Ep. 57 – Harvey Milk
A look at the life of one of the most influential figures in modern history from his childhood to his assassination and beyond. Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Soundcloud | Spotify
The Peaceful South
Anders Walker— The recent opening of a lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama underscores the role that violence played in upholding racial segregation, or Jim Crow. From the 1870s through the 1950s, even the slightest challenge to white supremacy could spark a violent, terrifying backlash. And yet, the actual incidence of
Ep. 53 – Class in America
Class in America, often ignored, has shaped the country from the very beginning. We take a look at the changing role of class and how it has led us to where we are today. Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Soundcloud
Ep. 51 – Why Baseball Matters
Baseball is America’s Pastime but can it survive in the technological era when games are longer than most attention spans? Susan Jacoby, author and longtime baseball fan, discusses the history of the game and what it can do to keep fans engaged. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher | Soundcloud
Divided Lands
Hasia R. Diner— Nearly every place the immigrant Jewish peddlers went, with the exception of the British Isles and Scandinavia, they stumbled into societies in which color mattered. In some places—Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—the color divide followed a native-versus-European colonist divide. Where one stood across the native-European
Struggling and Failing to Break White Supremacy and Injustice
Gary Dorrien— Martin Luther King Jr., at the end of his life, fixed on three reform objectives, a movement ambition, and something bigger. The policy objectives were to terminate racial discrimination in housing, establish a minimum guaranteed income, and end America’s global militarism. Sometimes he put it in ethical terms,
The Four Horsemen of Capitalist Decline
Fredrik Erixon and Björn Weigel— Now, however, capitalism seems to have lost its founding spirit of enterprise. Four forces that guided the economy from the 1970s assisted in reducing the scope for experimentation and innovation. They are not the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, nor were they all undesirable, but
Ep. 8 – A History of Things That Go Bump in the Night
On this special Halloween edition of the podcast, cultural historian Leo Braudy, author of Haunted, sat down with us to talk about the history of monsters and other scary creatures. Spooky!
Taming the US Shadow Banks
Tamim Bayoumi— US financial reformers faced a fundamentally different issue from those in Europe. Banks in Europe were under a flawed single system. The issues in the United States, on the other hand, centered on the dual nature of the pre-crisis banking system that contained a relatively tightly regulated core and
Strangers of Familiar Soil
Edward Dallam Melillo— On October 31, 1967, California governor Ronald Reagan addressed seventy-three diplomats, businesspeople, and academics who had assembled in Sacramento for the fourth annual Chile-California Conference. As the former Hollywood actor and future US president told his audience, “Well, Chile is something special to California, and to Californians