#1702 Thomas Jefferson on British Royalty
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Release Date: 05/05/2026
#1713 The Magic of Joshua Jay
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay and his travel partner, Russ Eagle, interview the world-renowned sleight of hand magician Joshua Jay in Las Vegas. In addition to wowing audiences across the United States, Joshua Jay performs in America’s prisons and encourages criminals, including hardened ones, to take up magic. He has just returned from a tour of war-torn Ukraine, where he lightened the burden of the Ukrainian people, fighting for their national survival against Russian aggression. Clay gave Joshua Jay the tuxedo of one of the 20th century’s greatest sleight of hand magicians, Channing Pollock, for Jay’s museum...
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#1712 The Changing Face of Hollywood
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay welcomes Sandra Murray to talk about her 40-year career behind the scenes of major Hollywood film productions. Sandra has worked on over 250 films, including Titanic, King Kong, Les Misérables, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, most often creating the “Making of the Movie” features that accompany distribution. She has worked with some of the major filmmakers of the last half-century, including her friend Clint Eastwood. The American film industry is undergoing a revolutionary set of changes, not all of them, in her opinion, good. Movie theaters are increasingly empty. Streaming is...
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#1711 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historian Joe Ellis on America at 250
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joe Ellis to the program to discuss America at 250. Ellis is the author of more than a dozen books about the Early National Period. He has been in several Ken Burns documentaries and a wide range of other media projects. Ellis believes the American republic is in grave danger and could still collapse. Still, he hopes that the American people are waking up to the threat to their now-fragile constitutional order. Clay and Joe examine the debate between Thomas Jefferson, who believed in the goodness of humankind and our ability to govern ourselves...
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#1710 President Jefferson Reads the Declaration
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Host David Horton interviews the third president, Thomas Jefferson, about the circumstances surrounding the writing of the most important document in American history. Arguably the most important document in human history. Jefferson insisted that he was only trying to articulate what every American was thinking in the early summer of 1776. David Horton asks Mr. Jefferson to read the entire text of the Declaration, including the 27-point indictment of King George III and the Parliament of England. Jefferson always reminds us that if the other Founders had known how famous this document would...
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#1709 America at 250: Historian Lindsay Chervinsky
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay welcomes one of his favorite guests, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, to talk about America at 250. Many Americans are bewildered and frightened by the current state of the Union, unsure how things got so partisan and paralyzed. Instead of offering our personal opinions on the current crisis, we, as historians, attempt to contextualize the present moment within the broad sweep of American history, beginning, of course, with the Founding Fathers. What would Adams and Jefferson say about the world of 2026? Would they be disappointed with us? And what would they urge us to reform as we move forward...
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#1708 The Amazing Explorations of Francisco Coronado
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay interviews Peter Stark, the author of a new book on the 1540 exploration of what would eventually become the United States by Spanish Conquistador Francisco Coronado. is a remarkable examination of an expedition that took place 250 years before Lewis and Clark. The book chronicles Coronado’s search for the famed Seven Cities of Cibola, rumored to house untold wealth somewhere in the American Southwest. Coronado's ambitious expedition, one of the largest ever of the New World, traveled as far north as present-day Kansas. Although Coronado pledged to treat indigenous people with respect,...
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#1707 Teddy Roosevelt, National Monuments and Devils Tower, Wyoming
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
From Devils Tower in northwestern Wyoming, Host David Horton and Clay Jenkinson discuss Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation achievements. When the National Monuments and Antiquities Act was passed in 1906, President Roosevelt lost no time in setting aside what would become 18 National Monuments, starting with Devils Tower just west of the Black Hills. Roosevelt had little to do with the creation of the Antiquities Act, but he made the most of it, culminating in his colossal designation of Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908. In the course of his two-term presidency, Roosevelt set...
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#1706 Books about the Declaration of Independence
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay and his frequent guest, the redoubtable Lindsay Chervinsky, discuss books written about Jefferson’s declaration, arguably the most important document in the history of liberty. Among the titles discussed are Walter Isaacson’s recent The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, which celebrates the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, to Garry Wills’ award-winning 1978 Inventing America, which locates the inspiration in the Scottish Enlightenment, and Pauline Meier’s 1997 American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, which examines local and regional declarations that...
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#1705 Free Expression and Political Repression: Stephen Colbert’s Exit
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Host David Horton interviews Thomas Jefferson about freedom of expression in America. Did the Founding Fathers know what they were doing when they ratified the extraordinary First Amendment of the Constitution? What limits, if any, should there be in the expression of ideas in a free society? When, if ever, can government suppress press freedom? What protections do American citizens have against malicious attacks on their character? When Jefferson retires and humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson takes the microphone, Horton asks Clay about the final episode of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, which...
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#1704 A New Perspective and Book on Lewis and Clark
Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
Clay interviews Craig Fehrman, the author of an important new book on Lewis and Clark, . Fehrman approaches the great story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by viewing it through the eyes of the often-overlooked participants: Sergeant John Ordway, Clark’s enslaved valet York, and Sacagawea. Rigorously researched and grounded in actual historical discoveries, this book will be essential reading for students of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In his footnotes, Fehrman begins with a truly remarkable short essay on his methods and historiography. These essays, which amount to 40,000 words, are...
info_outlineGuest host David Horton interviews President Thomas Jefferson about his strong anti-royalist principles. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson lambasted King George III for his crimes against the American colonists. Jefferson did not go quite as far as Thomas Paine, who called George III “the royal brute of England,” but he wanted to eliminate all echoes of monarchism in American public life. Jefferson met George III once in 1786 and came away even more disillusioned than he had been previously with the ways of kings. In France, he met Louis XVI several times and generally liked him, but found him woefully out of touch with the suffering of the great mass of French people. David Horton wondered how Mr. Jefferson would react to the American fascination with British royalty in our time. This episode was recorded on April 28, 2026.