#1646 The Legacy of Louis L'Amour and American Western Fiction
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Release Date: 04/08/2025
#1668 Bittersweet Homecoming
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay talks about his 2025 trek across America in his 23-foot Airstream following the Lewis and Clark trail. Clay discusses RV life and provides a sense of what a day in the life of an RV drifter is like. Clay also speaks about his intensive study of the journals of Lewis and Clark and the book he is developing, tentatively titled Getting Noticed on the Lewis and Clark Trail. And, at the end, he tells us about his future Airstream travel plans and his fall 2025 trips to England and Rome.
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#1667 Lunch With America’s Leading Steinbeck Scholar
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay and his friend Russ Eagle interview Robert DeMott, one of the greatest living Steinbeck scholars, at his fishing cabin on the Madison River, south of Bozeman, Montana. DeMott is the author of three important studies of Steinbeck’s novels, the editor of the journal he kept while writing his classic, The Grapes of Wrath, and also the editor of the four-volume Library of America edition of Steinbeck’s work. Russ Eagle has been enamored of Steinbeck for decades, particularly his 1945 novella Cannery Row. Dr. DeMott was incredibly generous with his time and his insights into Steinbeck. An...
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#1666 Ten Books on the American Revolution
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Frequent guest, Lindsay Chervinsky, makes a late summer appearance to discuss Ten Books on the American Revolution. Ken Burns recently said the American Revolution was the most important event since the birth of Jesus. Our listeners have asked for advice about what to read as July 4, 2026, looms over American life. Lindsay is current with recent scholarship; Clay’s approach is more biographical. They agreed that you cannot go wrong with Rick Atkinson's trilogy on the revolution, and reading anything by Joseph Ellis is great. Clay recommended Ellis's book Passionate Sage, on John Adams, while...
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#1665 Jefferson and Madison on Vacation
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay's conversation with historian Louis Masur about his new book A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, & the Forging of a Friendship. In 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison went on a monthlong tour of New England. They were weary from their struggles with Alexander Hamilton for the soul of America. They needed a vacation, but as exemplars of the Enlightenment, they wanted to do some "botanizing," as they put it. They were interested in studying the Hessian Fly, which was devastating New England wheat production and seemed to be heading south to Maryland and Virginia. They...
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#1664 The Rivers of the Lewis and Clark Expedition
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay and his good friend Russ Eagle discuss the rivers Lewis and Clark traveled from Pittsburgh to the Pacific Ocean, including the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Clearwater, the Snake, and the Columbia. The paradox of Clay’s 2025 Airstream journey along the Lewis and Clark Trail is that they floated America’s rivers, and Clay has been driving along the roads closest to those rivers. To overcome this, he has contrived ways to get on the rivers of the expedition. In North Dakota, he floated for three days in a pontoon from Fort Rice to Bismarck with two young comrades. Just north...
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#1663 Presidential Finances
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay interviews Megan Gorman, the author of the excellent new book, All the President’s Money: How the Men who Governed America Governed their Money. Gorman is a nationally respected money manager for some of the wealthiest Americans. She thought it would be interesting to explore the way American presidents have handled their finances, before, during, and after their time in office. Gerald Ford is a pivotal figure in this regard, because he left the presidency as a young man and had to find a way to make a living beyond the White House. But we spent most of our time talking about George...
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#1662 Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay’s conversation with Claire Martin, who hiked the entire Pacific Crest Trail in 2020, more than 2,400 miles through some of the most rugged landscapes in America. Claire was a 2018 graduate of Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia. Without quite knowing why, she set out for the Mexican border with a 35-pound pack and began the long journey to Canada. It’s an amazing story of a young woman who doesn’t seem to be afraid of much, who undertook one of the planet’s great adventures and lived to tell the tale. In the high Sierra, just for the fun of it, she and her companions...
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#1661 Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a New Constitution for the United States
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Frequent guest Beau Breslin of Skidmore College and one of his prize students, Prairie Gunnels, talk about a capstone project for Beau’s Introduction to American Politics Course, in which students used the AI tool, ChatGPT, to write a new constitution for each of the seven generations that now share American soil. Professor Breslin is fully aware of the disruptive nature of Artificial Intelligence in the university classroom. Still, he decided to harness it for the good and encourage his students to use it responsibly to gather data essential to any possible new Constitution of the United...
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#1660 Ten Things: The Real Patrick Henry (Live)
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay’s conversation with popular guest Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky on Patrick Henry. Henry began his life as a shopkeeper but rose to become the governor of Virginia and one of the handful of most essential rabble-rousers in the American Revolution. Henry and Jefferson were frenemies; at one point, Jefferson (the Deist) said to his friend Madison, “We must pray for Henry’s death.” This quip was likely a joke, but Jefferson was quite critical of Henry, and he never forgave him for initiating a legislative investigation into Jefferson’s conduct as the beleaguered wartime governor of...
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#1659 Theodore Roosevelt in Grand Canyon Country
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay’s conversation with Harvey Leake, the great-grandson of the pioneering southwestern archaeologists . Harvey tells the story of former President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1913 visit to the Four Corners region. First, TR and his sons Archie, age 19, Quentin, age 15, and their cousin Nicholas Roosevelt, age 20, rode through the Grand Canyon and up to the North Rim, where they hunted mountain lions. Then, they made an arduous horseback journey to Rainbow Bridge, the sacred site in the heart of Navajo country. Finally, they visited the Hopi world, where TR and his young companions observed the...
info_outlineClay interviews Beau L’Amour, the son of Louis L'Amour, the celebrated author of multi-million best-selling Westerns. Beau L’Amour is the manager of his father’s literary estate. By his passing at 80 in 1988, Louis L’Amour wrote just under 100 novels and more than 250 short stories. All of his books are still in print. Clay and Beau talked about changing views of the frontier, white-Native relations, and the role of violence in the American West. How well does Louis L’Amour hold up in our culturally sensitive time? Beau L’Amour is currently revisiting his father’s novels and providing afterwords in the books, sharing the backstory of their creation, their connection to film and television, and their place in the larger achievement of the famous author. Louis L’Amour, more than 30 years after his death, still ranks every year among the top 50 most popular writers in the world. You can read Clay’s essay about his talk with Beau L’Amour here. Their conversation was recorded on March 17, 2025.