Why Now? A Political Junkie Podcast

Sojourner Truth, copyright by Nell Irvin Painter, 2022: reprinted with permission of the artist. On July 21, 2023, amid a culture war manufactured by Republican party activists, Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech in Jacksonville, FL. The occasion? A set of standards for teaching African American history just issued by the Florida Board of Education that evaded or denied much of what we know about the history of Black people in the Americas. These dishonest guidelines brought the state’s social studies curriculum in compliance with H.B. 7, passed in April 2022, a law that characterized current scholarship in Black history as socially divisive propaganda and harmful to the young. Like similar laws passed in seventeen other states, H.B. 7 misclassifies most knowledge about Black history, literature, and culture as “critical race theory.” It makes false claims that true history shames white students by forcing them to bear responsibility for racism. White activists, under the mantle of “parents’ rights,” have pushed this narrative since the 2020 election. One white mother from Fairfax County, Virginia worked to have Toni Morrison’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved, removed from the curriculum. She claimed that the book gave her teenage son nightmares. “It was disgusting and gross,” the young man, now a college student, affirmed. Most of us would characterize Beloved as a tough read, but also one that accurately reflects the scholarship about violence directed against enslaved people. So, this creates a problem for educators under laws like H.B. 7: removing the violent realities of white supremacy from the curriculum creates a void that is difficult to fill. And yet, Florida educators, hand-picked by Governor and presidential primary candidate Ron DeSantis, tried, looking for stories of uplift and progress. The standards offered younger students stories about African American inventors and explorers. They encouraged high school teachers to introduce “the contributions of Africans to society, science, poetry, politics, oratory, literature, music, dance, Christianity and exploration in the United States from 1776-1865.” Sometimes the realities of African American history had to be massaged into a positive story. One lesson plan included instruction in the “opportunities” Black Americans had to learn “skills” as enslaved people, as if plantations were vocational schools. The history being dismantled, and books being banned, in states like Florida took decades to research, write, and weave into lesson plans. Historians don’t just fight for this knowledge because it helps us understand the past, but because our violent present is descended from the world that slavery made. In 2007, celebrated African American historian John Hope Franklin, the grandchild of enslaved people, discussed this legacy. He urged us to not just understand Black history as a field with its own lessons, but as a living thing: an intervention in United States, North American, and world history, and a mirror for the present. Few contemporary scholars have invested more in that project than Nell Irvin Painter, who returns to the show with a new collection of her work, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays (Doubleday, 2024). The author of eight previous books, Painter also pursues her historical vocation as a visual artist, professional training she completed after retiring from the Princeton University history department. This curated collection of essays is beautifully illustrated with the questions, visual observations, and imaginative renderings that scholarship alone cannot properly address. The book is autobiographical, it is scholarly, and it is beautiful: Painter has truly taken the practice of history to a new level. Show notes: * Claire notes Nell’s last book, a personal story about training as a visual artist after retiring from Princeton, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over (Counterpoint Books: 2019.) * Nell mentions...

The situation comedy Leave it to Beaver, which ran from 1957 to 1963, was one of many half-hour comedies that idealized the American post-war suburbs, always portraying them as uniformly white and a refuge where children got into “scrapes”—but not real trouble. From left: Hugh Beaumont (Ward), Tony Dow (Wally), Barbara Billingsley (June), Jerry Mathers (Theodore AKA "Beaver"). Photo credit: ABC/Wikimedia Commons I grew up in a place called the Main Line, a string of suburbs outside Philadelphia. The area got its nickname from a branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad first laid in the early 19th century as part of a Federalist public works program. In the next several decades, the railroad also became a passenger line, ferrying upper-class Philadelphians, eager to escape the summer’s heat and epidemic diseases, out to the healthful Haverford and Bryn Mawr hotels. But by the late 19th century, that Main Line train was ferrying businessmen, who now lived in suburbs built around the railroad, in and out of the city every day. Today, men and women can still walk to the train from their homes. Children who attend private schools that are also situated near the tracks (Baldwin, the one I attended, is in the old Bryn Mawr Hotel) can also be seen trudging off to the train like the little professional workers they will become. But one thing has changed. Those suburbs, which were almost uniformly white for decades, are now integrated—if not by class, then by race. As prices for one-bedroom apartments in places like New York top a million dollars, a three-bedroom house with a broad expanse of lawn may even seem—affordable? Something else changed too. Those suburbs used to be solidly Republican, but now Main Line voters are far more likely to vote with Democratic Philadelphia. Oh sure, there are still some Republicans in those fancy houses. That’s why Donald J. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, was in my hometown on November 6, 2016, two days before the election, telling her audience that it was an honor to speak to the white suburban women who had volunteered for the campaign. When I saw this on the evening news, I was shocked, but not nearly as shocked as I was on November 9 when I learned that my home state—my hometown—had been among the metropolitan regions producing the razor-thin margins of votes that elevated Ivanka Trump’s pussy-grabbing father to the Presidency of the United States. But the good news is: it didn’t last. When the GOP embraced extremism, the Pennsylvania suburbs east of the Appalachian mountains roared back. Suburban voters provided the margin of victory for Joe Biden in 2020, and have consistently handed the GOP loss after loss, turning red states purple, and purple states blue. And it’s not just Pennsylvania. Republican suburbanites in bright red states are also voting to preserve the right to choose abortion in the post-Dobbs era. Why? Well, we can point to that diversity I mentioned at the top of the show. Dr. Jasmine Clark, a Democratic member of the Georgia House of Representatives, described the pockets of support for African American minister and sitting Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in the 2022 by-election. Her prediction was that the suburbs were changing, and that Warnock would win. Dr. Clark was right, and today Georgia has not one, but two, Democratic Senators. The suburbs have never been more important to our political life than they will be in 2024. They are also important in every other respect: 69% of Americans now live in an area defined as suburban, and every policy has its greatest impact on suburban citizens. But it’s also true, as my guest historian Becky Nicolaides underscores in her book, The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles after 1945(Oxford University Press, 2024), that suburban America has always been less white and more complex—in its class structure, its built environment, its relationship to the city, and its attractiveness to new immigrants from...

It’s the summer of 1978, three years after the end of an American war in Vietnam that Joan Baez and other musicians had lifted their voices to oppose. On this day, Baez is giving a live, outdoor concert in Norway. Bantering with an audience of young Norwegians, she smiles to a happy, shirtless youth and segues into her next number: “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Canadian Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist of The Band, wrote that song for his drummer, Southerner Levon Helm, in 1968. The original, backed by a Robertson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel blues harmony, describes the pain and despair of Virgil Kane, a Southern railroad worker who watches the Confederacy crumble before his eyes in 1865. Although this powerful ballad can be seen as an anti-war song, it also sentimentalizes the “Lost Cause” myth —a cherished dream of the independent Southern nation, based on white supremacy, that might have been had the Confederacy not lost the Civil War. As in other cultural renditions of this alternative South, in which all white men are equal and have dignity, the song conceals the causes of the war: a violent, illegal rebellion that sought to preserve racial slavery. Talking to one interviewer who raised this issue, Robertson again returned to mythmaking. The song, he recalled, had its origins in a conversation with Levon Helms’s father, a poor, white Delta farmer, about what his family lost in 1865. In the interview, Robertson says he felt like he was writing a movie: in fact, he was transcribing, and embellishing on, a myth, one that figured rebellious Southerners as the victims of violence, not the cause of it, much as those being held in jail for the failed coup of January 6, 2021, are perceived by Donald Trump’s supporters as martyrs. Nevertheless, it’s a powerful song, and it became an instant folk-rock hit when it was released in 1969. It climbed even higher in 1971 when Baez recorded it for her double album Blessed Are. But why was Baez, a longstanding supporter of the Black Civil Rights movement, singing such a song in the first place? And why was she still singing it on August 1, 2017, this time accompanied by the Indigo Girls and Mary Chapin Carpenter, even as Donald Trump’s MAGA crowds declared themselves descendants of that same Confederacy? A better question might be: how do myths provoke feelings so powerful that even people with progressive politics like Baez stop paying attention to the dangerous, false histories they promote? And who better to turn to for answers, at a time when the Donald Trump MAGA myth machine promotes the worst aspects of American history as virtues, than American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin? A former colleague, friend, and mentor from my Wesleyan University days, Slotkin has spent a career exploring the violence at the center of the American past, and how it is both concealed and elevated by national mythmaking. Just to reassure you: not all myths are bad. After all, if the Confederacy represented one myth about the American founding, the Union government represented another. As Lincoln put it in the 1864 Gettysburg address, that myth was that the nation’s founders “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” That was a myth too—but it’s one that we who love democracy are willing to fight for still, and one that those who do not love democracy—Donald Trump and his allies—are determined to defeat. In his new book, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America (Belknap Press, 2024), Slotkin examines the history of the two Americas that exist side-by-side today, with their clashing and common myths, two American cultures that will meet at the ballot box in November 2024 to decide the fate of American democracy. Show notes: * Richie refers to the American “myth of the frontier.” There are many worthwhile things to read on this topic, but one of the primary sources that most...

If you have ever attended one of former President Donald Trump’s rallies, seen one on TV, or even just watched Fox News regularly, you may have seen people wearing tee shirts that have “Gays for Trump” written on the front. Did you think they were planted by the campaign? Or that any gay, lesbian, or transgender person who supported the current Republican Party was deluded? Or a simpleton? I’ll be the first to confess that, even as a historian who knows that ideology and identity do not map onto each other in obvious ways, I was stunned when I walked out of a Ben Shapiro keynote at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2018, where the rabble-rousing reactionary journalist had rejected homophobia but embraced hatred of trans people. Then, I saw two women holding a trans flag that declared: We Are Trans and We Are Conservative. It was incredibly brave. But here’s where I reveal my inner b***h queen. When I went downstairs to the exhibit hall and stumbled over a Log Cabin Republicans table staffed by two skinny, rumpled, nervous white men who were made even more anxious when approached by an obvious lesbian, my first thought was: what sad little queers they are. Well, shame on me. Those men had fought for their table at CPAC, a particularly difficult task since high-profile gay conservative influencer and youth organizer Milo Yiannopoulos had been disinvited the previous year for having shared fond memories of oral sex with a priest as an underaged teen. In fact, Yiannopoulos is an exception to the history of LGBT people in the GOP, and not because he was, and is, so out of the closet—although now he says he’s straight. Instead, queer Republicans have historically been the definition of rectitude and respectability, men and women who often did come out in defense of their rights: to be free of state surveillance, to serve in the armed forces, to marry, and to adopt children. That’s still true today. And like other Republicans, LGBT conservatives are often businesspeople who believe in individual freedom, family, low taxes, deregulation, God, and a strong national defense. If you go to the Log Cabin Republicans site today, you’ll see a full-throated endorsement of these values, updated for the Trump era. (You can listen to Charles Moran, a representative of Log Cabin Republicans, endorse Donald Trump on Fox News in 2019. As yet, the group has not made an endorsement for 2024.) And of course, much of what Log Cabin Republicans argued about Trump was true in 2019. Trump was in favor of same-sex marriage during the 2016 campaign, whereas both Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama before her, were reluctant to challenge their political advisors’ wisdom that it diminished their electability. Listeners may recall that it was President Joe Biden, then Obama’s vice president, who endorsed gay marriage in May 2012 on NBC’s Meet the Press.” The history of LGBT politics is complicated, to say the very least. And that’s why I invited my fellow historian, journalist, podcaster and friend Neil J. Young on the show to talk about his new book, Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024). As Neil explains, battling detractors on their left and homophobia to their right, gay Republicans have nevertheless played power politics for over 80 years, sometimes in coalition with liberal groups—and sometimes even founding advocacy organizations like One, Inc. that we think of as liberal in their origins. You’re going to learn things in this episode that I didn’t even know before I read Coming Out Republican. Show notes: * Claire begins by asking Neil to discuss the role of conservatives in founding the nation’s first homophile organizations. “Homophile” was a word that embraced the spectrum of pro-lesbian and gay politics in the 1950s and early 1960s. You can read more about this movement in a book edited by a character in Neil’s book: W. Dorr Legg, Homophile Studies in Theory and Practice...

Content warning: this podcast discusses sexual assault and other forms of violence. We begin this episode with Pramila Patten, the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. She is discussing an international investigation of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists stormed over Israel’s border and triggered the current and devastating war in Gaza. The most damaging attack since the 1948 war, more Israelis were killed in a single event than at any time since the Holocaust. Hamas fighters killed 695 civilians (36 of whom were children), 71 foreign nationals, and 373 members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The attackers took around 250 hostages, which included at least thirty children and several dozen contract workers from countries other than Israel. Thousands were wounded. Within a week, Israel initiated a terrifyingly violent attack designed to destroy Hamas, a military force embedded in a civilian population. By October 13, experts predicted the humanitarian catastrophe that has since unfolded. By the end of January 2024, the civilian infrastructure, layered on top of thousands of miles of Hamas military tunnels, was between 50 and 60% damaged or destroyed. Hamas claims that over 30,000 Palestinians, the majority of them noncombatants, have been killed. As I record this podcast, Israeli forces are planning to move over a million sick, injured, and starving Palestinian refugees out of Rafah, in southern Gaza, to pursue the elimination of Hamas there as well. I want to note that, while we all deplore unbridled violence, Israel’s strategy is not unique, and it is frequently used in places where insurgent fighters are not fully embedded in urban infrastructure. Carpet bombing civilians was invented in World War II, and the United States destroyed two Japanese cities with nuclear weapons, causing generational suffering. So-called “surgical” strikes were used by the US in both Iraq wars, bombing designed to deny the state access to water and power, and which killed civilians immediately and over time. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin pursued the strategy of destroying entire cities, along with cultural centers, hospitals, and schools, in Chechnya. In Ukraine, Russian missiles continue to pound civilians and civilian infrastructure far from the front. Bashar al-Assad, the authoritarian President of Syria, also used these tactics against political dissenters in his own country. Forcing states, or insurrectionist forces, to capitulate by killing, starving, torturing, and sexually assaulting civilians is not historically new or uncommon. That said, accusations of rape, sexualized murders and genital mutilation of women and children on October 7 have proven particularly, and unexpectedly, controversial. Despite eyewitness testimony and visual evidence, Hamas has denied these attacks, while some pro-Palestinian journalists in the United States have gone to great lengths to sow doubt about sexual violence, and to deny that it was part of the repertoire of terror that day. Denialism and doubt serve an important propaganda role, to be sure. But fifty years of feminist scholarship also demonstrates that war does not occur without sexual assault, just as it cannot be prosecuted without civilian casualties. The idea that you can have war without rape, on all sides, is historically implausible. And yet, to understand how war works, acknowledging and investigating these crimes is not where our conversation about gender and war can end. How men, women, and children experience violent conflict inspires, sustains, and promotes war. Women are not just the passive victims of violence, they are the ones who give birth to soldiers, become soldiers, support military operations, and care for the wounded—often for life. Men are raped. Palestinian mothers and fathers, like women in conflict zones everywhere, currently care for and feed families in reduced, terrifying, and exposed circumstances. Women are counted upon...

That was a small portion of the State of the Union speech that President Joe Biden gave on the evening of February 7, 2023. By the time many of you listen to this episode, Biden will have delivered his 2024 message to Congress, one that is widely expected to lay out his agenda for a second term and provide a compelling argument for the voters to give him a Democratic House and Senate to work with. Biden is commonly criticized, not for his abilities, but for his age. And yet, age makes him an important link to the past and tells us a great deal about his embrace of a political agenda forwarded by the Democratic party’s Progressive caucus. Why has Biden, an establishment Democrat, gotten behind LGBT rights, women’s rights, racial justice, and anti-poverty programs? Because he is a liberal. Although today, the word “liberal” is synonymous with moderation and centrism, that isn’t its history. For much of the twentieth century it was liberals—in both the Democratic and the Republican parties—who pushed American society closer to equality. Beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s, liberals—often culling ideas from socialists, feminists, and populists—were the leading figures of the American progressive movement. We forget that at our peril, and if you watch tonight’s State of the Union, you will see how liberals transformed politics. Seated behind Biden’s right shoulder will be Kamala Harris, the first woman, Black, and South Asian person to become Vice President of the United States. In front of Biden will be Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to occupy the Speaker’s Chair and Hakeem Jefferies, the first Black American to serve as the Leader of either party. And there will be Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Biden’s only Supreme Court appointment and the first Black woman to serve in that role. Joe Biden didn’t make today’s Democratic party: he inherited it from Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr. On January 3, 1973, when Biden took his first oath as the junior Senator from Delaware, Humphrey may even have been in the audience. Watching this fiery, 31-year-old liberal, Humphrey might have recalled his own arrival on the floor as a freshly minted, 37-year-old Senator. A rising star in the Democratic party when he took the oath in 1949, Humphrey became the leader of the party’s liberal faction when, as the progressive “Boy Mayor” of Minneapolis, he fought for, and won, a civil rights plank in the 1948 Democratic platform. When you listen to the speech, you can hear the boos among the cheers. Humphrey’s words caused numerous segregationist Southern delegates, led by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, to leave the national convention in Philadelphia. Mounting a third party Dixiecrat candidacy with Thurmond at the top of the ticket, within 20 years, these Southerners would find a home in an increasingly conservative Republican party determined to turn back the civil rights achievements of the 1960s and 1970s. That’s the world we live in today: Republicans occupy the political right, referring to Democrats uniformly as “the Left.” Ironically, many progressive Democrats disdain liberals, viewing them as the most conservative wing of their own coalition. But that’s not what it means to be liberal. Instead, liberalism, as it first cohered in the New Deal, then Harry S Truman’s Fair Deal, and then Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, imagines that government’s role is to take the actions, provide the support, and pass the laws that free all Americans to prosper. This is why I invited James Traub, a journalist, historian, and expert on liberalism to talk to us today about his new book, True Believer: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America (Basic Books, 2024.) Traub takes us from Humphrey’s roots in a small South Dakota town to his years as party whip in the Senate and then Vice President to Lyndon Johnson, and his role in masterminding passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. And yet, if Humphrey’s life’s work...

The first cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed in late December 2019, near a lab in Wuhan, China that may or may not have been responsible for accidentally releasing the virus into the wild. The disaster that took shape around the world in the following weeks was like watching someone fall from a skyscraper in slow motion. The first case of Covid-19 in the United States was diagnosed on January 20, 2020. But even though there had been three weeks to make contingency plans to defend against a fast-moving and deadly virus, the White House seemed almost paralyzed. Donald Trump, consumed with his reelection campaign, did not declare the public health emergency that gave his administration broad powers to act until January 31. Trump, of course, believed that a wall stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico would keep undocumented immigrants from crossing the southern border. So, in retrospect, it makes sense that he rolled out only one major policy response in the next five weeks: he stopped travel from China. This neither stopped the spread of a virus that was already in the United States, nor did it keep out infected travelers from other countries. By the time Trump allocated $8.3 billion for emergency health care on March 6, and declared a national emergency on March 13, there were 2,000 known infections and 41 deaths. Health care workers were starting to work double shifts; six states had closed their schools to prevent spread; and the New York Times predicted that as many as 2.4 million Americans could soon be competing for 925,000 hospital beds. New York City was an early epicenter, and everything fell apart on March 20. We all know what happened next. People who could leave cities did. Medical and nursing schools graduated their classes early and sent young health care workers into the hospitals to support already fatigued staffs. Students attended school, as best they could, online. Amazon and food delivery orders went through the roof. And work, if you still had it, became very complicated. Some non-essential workers were sent home to work online, and others were laid off and left to fend for themselves. Essential workers had to keep working, no matter what. Often the poorest and most vulnerable among us, they were constantly exposed to the virus with little or no protection. Who would, or would not, physically survive the pandemic was one question, but economic survival was part of that equation. And the divisions between us initially crystalized around which laid off workers had access to the social safety net. W-2 workers were eligible for unemployment: they paid social security taxes every month. But 1099 workers, a growing category of contingent laborers who work as independent contractors, were not. Then, there are other divides that crosscut the 1099 category: people who worked in bricks and mortar businesses and those whose labor was contracted through platforms like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and Instacart—gig workers who made an income with their own vehicles, tools, homes, and hustle. There were people who still had jobs, others who had worked several jobs and lost a few of them, and some who suddenly lost all of their income. As the world of work sagged and collapsed, University of North Carolina sociologist and W-2 worker Alexandrea Ravenelle decided to document this economic shock in real time. Ravenelle had just published Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy (University of California Press, 2019.) She jumped on social media to locate and interview precarious, or suddenly precarious, workers about their survival strategies. Ravenelle listened as people told her how they navigated government programs, avoided scams and predators, and balanced multiple jobs. She found out how a sudden infusion of money--$1000 a week—could create the mental and economic space for a worker to rethink, re-set, and plan their life. And Ravenelle learned that a universal basic...

If you are my age, you remember exactly where you were when defense attorney Johnny Cochrane delivered his closing statement in The People v. O.J. Simpson, a 1994 murder trial that captured the nation’s imagination. Simpson, a former star National Football League running back, actor, and celebrity was on trial for the gruesome murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman. Eventually judged not guilty, Simpson was later successfully sued in civil court by Goldman’s parents and, in a bizarre twist, went to jail in Nevada for armed robbery and kidnapping. As it was being investigated and tried in criminal court, however, the Simpson murder case became something else, moving to the center of American culture. It is even credited by some with launching the genre of reality TV. Here’s how that started. When attorney Robert Kardashian (maybe you’ve heard of his wife and daughters) notified Simpson on June 17, 1994, that he had been charged and would have to surrender to the police, Simpson famously ran instead. A tragic, celebrity double murder suddenly became a sensational media event. The police chase was filmed by nine news helicopters: future MSNBC anchor Katy Tur’s mother Zoë broadcast live from one of them. Millions of shocked Americans watched as regular programming was interrupted to watch Simpson’s white Bronco drive down a Los Angeles freeway tailed by police cars. The trial itself received more nightly coverage from the three legacy networks than the war in Bosnia did. Court TV, a now-defunct cable channel, broadcast the Simpson proceedings live from arraignment to verdict. And because attorney Johnny Cochrane was able to cast doubt on the ability of the Los Angeles police to investigate a Black man fairly—something that wasn’t hard to do in a city where the police routinely brutalized Angelenos of color in the name of the war on drugs—the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty.” But the Simpson case is only one in a long American history of sensational murder cases, crimes that are simultaneously tried in court and in the public square, yet never fully resolved. There are common elements in many of them: a troubled romance, conclusions drawn from gossip, an especially violent death, contests over expertise, jealousy or blackmail, shredded reputations, and what seems to be an obviously guilty culprit claiming to be innocent. Most importantly, these trials inflame the public imagination because they capture the zeitgeist: larger political tensions, social inequalities, and cultural preoccupations that we disagree about as a nation. Which is why I asked Bruce Dorsey, a professor of history at Swarthmore College and the author of Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation (Oxford, 2023) to come talk to me about America’s first, great sensational trial. In December 1832, pregnant mill girl Sarah Maria Cornell was found, apparently hanged from a fence post in Tiverton, Rhode Island. Or perhaps she was strangled, or had killed herself. Numerous mysteries surrounded the death of a girl who had been born into the property-owning middle classes, but gradually fallen into poverty and unemployment, even as she sought to preserve her freedom and respectability as a working girl in New England’s mills. Now, the police and the community had a mystery on its hands. Did Cornell commit suicide out of shame for her condition? Was she murdered by her lover? Cornell’s reputation in the mill towns that dotted New England, and in the Methodist Church community of Fall River, Massachusetts, just north of Tiverton, suggested both possibilities. But when a local doctor told the inquest jury that Cornell’s minister, the handsome, married Ephraim Avery, had forced sex on the girl at a camp meeting the previous summer, Avery was arrested and put on trial for killing her—presumably, to silence Cornell about the rape and the child that she had conceived. Show notes: * To learn more...

In the introduction to this episode, we begin with some false and partially false claims. Listeners should know that aborting a viable, healthy fetus in the third trimester is a vanishingly rare event, and that this has never been either best medical practice, nor has abortion been guaranteed under federal law in the United States after 24 weeks. And despite a talking point that has been repeated across GOP campaigns, no child is aborted “after birth”—that would be a murder. We can also dismiss the idea that the only two Republican presidential candidates still standing just want us all agree on an arbitrary number of weeks, after which the details of maternal and fetal health will no longer matter. The ideas that have succeeded in reversing the right to abortion have nothing to do with the procedure as those who are pregnant experience it. What you will hear in the incoherent statements made at the beginning of the episode is not policy, but fear and uncertainty. Former President Donald J. Trump and former South Carolina Governor and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley know that their own party’s abortion policies have become electoral Kryptonite. Let’s recap how abortion, after almost 50 years, once again became a matter of state law. On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States delivered its split opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade, a 1973 decision that created a federal right to abortion at 24 weeks. A judicial decision that pro-life activists had mourned with a demonstration in Washington every January 22 was eviscerated. Trigger laws, and pre-Roe zombie laws, stripped women of their right to an abortion, and created harsh new penalties for anyone involved in the procedure. When clinics closed, both economically marginal women and men lost access to a range of reproductive services. Although the cost of raising an additional child is one reason why people choose abortion, no state banning abortion has come up with a plan to support larger families throughout the life of a child. Furthermore, many physicians are afraid to perform life-saving operations that imperil a pregnancy, out of concern they will be subject to felony charges and fines. As a result, in some states, women have been forced to carry unviable or dead fetuses to term because medical facilities are unwilling to test the law. Conservative politicians have claimed that things are now as they should be, since Roe foreclosed states making their own decisions about whether to reform or eliminate their abortion laws. And then, a funny thing happened on the way to the 2024 election: as it turns out, Americans of all political persuasions want to make their own decision about whether to have children. A year after Dobbs, 34% of Americans wanted abortion to be legal in all circumstances, and 51% wanted it to be legal, with some restrictions. And a great many people in that 85% are the Republican and independent voters that any GOP candidate will need to beat Joe Biden in November 2024. They are the voters that the GOP is losing in key elections and referenda, even in red states. But the idea that restoring Roe would also restore reproductive justice relies on bad history: the two were never the same, and the right to abortion is just one piece of the puzzle we call reproductive rights. To understand that is to understand a bigger failure in 20th century feminism: that mostly white and middle-class pro-choice activists failed to connect with the needs of American women, largely poor and of color, who had been involuntarily robbed of their fertility be deceit and by design. That story takes us back to the states, specifically to New York, where abortion was decriminalized in 1970—and a state where thousands of women of color, in custodial situations, on reservations, disabled, and on welfare--were also sterilized. It was a state where women mobilized powerfully for the right to abortion, and one...

On June 10, 2020, grassroots calls to defund the New York City Police Department, initiated in Minneapolis, Minnesota, following the police murder of George Floyd, grew louder. That morning, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explained why to Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos. The NYPD’s $6 billion budget dwarfed the funds set aside for all other city functions. That, she explained was an imbalance that wealthy communities did not permit, and it was money that could be used to prevent crime. In other words, policy critics of the NYPD wanted to reduce interactions between the police and the poor, disproportionately people of color, by changing policies that put underserved New Yorkers under surveillance. They wanted to redirect these funds to the basic human services that house, feed, and care for Americans, and give them the training and education that create pathways to good jobs. But as Ocasio-Cortez went on to explain, “defund the police,” while the slogan might mean different things to different people, was not a path to eliminating, or even shrinking, the NYPD, but to reforming it. Specifically, she noted the funds spent on military-grade weapons acquired through the Department of Defense’s 1033 surplus program, and the budget for para-military NYPD tactical groups supplied with body armor, armored vehicles, assault rifles, bazookas, and small tanks. As an aside, the NYPD is also rumored to have an attack helicopter capable of shooting an airliner out of the sky in the event of another 9/11-style attack. Police recruitment advertisements and public relations videos paint a very different picture. In them, police officers who represent the hundreds of ethnic groups that live in New York, extoll the value of service, their dedication to community, and their desire to protect and serve all New Yorkers. In fact, both things are true: police are violent, and they are useful allies. Police officers are authorized by the state to commit violent acts, invade our homes, and use physical force and cause pain to assert their authority over civilians, whether those people have committed a crime or not. But it is also true that police officers are embedded in New York’s neighborhoods and communities. They are often familiar and recognizable figures, who eat in our restaurants, watch over streets and subway platforms, give directions to strangers, and provide reassurance that New Yorkers will not become victims of random crimes. This paradox lies at the heart of the social relationship between police and the people. While they are supposed to be the “good guys” who protect citizens from the “bad guys,” the ongoing tragedy of policing in the United States is fueled by the incidents, often fatal, in which these two categories become confused. Parents of Black youth warn their children to never run in public, lest they be mistaken for criminals; random drug searches concentrated in communities of color criminalize young people for simply hanging out; peaceful, law-abiding citizens are subject to traffic stops and searches, and are sometimes brutalized—or even killed—if they do not comply meekly. It's unsurprising that racial prejudices that are widespread in the United States would infect policing too, but they have a particular implication for the relationship between state and citizen: while white people usually believe the police to be a benign presence, people of color know they could lose their dignity, their jobs, and their lives when stopped by a police officer. How did we get here? Perhaps a better question, I realized after reading historian Matthew Guariglia’s Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York (Duke University Press, 2023) is—why are we still here? As Guariglia explains, the NYPD has not only always been violent, it has also been a racial project since the mid-19th century, when New York’s political class saw a need to control working-class immigrants...

You just heard an anthem sung by members of the Merze Tate Explorers, a non-profit, grassroots organization founded in 2008 for girls in the sixth through twelfth grade. Like other youth groups embedded in communities of color, the organization introduces girls to mentors, exposes them to career and college opportunities and, most importantly, funds travel and study abroad that wealthier students may take for granted. Merze Tate Explorers was founded by reporter Sonya Bernard-Hollins, who became aware of historian and international relations expert Vernie Merze Tate when she was researching a series of articles about prominent African American graduates of Western Michigan University. But maybe you are asking—who is Merze Tate? I’m not surprised if you have never heard of her: I hadn’t before a few weeks ago. Despite Tate’s prominence in her own time, I was never assigned her work in graduate school, nor was I aware of the substantial impact she made to the histories of international relations and American foreign policy. Tate was born into a rural African American family in Michigan in 1905. Growing up in a majority white community, she was one of a few notable figures (another is W.E.B. DuBois) who moved from a desegregated environment to a segregated one as her educational accomplishments propelled her to Western Michigan University, then Western Michigan Teachers College. Tate was the school’s first African American graduate, and after commencement, she took a teaching position at the prestigious Crispus Attucks High Schoolin Indianapolis. There, she did something no other teacher had done, and that was difficult to navigate in a racially segregated country: Tate started a travel club and took a group of Black students to the nation’s capital. The theme of Merze Tate’s life was travel. This was true in the literal sense—she visited numerous countries on all but two of the world’s continents—and it was also metaphorical, since over several decades, she went from being an ambitious, small-town girl to a cosmopolitan citizen of the world. Tate charted her path as an intellectual and fought for her dreams in a skilled, self-confident style that would equal one of today’s students from any race, gender, or class. She earned a master’s degree from Columbia University, then won scholarships that took her to Oxford University as the first African American woman to earn the B.Litt. there, and to Harvard University, for a Ph.D. in international relations. Along the way, Tate won her first college teaching job at Bennett, a four-year liberal arts college for Black women in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a second job at Morgan State University in Baltimore. Then, in 1942, Tate became the first African American woman to be appointed to the history department of Howard University in Washington, D.C., still known by its students and alumni as “The Mecca,” and the national capital of Black intellectual life. Tate spent the rest of her career at Howard—that is, the time she wasn’t spending on ships, planes, and trains traveling around the world, doing research, and hobnobbing with world leaders, and knitting together a global network of Black intellectuals and policymakers. Oh yes—and writing five books, as well as hundreds of scholarly and general audience articles and essays, taking breaks in the evening to host and attend dinner parties and bridge tournaments. If achievement is one theme of Tate’s life, being in motion is another. Travel was not just a pleasure, or work. It was central to how she carved out a prominent place in the firmament of twentieth century intellectual life. Travel defined Tate’s proudly independent existence. “We’re on our way, becoming who we are,” the Explorers sing in the clip that opened this segment. “We’re going to live—live the way we want to.” Traveling as a single, Black woman—Tate never married and remained unpartnered—was a challenge, even for a woman who spoke multiple languages. But Tate...

By the time he was four, the little boy began to notice that he could see less of the world. Had he not been born into a working-class African American family, or lived in the rural panhandle of Florida, the child might have had his condition diagnosed and treated. However, Jim Crow segregation and poverty prevented that. By 1937, the seven-year-old, now living and attending classes at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine, went from low vision to a complete loss of sight, eventually having one eye surgically removed. As he understood when he was a man, the cause of this vision loss was glaucoma, a progressive but treatable disease that destroys the eye when the pressure of accumulated fluid crushes that organ’s delicate and complex structure. But the boy’s life was not tragic or sad. Later, Ray Charles credited his mother, Aretha Williams Robinson, with his determination to live a full life as a blind person. “You lost your sight, not your mind,” he remembers her telling him. That clarity also gave him the strength to overcome an institutional education mostly intended to prepare disabled Black children for an adult life of menial, repetitive, underpaid manual labor. Over the seven years he spent at the school, Charles learned to put brooms together, a profit-making enterprise that helped to support the school, one that white children were not required to perform. But he also learned to read braille, pages of small bumps that translated into language, but also into sheet music. Encouraged by a music teacher at the school, Charles trained as a classical pianist, playing with one hand while reading and memorizing the score with the other, and then reversing that process to memorize the part for the other hand. In retrospect, although Charles used this technique because he was blind, it's also hard to imagine any activity that could be better for a maturing brain. But Charles’s life, often seen as a triumph over blindness, illustrates a larger point: blindness was part of who he was as a person, and may have been part of his musical genius. It also illustrates that many people who become legally blind have lived part of their lives as sighted and retain some vision. For example, Charles, who burst onto the national scene as a teenager in 1949 when he charted at #2 with “Confession Blues,” was sighted and partially sighted for a significant chunk of his life. Even when his vision loss was complete, Charles’s mind was still imprinted with colors, objects, and people, and throughout his life, he continued to gather sensory data that allowed him to experience the world visually. In 1972, Charles sat down with television talk show host Dick Cavett, who asked whether, were it possible, the now-iconic musician would want his sight restored. In retrospect, Cavett’s approach to the subject of blindness is often as tasteless as the still-common phrase that describes futility: “the blind leading the blind.” For example, riffing off of Charles’s abilities as a musician, as if they were improbable for a blind person, Cavett asked the artist about other things he could do. Could Charles land his private plane in an emergency? (Charles responded that he actually thought he knew enough about flying that he could.) Or could he perform an appendectomy? Although Charles had no medical training, there are, in fact, blind surgeons who do the delicate work of dissection through a refined sense of touch. Later, when Charles said that he had been watching the Cavett show for years, the host jumped on the word “watched.” Charles graciously explained that he saw everything sighted people did, because every piece of information entering his mind triggered his visual imagination. As journalist Andrew Leland explains in The Country of the Blind: A Memoir At the End of Sight (Penguin/Random House 2023), despite the fact that sighted people “equate blindness with darkness, it's rarely experienced as a black veil draped over the...

You remember that morning. It was November 9, 2016, and defeated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had gotten even less sleep the night before than the rest of us. In fact, things had started falling apart early on election night. Confirmed political junkies like me saw the look on James Carville’s face in the hour after the polls closed in Florida, listened to his uncharacteristically clipped, subdued tone, and knew he wasn’t seeing the early numbers for Clinton that he wanted in that state—or anywhere else. Clinton would not learn definitively that she had lost the election for another nine hours. But the mood in places like my neighborhood in New York City grew increasing gloomy throughout the evening. We watched, stunned, as Clinton lost states to Donald Trump she should have won, and was deadlocked or behind in key midwestern states that the Democrats had held in national elections for generations. By 2:00 a.m., critical bricks in that so-called “Blue Wall”—Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—had either fallen, or were falling, to Trump. I went to bed uncertain what America I would wake up to. Hillary may have gone to bed—but if she did, as I said—I don’t think she slept much. The next day, Clinton gave what was by any measure an outstanding concession speech, wearing a black suit with purple satin lapels that was supposed to summon the history of women’s suffrage to the victory platform. Now her outfit seemed downright funereal. And compared to what has happened since, Clinton’s words sound like they came from another century, not seven years ago. “Last night I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope he will be a successful president for all Americans,” she said, recounting the early morning concession call. This was a particularly gracious offer, considering that Trump had encouraged his partisans to chant “Lock her up,” invited women who had accused her husband of sexual assault to one of the debates, and spread false rumors that Clinton herself was chronically, perhaps fatally, ill. I won’t go on. Unless you are younger than ten, you probably remember it yourself. And you remember what came after: a unilateral ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries entering the United States. The brief elevation of a conspiracy theorist to the position of National Security advisor. An attempt to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into smearing Joe Biden with a fake corruption scandal. Impeachment Number One. An attempt to overthrow a legally constituted United States election. Impeachment Number Two! By the time Joe Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, we knew that Trumpism was an assault on our democratic system the likes of which we had not seen since the Civil War. Somewhere in there, Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, started writing long Facebook posts about the state of our nation. Richardson is no stranger to creating history for a general audience. She has written seven books, and nearly all of them could be a holiday gift for your relative who is passionate about intelligent, well-written political history. She has done three podcasts, most recently Now and Then, co-hosted with Yale historian Joanne Freeman. But those Facebook posts began to gather a mass audience, and in 2019, Richardson launched a Substack, Letters From an American, to help what was now a substantial readership make sense of the first Trump impeachment. Once the impeachment was over, she plucked a news item from the day’s political events to delve into or told a story from our nation’s history that illuminated the present. Four years later, Richardson is still at it. Every morning, there is a newsletter waiting for subscribers that number in the hundreds of thousands (actually, at last count it was 1.2 million.) Letters From An American is the top politics newsletter on Substack, beating out The Bulwark, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt...

We had a feedback issue on this recording. We managed to eliminate most of it, but if you hear a squeak, or a bit of distortion, that’s us—not your equipment. More importantly, the show is about gun violence. If this is a trigger, you may want to skip this episode. Before September 11, 2001, the cultural moment that everyone my age and older had in common—the sharing of confidences that begins with the phrase “Where were you when….” was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. On November 22, 1963, I was five. My mother had picked me up at nursery school and taken me into town to the Reading Terminal Market in South Philadelphia. This is where we were when, thousands of miles away in Dealey Plaza, a central thoroughfare in Dallas, Texas, a 21-year-old drifter named Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots. Two hit the president, and one wounded Texas Governor John Connally. Today, the news would have been tweeted instantly, but back then it took ten minutes or so for it to be reported out, as beat reporters pushed each other out of the way at pay telephones. Most famously, CBS News’s Walter Cronkiteinterrupted the popular soap opera, As the World Turns, to break the story. My mother, and everyone else line at one of the Italian stalls that sold meat, fish, and fresh vegetables, heard the news on a radio playing behind the counter. I remember only a churn of women’s legs around me—remember, I was five, and was as tall as the average hemline—and my mother seizing my hand and running to the door. “We have to go home,” she said. “The President has been shot.” We got into her big yellow Mercury and started our drive to the suburbs with the radio on. I wasn’t really listening, but what I remember was this: my mother pulled to the side of the road and began to cry. I looked through the windshield (yes, children sat in the front seat then) and one after another, cars were pulling onto the shoulder. Afternoon television audiences still watching As The World Turns, saw Cronkite return to their screen, choking back tears, to tell them that the President was dead. At 2:38 p.m., Air Force One took off with First Lady Jacquelyn Kennedy on board and JFK’s body in the hold on its way to an autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital. In mid-air Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson took the oath of office as the 36th president of the United States. A few hours later, the assassin—a little-known figure named Lee Harvey Oswald--was captured in a Dallas movie theater, after killing again, this time patrolman J.D. Tippit. Oswald was a former Marine, defector to Russia, and briefly, a streetcorner activist with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Needless to say, initial speculation was that he was a foreign agent striking a blow against the leader of the free world. That turned out to be wrong. Furthermore, in a brief appearance before a swarm of reporters outside the Dallas Police Department headquarters, Oswald insisted that he didn’t do it. Of course, since he was a child, Oswald had never accepted responsibility for any of his misdeeds. We’ll get to that—but to say the least, his public disavowal of the crime that day complicated things—forever. Had there been a trial, and Oswald proven to be the lone gunman, perhaps what became the foundational conspiracy theory in modern political history would never have been born. But on November 24, the day before President Kennedy’s funeral, that conspiracy theory gathered strength. Like millions of other Americans, I watched wide-eyed as a handcuffed Oswald was himself murdered in the basement of the Dallas Police Department by a nightclub owner Jack Ruby linked to the Mafia. These events were a turning point in American life. Although Presidents had been assassinated before, I was born into an America where gun violence didn’t suddenly erupt in public places. By the end of the decade, that was no longer true. A few months before Kennedy was shot, civil rights organizer Medgar Evers had been gunned...

This episode begins with a 1994 exchange between a teenage American voter and sitting President William Jefferson Clinton. Running against an incumbent, Republican George W. Bush, in 1992, Clinton wanted to emphasize his youth. He played the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show, and appeared on MTV as part of the cable music channel’s youth voter initiative, “Choose or Lose.” In a town hall-style symposium, when asked by a young voter whether he had ever tried marijuana, Clinton deadpanned: “I didn’t inhale.” It was a canny answer. It showed that he wasn’t a prude, while expressing caution about the wisdom of intoxication. It also made Clinton the first president to talk about recreational drug use outside of a criminal justice context. Clinton promised to return to the channel if he were elected, and in 1994 he did, leading to the famous “boxers or briefs” episode when he also became the first President to let an audience imagine him in his underpants. Between 1968 and 1988—that’s five presidential elections—only one Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, won election to the White House. So, MTV was onto something during the Clinton campaign. Recruiting younger voters was a way to break Republicans’ hold on the presidency without being overtly partisan. Like Rock the Vote, an earlier initiative by Virgin Records executive Jeff Ayeroff, MTV sought to elevate its cultural position and use the power of cool to mobilize the 18–29-year-old demographic, only 20% of whom had cast a vote in 1988. And by the way, of that 20%, a majority, 53%, had voted for Bush. Between 1972 and 1988, youth voters either tipped Republican, or split evenly, probably reflecting longstanding GOP organizing on college campuses. I talk about this in my book, Political Junkies. Young people voted in relatively small numbers, and they still do. However, in 1992, they tipped Democratic. Only 11% of eligible voters in the 18-24 demographic cast a vote, and 10% between the ages of 25-29, but young people went to Clinton by 13 and 5 points, unseating Bush. And although they voted in even smaller numbers in 1996, young voters leaned even more heavily towards Clinton and away from the lugubrious Republican Senator from Kansas, Bob Dole. The idea that young people have an investment in the future was the motivating force behind lowering the voting age to 18, a campaign for enfranchisement waged from early 1942 until July 1, 1971, when the 26th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. For three decades, supporters emphasized military service as the criterion for maturity: men were eligible to be drafted at 18 and could volunteer at 17. Although they have been voting for 50 years, the 18-24 demographic still does not punch its weight: only 17% cast a ballot in 2020 in an election that boasted a higher participation rate—66.3%--than any other election for 120 years. Yet, even if they do not vote in great numbers, young Americans are increasingly political and, in the absence of a military draft, they mobilize around other issues: the high cost of education, gun violence, racial and economic justice, reproductive rights and climate change are major issues that students promote. Which is why some politicians, like Representative Ayanna Pressley (D, MA-O7), are suggesting that the federal voting age be lowered to 16, something that has already happened in three Maryland cities and Berkeley, California. Pressley’s definition of citizenship goes beyond formal national service, linking patriotism to the work young people do in their families and communities. Voting at 16 could become a big issue, in part because it would potentially blunt the impact of voters 65 and over, who vote in much higher numbers and more conservatively. And it’s why I turned to historian Jennifer Frost, Associate Professor of History at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and her new book, "Let Us Vote!" Youth Voting Rights and the 26th Amendment (2022), just out in paperback from New...

You probably recognize the tune this episode begins with: it’s “The Song of the Volga Boatmen,” sung by Leonid Kharitonov and the Red Army Orchestra at Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow in 1965. It’s a folk song, originally sung by Russian barge haulers, or burlaks working on the Volga River in the 19th century. These peasants, in teams, literally hauled barges down the river, like beasts of burden, earning barely enough money to keep themselves and their families alive. Over time the song came to stand in for the strength and the spirit of a Russian people laboring under an absolute monarchy and the capitalist system that propped it up. Each verse’s repetitive “Yo, heave ho” not only evoked the numbing, back-breaking labor that bound Russians to lives of misery and privation under the Tsar, but also for the capacity of the people to endure and fight for their own freedom. The Russian monarchy finally fell in the face of the successful 1917 revolution, giving way to a Communist state that survived until December 8, 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. But well before 1917, there were periodic uprisings of peasants, intellectuals, and workers who hoped to make a better world. In 1648, Muscovites rebelled against the imposition of a salt tax. In 1698, 4000 soldiers overthrew their commanders and marched to Moscow, demanding that the exiled Russian Princess Sophia Alexeyevna be made Tsarina instead of 17-year-old Peter I. In 1771, rioters entered Red Square, broke into the Kremlin, and sacked a monastery. In 1825, three thousand rebellious soldiers demanded a constitution and that the Grand Duke Constantine be put on the throne. Anti-imperial uprisings occurred periodically in Poland throughout the 19th century, as ordinary Poles demanded freedom from the Tsar’s rule. Despite constant repression and policing, socialism, anarchism, and other radical ideologies spread like wildfire through the Russian Empire. The quest of the Russian people for democracy continues to this day, something that is worth remembering as the world musters support for the defense of Ukraine against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine. We don’t usually do Russian history on this podcast, but when I saw Allison Epstein’s new historical novel, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, just out this month from Penguin/Random House, I knew I wanted to read a story about Russians fighting for freedom. It’s a ripping tale about an officer coming home from the Napoleonic Wars to the man he loves, who just happens to be the tsar’s second son, a diffident, louche fellow who suddenly grows a conscience. And it also stars a brave band of revolutionaries, determined to set their country free, no matter what. And oh, yes—there’s a witch. This is Allison’s second historical novel, and her first about Russia. They are serious works of historical fiction that you will love, But she’s also funny. A fellow Substacker, Allison writes a newsletter called Dirtbags Through the Ages, which is exactly what it sounds like. Posts have titles like “that don’t empress me much” (about Empress Elizabeth of Russia), “double, double, toil and throuple” (the sexual antics of James I of England), and “a real papal pleaser: Or, the horny and heretical adventures of tenth-century Bad Pope John XII.” I love historical fiction: as I say in this interview, it’s what got me interested in history as a child, and I still turn to it—for pleasure, and to think through narrative strategies for the nonfiction books I write. So, I knew I had to get Allison on the show. Show notes: * Would you like to read a first-hand account of the 1917 Russian Revolution? Try journalist John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, originally published in the United States in 1919. * Allison notes that her novel begins as French Emperor Napoleon’s army is retreating from Moscow through a brutal Russian winter. This event wasmemorialized in Tchaikowsky’s 1812 Overture, but this period in Russian history has also been...

The peaceful march in Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 6, 2020, was organized by a chapter of the Black Lives Matter network to protest the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was one of numerous protests held around the United States and the world to protest Floyd’s death. But organizers also insisted on not treating this one murder as an isolated incident. Instead, it was another chapter in the daily violence against Black people that has not ceased since human beings were first exported from the African continent, sold, and consigned to forced labor over 500 years ago. Let’s be clear: Black Lives Matter is a slogan, it’s a hashtag, it’s a way to organize in communities. However scholars refer to this latest incarnation of the Black freedom struggle as the Movement for Black Lives. And it’s not a new civil rights movement, although the tools of civil rights—the right to walk across a university quad without being stopped by campus police, the right not to be murdered for a minor traffic infraction, the right not to be killed in your own home during the execution of a no-knock warrant, the right not to be suffocated during an unnecessary arrest—all of these rights are certainly relevant. Instead, the Movement for Black Lives seeks to transform a society that has always been lethal for Black people. And in our gun-saturated American culture, where white nationalism plays an increasing role in unleashing violence, it isn’t always the police that take Black lives. This new phase of the freedom struggle was inaugurated in 2012 when neighborhood vigilante George Zimmerman saw African American teenager Trayvon Martin walking down the street in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman stalked the younger man and in the course of an illegal attempt to apprehend and question him, shot Martin. Why? Because, as Zimmerman explained, the young man was wearing a hoodie and looked suspicious. Not only did the Department of Justice decline to prosecute Zimmerman under federal hate crimes statutes, but on June 10, 2013, a jury also acquitted him of all charges. Stunned at the verdict, Los Angeles community organizer Patrisse Cullors wrote on her Facebook: #BlackLIvesMatter. In subsequent days, Cullors, Opal Tometti, and Alicia Garza created what they called the Black Lives Matter network, a collection of organizations around the country that reignited the freedom struggle by organizing to stop police violence through community-based direct action and imagining a future where the most vulnerable among us—women, queers, immigrants, trans and disabled people—were at the center of the Movement’s concerns. The Movement for Black Lives makes demands on municipalities; the decriminalization of society and redirecting police budgets to humanitarian needs are among them. Like some earlier social justice movements, organizers are deeply embedded in their own communities and committed to a democratic praxis, this time informed by Black feminism. But unlike prior movements, which often centered on the entry of Black people into existing institutions such as education, politics, and business, the movement centers a broader critique of capitalist society and demands transformation. As movement scholar Deva Woodly has argued, “What democratic education should do and what social movements must do is to help people connect the dots between the problems that they are experiencing in their own lives, their values, and possible and desirable solutions.” Because of its decentralized nature, the movement isn’t easy to study. Scholars have to be agile and commit to the small community groups that spend less of their time marching and protesting over the high-profile murders that make the national news than in working through the daily forms of violence that don’t make the news, practicing care in community, processing trauma, and making sure that Black lives are not only mourned, but celebrated, honored, and committed to joy. This is why I...

At various points in this episode, we discuss sex and sexuality, AIDS, mental illness, and suicidal ideation. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis or thoughts of self-harm, you can dial 988. Or you can call the National Hotline for Mental Health Crises and Suicide Prevention at 1-800-273-TALK (8255.) For more information about AIDS prevention and treatment, you can go to HIV.gov or plannedparenthood.org. In 2012, Amber Hollibaugh, then the executive director for Queers for Economic Justice, explained to radio host Laura Flanders what sex and politics had to do with each other. Desire, she argued, was a way of reflecting on the past, understanding the present, and imagining a future. The erotic and fantasies about what might be sexually possible, she explained, are essential ways to connect not just to the world around us but also to the people in it who are imagining that better future. Hollibaugh, like other queer people born in the 1940s, inherited a conservative American culture where sex was hidden and ideally confined to heterosexual marriage. She had to fight to publicly claim her desiring identities: lesbian, femme, sex worker, erotic writer, feminist, and gay liberation activist. Like Joan Nestle, who appeared in an earlier episode, Hollibaugh went to queer bars to find other sexual outlaws, coming alive in sexual communities that formed under cover of night and operated under the uncertain safety of police and mob protection. In the 1960s, it was still illegal in many states to sell alcohol to gay and lesbian people or for queer people to congregate. Bars constantly threatened to expose their patrons with the occasional raid that reassured the public that the police were on the job. Pornography theaters, where gay men met for sex, were subject to similar raids, and sex workers were periodically rounded up, jailed, and fined. Similarly, obscenity laws governed what could or could not be published, sold, viewed, or exhibited. And outside the arts and the theater and film worlds, a so-called “known homosexual” had difficulty finding work and could certainly not be employed as a teacher, coach, or minister—in other words, someone who had contact with the young: queer people were all seen as potential child molesters. Because of the sexual revolution and the gay liberation movement of the 1960s, these prejudices and laws began to fall away, allowing ordinary people to come out, get good jobs, and seek sexual pleasure openly. As importantly, decisions by the Supreme Court rendered many old laws that had confined sex and sexuality unconstitutional. These decisions, and particularly those that applied the First Amendment to sexual expression, opened the door to the erotic performances, writing, film, and art we enjoy today. Initially, some of this material was little different from the forms of gritty pornography that had previously operated in a semi-clandestine way. But many newly available books were works of literature—novels like D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and Vladimir Nabokov’s sensational 1962 novel, Lolita. Movies like Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Taxi Driver (1976) celebrated New York’s Times Square as a neon world of sexual outlaws, hustlers, and grifters. When it came to pornography, the Court released a gusher of films, books, and magazines. Some Americans were content to use newly available home video equipment to rent a porn tape now and then or to visit the adult theaters that sprang up in chains across the nation. But feminists like Amber Hollibaugh, anthropologist Gayle Rubin, and writer Patrick Califia took erotic expression in a new direction. They published about their embrace of power exchange sexuality and their political commitment to outlaw desires like leather, S&M, and other sex play that required training and consent. Other women promoted an idea born in radical feminist consciousness-raising: that women could take charge of their own pleasure, even if that was...

The cartoon ad for retired General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower’s presidential run, “I Like Ike,” was created in 1952 by a Disney employee. It was part of a campaign designed by the advertising agency BBDO and paid for by "Citizens for Eisenhower," an independent group run by lawyer and New York politician Herbert Brownell. “I Like Ike” was a one-minute spot, distributed in the campaign's last two weeks, and its upbeat message was intended to create excitement around Eisenhower's Republican candidacy. It featured Uncle Sam leading a parade of homemakers, pipe fitters, cowboys, and other ordinary working Americans who marched past several doleful Democratic donkeys to the beat of a cheerful elephant banging a drum with its tail. The spot spoke to a society of men in grey flannel suits: I like Ike because—well, because—everybody likes Ike! Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who lost to Eisenhower in 1952, would try to replicate this magic in 1956 by rhyming "madly" and "Adlai,” which worked less well: across party lines, voters flocked to Eisenhower in that rematch too. But what you will also notice about “I Like Ike” if you watch it, other than its upbeat tune (and constant repetition of "like" and "Ike"), is that all the human cartoon characters are white. In at least 13 states, Black Americans voted in tiny numbers because state laws had created an elaborate set of barriers, often in majority-Black counties, to prevent them from wielding political power. In 1952, Black Southerners were also subject to Jim Crow, formal and informal practices that relegated most African Americans to inferior schools, prevented them from accessing public accommodations, put children to work at an early age, and required complete deference to whites. These laws, and social mandates, were enforced by violence: beatings, imprisonment, forced labor, and lynching. In the former Confederacy, those values were the values of state Democratic parties, if not the national Democratic party, and Democrats ran those states with an iron fist. (Today, those same Democrats and their descendants are Republicans.) So, the ad sought to reassure white Americans everywhere that their values were Ike's values, too. And “I Like Ike” had a seismic effect in a South where civil rights activists were already mobilizing against racist violence and official bigotry. Eisenhower not only took 39 states, he also captured the Democratic strongholds of Virginia, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. In 1956, he added Louisiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Eisenhower’s political affability, and his sheer blandness, often concealed and distracted from profound and growing political dissent in the United States. For decades, the 1950s was imagined in popular culture as an age of innocence and a site for white nostalgia. Dozens of books have declared the Age of Eisenhower to be a decade of conformity and consensus, of poodle skirts and the birth of rock n' roll, high wages, home ownership, and college enrollments that boosted white working Americans into the middle class. This collides uncomfortably with parallel histories of those years. The 1950s was also a time of political repression, led by anti-Communists in Washington and statehouses across the country. Students and progressives were already mobilizing to end nuclear proliferation. Gays and lesbians were beginning to organize publicly. And most importantly, a mass movement of African Americans was mobilizing to end Jim Crow. As Eisenhower was still waffling on whether to run in April 1951—after all, he had never registered with a political party or even voted because he had spent his whole adult life in the military—Black activists had begun to launch civil disobedience campaigns to support existing National Association of Colored People lawsuits. Students in Prince Edward County, Virginia, launched a student strike to protest the conditions in their school. In 1952, that suit would be wrapped into Brown v. Board of Education. The...

As we saw in the last episode, women were engaged in passionate activism to achieve gender equality by 1970. But unlike grassroots radical feminist groups, the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other organizations like the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), had begun to look to state legislatures, Congress, and the courts to rectify the injustices women encountered every day in the workplace, as consumers, and in their homes. To demonstrate how much the nation depended on women, in contrast to how little they were valued, NOW asked women across the nation to withhold their labor—from bosses, husbands, and even their own children--on August 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of the passing of the 19th amendment. In rallies held in major cities across the nation, activists would demand free, legal, and unrestricted abortion, equal opportunity in the workforce, and free childcare. But this was only a start. Why fight this battle law by law, grievance by grievance, when a Constitution amended to recognize women’s full citizenship could do the job in one fell swoop? Only a few weeks earlier, on August 10, 1970, Michigan Democrat Martha Griffiths had re-introduced an amendment to the United States Constitution that had been kicking around since suffragists Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman marched it up the steps of the Capitol in 1923. The Equal Rights Amendment consisted of one, clear, sentence: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” I don’t need to tell this audience that the ERA didn’t pass. And although many things changed for women in the 1970s—abortion became legal, sexual harassment became illegal, and women gained access to professions, occupations, and schools that had previously been closed to them—after a a decade of intensified activism, the battle for ERA was all but lost, and gender bias remained rampant. Women looked to NOW to defend them. Although the organization had dedicated itself to the fight for ERA to the point of near bankruptcy, during that campaign NOW had become a feminist institution where cross-cutting forms of discrimination by gender, race, sexuality, ability, class, and immigration status were forged into a bigger fight for social justice. Founded in 1966 by a diverse group of dedicated activists that included attorney Pauli Murray, journalist Betty Friedan, politician Shirley Chisholm, labor organizer Aileen Hernandez, and historian Caroline Ware, NOW’s loose, networked, chapter-style organizational structure brought diverse women across the United States together under a single umbrella to fight for their rights. It's an important story—not just about women, but about the difficulties and contradictions of doing American politics. That’s why I was excited to see that Katherine Turk, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has just published a history of NOW, from its founding to the moment it emerged, bloodied but unbroken, from the fight for ERA. Turk is an expert in the histories of women, gender, and sexuality; law, labor, and social movements; and the modern United States. Her first book, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) won the Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize in US Women’s and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians, and her new book, The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America, is out this month from (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023.) Program notes: * The opening clip from August 25, 1970, produced by WHDH Channel 5 is included courtesy of the Boston Digital News Library; you can view it here. * Read more about the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality here. * I mention the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL). That organization still exists, and is now NARAL Pro-Choice America. * Oprah Winfrey’s...