Doug Melville joins guest host John McCaa to discuss his family’s patriarchs – how they were unfairly compensated and faced racism among the ranks, and his quest to bring these extraordinary men’s stories to light.
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Can a democracy survive minority rule?
Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky joins guest host John McCaa to discuss how minority rule undermines democracy and why the U.S. is vulnerable to partisan takeovers from both the left and the right.
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How Daniel Webster united the States
Professor Joel Richard Paul joins guest host John McCaa to discuss orator, lawyer and politician Daniel Webster, who argued that binding the states together was the only way to end slavery.
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Think America’s too divided? Blame the Founding Fathers
H.W. Brands, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, joins guest host John McCaa to discuss the early days of the Republic, when Federalists and Anti-Federalists battled it out and planted the seeds of our current state of division.
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The family who escaped the Nazis and the Gulag
Daniel Finkelstein, a political columnist for The Times of London, joins guest host John McCaa to discuss his family’s history – a mother who fled Nazi Germany only to be sent to a concentration camp and a father whose family was sent to Siberia.
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For old-school conspiracy theorists, QAnon crossed a line
Conspiracy theory researcher Annie Kelly discusses how old-school skeptics raised on late-night call-in radio fear modern day conspiracy theorists are giving their passion a bad name.
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The devilish decade: A look back at the 2000s
Critic Kristian Vistrup Madsen makes the case that the aughts were marked by sexualization, obscenity and war – and why we ate it up.
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The history of secret societies in America
Colin Dickey discusses why our democracy has conspiracy theories woven into it and how to spot magical thinking so we can work to shut it down.
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Why LBJ and MLK needed each other
Peniel Joseph, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the contentious but essential relationship between the president and Civil Rights leader.
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Lessons from Lincoln on effective politics
Steve Inskeep, cohost of NPR’s Morning Edition, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how Lincoln sought to build a social revolution and hold the nation together.
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Earth has warmed and cooled before. So what’s different now?
University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Mann joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the precarity of human evolution and how previous changes in temperatures have affected life on the planet.
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Should presidents be our lone nuclear decision makers?
Science writer Sarah Scoles joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how psychologists want to study what factors into that high-stakes thinking.
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