Listening To America podcast

#Politics #Unitedstates #History #Society #Listening To America #The Americans

28:47

Tyler Summitt, son of legendary coach Pat Summitt, as well as the Co-Founder of Pat Summitt Leadership Group , shares the group’s mission, the story of Pat’s humble beginnings, the art of mastering full executive decision making in 90 second or less, the "secret sauce" to Pat’s leadership, what she definitely didn’t understand about, but learned from, a 5-year-old’s soccer game, how to visualize winning in a (very, very) highly detailed way, the key component that gets you to over a 90% success rate, and the answer to the mystery of just who is “Trish”? Mentioned in this episode: This episode is brought to you by Pat Summitt Leadership Group. Pat Summitt Leadership Group…

Listening to America

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Listening to America aims to “light out for the territories,” traveling less visited byways and taking time to see this immense, extraordinary country with fresh eyes while listening to the many voices of America’s past, present, and future. Led by noted historian and humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson, Listening to America travels the country’s less visited byways, from national parks and forests to historic sites to countless under-recognized rural and urban places. Through this exploration, Clay and team find and tell the overlooked historical and contemporary stories that shape America’s people and places. Visit our website at ltamerica.org.

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Listening to America

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490 эпизодов

#Politics #Unitedstates #History #Society #Listening To America #The Americans

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1
#1645 The Resurrection of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 57:53

3 hours назад57:53

57:53

Clay is joined by one of his favorite guests and favorite people, historian Joe Ellis of Vermont. The discussion is about the Trump administration’s attempt to pull the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 out of the historical dust and apply it to what it regards as undesirable foreigners in the United States. Two Alien acts, the Sedition Act, and the Naturalization Act were passed by a Federalist Congress during a war scare in 1798, the so-called Quasi War. The Alien Enemies Act permitted the president to deport any foreign person he regarded as a national security threat, without due process, without a hearing public or private, and without the benefit of counsel. In the presidential campaign of 2024 Donald Trump declared that he would be invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which is still on the books. He has begun to deport what he regards as Venezuelan gang members and other undesirables (as he sees them). The federal courts now will have to determine if the Alien Enemies Act is a legal tool in President Trump’s campaign to control immigration to the United States. Joe Ellis provides vital and essential historical context for this vexed issue. This interview was recorded on 22 March 2025.…

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#1644 Thomas Jefferson and American Diplomacy and Trade 1:15:19

7 дней назад1:15:19

1:15:19

Guest host David Horton interviews Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, about his life as a diplomat. Jefferson served for five years as the American minister to the court of Louis XVI just before the French Revolution. Then, he served three years as America’s first Secretary of State — trying to keep the United States from being drawn into the chaos of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. As president, Jefferson “solved” the problem of the Mississippi River by buying the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803, which doubled the size of the United States. Jefferson then sent his protégé Meriwether Lewis to inventory that vast territory. Jefferson was an admirer of Adam Smith. He believed that the less governments intruded into the free flow of goods and services in the world, the more efficient economies would be, and more prosperity would result. In the third segment of the program, Clay and David talked carefully about the trade, tariff, and foreign policy situation that has unfolded in the first months of the second Trump term. This interview was recorded on March 12, 2025.…

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#1643 A Cultural Tour of Cuba 58:07

14 дней назад58:07

58:07

Russ Eagle is the guest host for a discussion of Clay’s recent cultural tour of Cuba. Clay, Russ, and guests spent 10 days in Cuba, traveling in a small bus across the island. They began in Santiago, where the Cuban Revolution touched off on July 26, 1953, and ended in Havana, once one of the most vibrant cities in the Caribbean. It is still full of creative people exhibiting extraordinary resourcefulness under difficult circumstances. They visited two Bay of Pigs museums, one in Little Havana in Miami (pro-insurrection) and one at the Bay of Pigs itself (pro-Castro). They spent an afternoon swimming in the Bay of Pigs! Clay performed as Theodore Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, followed by a thoughtful refutation by a Cuban professor of law. At the end of our journey, they visited Ernest Hemingway's villa outside Havana and the fishing village from which he took his boat, Pilar, out to sea in search of marlin.…

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#1642 The Myths That Hold America Back 56:37

21 день назад56:37

56:37

Clay is joined by Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Dr. Casey Burgat to discuss a new book, We Hold These “Truths”: How to Spot the Myths That are Holding America Back. The book aims to tackle 13 myths at the core of political dysfunction: lobbyists are evil, Congress doesn’t do anything, the Supreme Court has become too political, and there is a demand that we keep politics out of sports. Clay and his guests try to make sense of how much weight they should give to the vision of the Founding Fathers, who Lindsay notes were not saints or Platonic sages but men (and a few women) who put together what they hoped would be a self-sustaining American republic. They grieve the death of civics education in America’s schools, without which we are all subject to political notions that may have no factual or historical basis. And no, says Casey Burgat, we do not want term limits for members of Congress.…

1
#1641 Author, Hampton Sides on Captain James Cook’s Amazing Third Voyage 56:18

28 дней назад56:18

56:18

Clay interviews Hampton Sides, the author of a dozen outstanding books, including studies of Kit Carson, Martin Luther King’s assassin James Earl Ray, the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in Korea, and most recently, The Wide, Wide Sea, Sides’ study of the third and fatal voyage of Captain James Cook. How does one write about a British explorer like James Cook in the 21st century when Cook’s statues around the world are being defaced, decapitated, or torn down due to his role in disrupting the indigenous cultures he encountered in his voyages? Sides talks about his strategy of coming down somewhere in the middle on this cultural and political question. He takes comfort in that his book, The Wide, Wide Sea,has been criticized from both ends of the political spectrum. We talk, too, about his forthcoming book about the Sand Creek Massacre in eastern Colorado on November 29, 1864.…

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#1640 Traveling America in Search of Its History and Stories 52:28

5 weeks назад52:28

52:28

Clay sits down with Nolan Johnson, fellow North Dakotan and Listening to America’s talented videographer and podcast editor. Nolan joined Clay with cameras and drone in hand at key points along Clay’s 21,000-mile Travels with Charley journey in 2024. The two discuss plans for this year’s Lewis and Clark trek from Monticello to Astoria, Oregon, and back again. Clay notes that following John Steinbeck’s 1960 journey was relatively simple with only a dozen must-visit places on the Travels with Charley trail. With Lewis and Clark, things are much richer and more complicated. How can one pay respect to a river journey across the continent by driving along those rivers pulling an Airstream trailer? Nolan has his own history with the expedition’s winter quarters at Fort Mandan in North Dakota and is excited to join Clay at Lewis and Clark sites across the country. Clay outlines his plan to get on each of the principal rivers of the 1804-1806 expedition, his goal to do a series of public events at Lewis and Clark interpretive centers, and his hope of making genuine discoveries along the way.…

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#1639 Jefferson and the Lewis and Clark Expedition 56:57

6 weeks назад56:57

56:57

Guest host Russ Eagle interviews Thomas Jefferson about the American West. When he became the third president in the spring of 1801, Jefferson hired Meriwether Lewis to be his private correspondence secretary. Two years later, he selected Lewis to explore the American West by traveling up the Missouri River to its source, crossing the continental divide, and following tributaries of the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Jefferson discusses his lifelong fascination with the West, his previous attempts to get an exploring party up the Missouri River, his secret message to Congress to get funding for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and his famous instructions to Lewis, which embodied the principles of the Enlightenment. Lewis and Clark led the most famous exploration in American history, so why did Lewis commit suicide just three years after the successful conclusion of his travels?…

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#1638 Joe Ellis on the 2024 Presidential Election 57:21

7 weeks назад57:21

57:21

Clay's discussion with Pulitzer Prize winning historian Joseph Ellis, author of over a dozen outstanding, award-winning books on the Founding Fathers and America's early national period. Joe shares his comments and insights on the 2024 election and the return of Donald Trump to the White House, only the second time this has occurred in American history. And who was Grover Cleveland anyway? Joe and Clay discuss the tenacity of racial tension in American history, the failure of Jeffersonian democracy to create conditions of harmony, compromise, and mutual respect, and the need for a new constitutional convention to address fundamental problems in American public life. Joe is, at heart, an American optimist. He believes we are going through a predictable reaction to rapid social and technological change and that we will get through this as we always have. He thinks the America, which will emerge in the next couple of decades, will come closer to the Founders' visions than might seem presently apparent.…

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#1637 Historical Integrity in a Hyper-Partisan Time 1:00:59

8 weeks назад1:00:59

1:00:59

Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Clay discuss the challenge of maintaining historical integrity during political turmoil and uncertainty. How does a professional historian differentiate between her personal politics, her status as an American citizen, and her responsibilities as a professional historian? In other words, how can the public trust a historian when we venture into something as controversial as the current president, who is a self-styled disrupter of American traditions and norms? How does a historian contextualize current events in the matrix of what is known with certainty about the past? Lindsay is exemplary in her intellectual discipline, but it doesn’t come easy when things we all thought were settled and taken for granted are being assailed by a populist revolutionary. In particular, we talk about Mr. Trump’s first-day pardon of 1,500 individuals convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Can a historian provide an analysis that puts this moment into a context that helps the American people know where we are and how we got here?…

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#1636 Special Episode: Listener Mail On Clay's Great Steinbeck Adventure 56:23

9 weeks назад56:23

56:23

Clay and special guest Russ Eagle take up listener mail about Clay's recently completed Travels with Charley tour of America. Thousands of people followed Clay's 210-day, 21,400-mile journey across America and sent along numerous suggestions and questions; these included recommended detours, great places to camp, restaurants to visit, and great spots along the route that Steinbeck did not give himself time to visit. Russ and Clay also talk about a recent report regarding the source material Steinbeck used for his classic, Grapes of Wrath. Was Steinbeck a plagiarist? Answer: no. They also preview plans for Clay's 2025 adventure that will follow the Lewis and Clark Trail from Jefferson's Monticello to the Pacific Coast, including how Steinbeck's journey differs from the explorations of Lewis and Clark.…

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#1635 Peaceful Transfer of Power 55:52

10 weeks назад55:52

55:52

Clay is joined by David Marchick, the author of the acclaimed book, The Peaceful Transfer of Power: An Oral History of America’s Presidential Transitions. The transfer of power in 2021 was not peaceful and it was not efficient. The transfer of power in 2025 will certainly be peaceful, but President-elect Trump is deliberately violating norms that have been in place in U.S. politics for most of a century. David Marchick’s book explores the history of transitions: Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln, arguably the worst in our history, all the way to G.W. Bush and Barack Obama in 2008, perhaps the finest and smoothest transition in our history. We spend some time talking about the transition in 2016-17 from the Obama to the first Trump administration, when Chris Christie worked for months to vet hundreds of potential appointees and provided a brilliant roadmap for Trump, only to see his dozens of binders literally tossed into the dumpster by Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner.…

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#1634 AI and Quantum Computing, Ready or Not 54:19

11 weeks назад54:19

54:19

Clay and frequent guest David Horton talk about the coming Artificial Intelligence revolution. Like it or not, we are already wading (if not rushing) into that brave new world, and we all better come to terms with what’s ahead of us. Horton’s portfolio at Radford University includes questions of technology, appropriate technology, and the laws of unintended consequences. Horton briefly defines AI and Quantum Computing and suggests how these things are already transforming life. Clay’s concerns are primarily about the future of privacy and intellectual property. The program begins with an examination of how Thomas Jefferson aggregated information for multiple purposes and how the third president might respond to the infinite rain of information in our time. Clay and David also discuss the implications of apps like Chat GPT for the future of education.…

1
#1633 The History of Presidential Transitions 56:30

12 weeks назад56:30

56:30

Clay and frequent guest Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky discuss how an incoming president prepares to govern the United States. In what ways does the outgoing administration advise and guide the one coming in, particularly when the new president wants to make a sharp break with his predecessor’s policies and style? We examine the first four presidencies: Washington, the only unanimous president, who had been preparing for this role his whole life; John Adams, who made the mistake of keeping Washington’s cabinet in place, not knowing until too late that those ministers were betraying him at every turn; Jefferson, whose preparation in 1800 was hamstrung by the constitutional crisis in which the House of Representatives took 36 ballots to certify his election; and the ways in which Jefferson tried to ease the path of his handpicked successor James Madison in 1808.…

1
#1632 A Survival Guide for the Next Four Years 55:13

13 weeks назад55:13

55:13

Guest host David Horton and Clay discuss New Year’s resolutions. Never more important than at present. People across the political spectrum are nervous about the next years of American life. But what’s to be done? Clay offers several ways of coping—taking up a craft that involves one’s hands and not merely one’s brain, reading with discipline and purpose, learning from Aristotle’s dictum that wisdom is knowing which battles to fight and which to leave alone, and much more. Clay and David wind up quoting Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity prayer in unison. Read the complete works of your favorite author. And when things really go south, watch Leslie Nielsen films: Naked Gun, Airplane, Naked Gun 2 ½ .…

1
#1631 The Annual Christmas Show 55:00

14 weeks назад55:00