: The Ku Klux Klan Trials of 1871, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas begins with the unfinished work of Reconstruction after the Civil War. He traces the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, the first Civil Rights Act, the struggle between Congress and Andrew Johnson, and the legal revolution that redefined American citizenship. The episode also introd...

In Part 4 of our Andrew Johnson series, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas takes listeners inside the first presidential impeachment trial in American history. He follows Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Butler, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, Edmund Ross, and the Senate showdown that left Johnson in office by a single vote. Along the way, this episode shows that the real fight was not just over the Tenure of Offic...

In Part 3 of our Andrew Johnson series, the constitutional fight turns into open warfare. Judge Stephen J. Sfekas follows Johnson's escalating clash with Congress over Reconstruction, control of the Army, Ulysses S. Grant, Edwin M. Stanton, and the Tenure of Office Act, while also unpacking what "high crimes and misdemeanors" actually meant to the framers. As Johnson overplays his hand, Stanton re...

With the Civil War drawing to a close and the House approving the 13th Amendment in January 1865, the fight over America’s future shifts from the battlefield to Washington. Judge Stephen J. Sfekas traces how Andrew Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction policy, the rise of the Black Codes, and the battle over the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Act pushed Congress into an escalating struggle with...

In the first episode of our new series on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas begins with one of the biggest questions in American history: how do you end a devastating war without creating the next crisis? He traces Johnson’s rise from poverty and illiteracy to political power, examines the resentments and contradictions that shaped him, and explains why Abraham Lincoln saw...

In this bonus episode, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas steps away from the courtroom to explore the patriotic songs Americans return to in very different moments: victory, crisis, resolve, and reflection. Beginning with The Star-Spangled Banner and Francis Scott Key, he traces the stories behind four songs that have come to function as national anthems in American life: The Star-Spangled Banner, The Battl...

In Part 10 of the Freedom Trials, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas turns to Dred Scott, the case that became one of the most infamous Supreme Court decisions in American history. Beginning with Strader v. Graham and moving through Scott v. Sandford, he traces how decades of precedent were upended as courts embraced an increasingly aggressive pro-slavery vision of the law. The episode follows Dred and Harri...

Judge Stephen J. Sfekas begins with the ordeal of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from upstate New York who was lured to Washington, D.C., kidnapped, and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Using Northup’s own first person account, the episode follows how he survived twelve years in captivity, stayed silent about his identity to avoid deadly punishment, and finally got word to allies in New York. Th...

In this episode of the Freedom Trials series, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas returns to St. Louis to tell the story of Polly Berry and her daughter Lucy Ann Berry, later known as Lucy Delaney. Polly Berry, an enslaved woman who had once lived in a free state, won her own freedom in court in 1843. She then took the extraordinary step of suing for the freedom of her daughter. The case would become one of t...

Parts 5 and 6 shift to the “middle period” of freedom suits, when St. Louis became one of the busiest places in the country for enslaved people to sue for their freedom. Judge Stephen Sfekas explains why Missouri’s geography mattered, a slave state bordered by free states and territories, with the Mississippi River as a literal line between bondage and freedom. He traces how the cotton gin and the...

Part 4 follows two freedom suits that grew out of the Atlantic slave trade after formal bans were on the books but smuggling and corruption kept the traffic alive. We begin with The Antelope (1825), a case that starts with a Baltimore clipper that changes its name and flag, captures slave ships off the coast of Angola, and ends with 258 surviving captives, most of them children, landed in Savannah...

Part 2 follows the first major freedom case in the English speaking world, Somerset v. Stewart, as abolitionist Granville Sharp searches for a test case and uses habeas corpus to stop James Somerset from being shipped to Jamaica for sale. We track Lord Mansfield’s long delay, his final ruling that slavery is “so odious” it can exist only by “positive law,” and why the decision was widely understoo...

Part 1 introduces the Freedom Trials, cases in which enslaved people sued their enslavers in court before the Civil War and, more often than most people expect, sometimes won. We start with the basic fact pattern and the scope of the phenomenon, including how historians have traced hundreds of appellate decisions and thousands of suits, then we lay out the roadmap for the full series, from Somerse...

Part V follows the fallout after the Alien and Sedition Act era ends, and tracks how the key players carry the fight forward. We revisit John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr as the political landscape reshapes, then move into the judicial aftermath through Samuel Chase, Thomas Iredell, and John Marshall as the courts absorb the collision between federal p...

Part IV follows the Democratic-Republicans as the prosecutions widen and the question becomes practical as much as constitutional: who gets to decide if the Alien and Sedition Acts are unconstitutional when the federal courts and Congress are controlled by Federalists. With few options left, Jefferson and Madison turn to state power through the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, triggering a natio...

Part 2 follows Congress as the Quasi-War fears peak and the Federalists move a package of laws aimed at immigrants and political opposition: the Naturalization Act, the Alien Enemies Act, the Alien Friends Act, and the Sedition Act. We break down what each law did, the penalties and sunset clauses, and the core constitutional fight over whether criminalizing criticism of the government could coexi...

Part I sets the stage for the Alien and Sedition Act crisis by tracing the young republic’s first decade: the new Constitution and Bill of Rights, Washington’s cabinet, and the birth of political parties as Hamilton and Jefferson clash over finance and federal power. As the French, Haitian, and Irish revolutions convulse the Atlantic world and Britain responds with crackdowns on dissent, refugees...

Part VIII follows the collapse of the witch trials and traces how Massachusetts tried to live with the knowledge that it had shed innocent blood. Competing narratives emerged right away, with Cotton Mather defending the proceedings in print and Boston merchant Robert Calef dismantling them in a meticulous critique that helped fix public judgment against the trials. Key participants stepped forward...