The Road to Now
In 1992, President George Bush’s bid for a second term did not go well. Despite taking 79% of the electoral vote in 1988, holding office during the collapse of communism in Europe, and serving as commander-in-chief during the US victory in the first Iraq War, Bush found himself flanked by a smooth talking former Arkansas governor and a Texas businessman armed with a personal fortune and a lot of charts. When it was all over, Bush had garnered about ten million fewer votes than he had four years earlier and a 12-year run of Republican Presidents was over. How did Bill Clinton manage to...
info_outline #300 The Election of 1980 w/ Rick Perlstein (Third Party Series #5)The Road to Now
On November 4, 1980, California Republican Ronald Reagan trounced Jimmy Carter at the polls, beating the incumbent by almost 10 percentage points in the popular election and winning 489 of 538 electors. That type of victory combined with Reagan’s larger than life place in modern political history might lead you to believe the 1980 campaign was never in doubt. But it was. And in early 1980, both men faced viable challengers within their own party, as well as a third party candidate whose 5.7 million popular votes could have changed the outcome of a closer election. The Presidential election...
info_outline #299 The Election of 1948 w/ Jefferson Cowie (Third Party Series #4)The Road to Now
The famous image of a victorious Harry Truman holding up a newspaper headlined “Dewey defeats Truman” is clear evidence that the 1948 Presidential election did not turn out the way many people had expected. That April, Truman’s approval rating had sunk to 37%, causing even many in his party to consider dumping him from the ballot. That summer, a rebellion by southern Democrats led by South Carolina segregationist Strom Thurmond promised to deny Truman electoral votes that his Democratic predecessors could have counted on for a century. Yet, despite all this, Truman didn’t just win, he...
info_outline #298 The Election of 1912 w/ Michael Patrick Cullinane (Third Party Series #3)The Road to Now
The Presidential election of 1912 was an unusual moment in American history. It featured an embattled incumbent President facing criticism from his former allies. It offered voters a choice between the sitting President and his predecessor. And when it was all done, the two men who had previously won the Presidency found themselves bested by a college professor with just a few years of experience in politics. So why did the predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt, become so critical of the incumbent, William Howard Taft, that he decided to break away from the Republican party to run against him?...
info_outline #297 The Election of 1860 w/ Michael Green (Third Party Series #2)The Road to Now
The Presidential election of 1860 is one we Americans know well. That election sent Abraham Lincoln to the White House, southern enslavers to the exit door, and the United States into a bloody Civil War. Lincoln’s leadership in those years and his tragic assassination in the last days of the war propelled the railsplitter into the pantheon of American Presidents. But sometimes we forget that just a few months before the election, Lincoln looked like a long shot. His experience at the federal level amounted to one term in the House of Representatives. His Republican Party, founded in...
info_outline #296 The Election of 1824 w/ Lindsay Chervinsky (Third Party Series #1)The Road to Now
The Election of 1824 was a turning point in American history. Long before the fall of 1824, Americans understood that the winner would be the first in America’s second generation to hold the Presidency. When the election began, all four viable candidates were technically from the same party. By the time it was over, the election had generated the rivalries and passions that formed the groundwork for a new national party system. How did Andrew Jackson win the most votes in the electoral college and still lose the election? How did John Quincy Adams win the Presidency but ultimately...
info_outline The Electoral College w/ Edward FoleyThe Road to Now
The Constitution empowers the electoral college to select the President, but the process for counting electors’ votes remains in the hands of Congress. In this episode, explains the origins of the electoral college, how and why the 12th Amendment changed the process for electing Presidents, and the concerns that led Congress to codify the procedure for counting electors’ votes in 1887. Edward also offers some specific ways that updating the Electoral Count Act of 1887 might help us avoid some of the potential problems that might arise in upcoming elections. Edward Foley...
info_outline #295 The Pursuit of Happiness w/ Jeffrey RosenThe Road to Now
The inalienable right to “the pursuit of happiness” is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, but what exactly does that phrase mean? While Americans today may associate it with the right to own land, opulence or some other act of acquisition, many prominent founders understood it to mean something quite different. In this episode President & CEO returns to the show to give us the full story and discuss his new book The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. The Pursuit of Happiness will be...
info_outline The Best Stories You've (Probably) Never Heard w/ Greg JacksonThe Road to Now
One episode. Two historians/podcasters. Four stories from American history that you’ve probably never heard. And an unknown number of listeners that we hope will find these stories as fascinating and surprising as we do. Greg Jackson is the creator of and a . Ben Sawyer hosts this podcast and has been teaching history at the university level for over a decade and a half. You might think that at this point they’ve heard it all, but when you keep digging into history, it just keeps surprising you. In this episode, Greg and Ben each share two stories that they discovered in the last...
info_outline The FBI w/ Stephen UnderhillThe Road to Now
The FBI has been the subject of criticism and concern since it was founded in 1908, but it has nevertheless become one of the most powerful, stable, and mythologized branches of the Executive Branch of the US government. In this episode, Steve Underhill joins us to discuss the origins of the FBI, the role J. Edgar Hoover played in making the modern Brueau, and how that greater history of the FBI can help us understand how they’ve approached their seizure of documents from Mar-a-Lago and the subsequent attack from Donald Trump. is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication...
info_outlineNote: Bob and Ben start off talking about the Covid-19 outbreak and plans for upcoming episodes of this podcast. We shift to our discussion with Dr. Cohen at about 10:30.
The suburbanization of the American landscape after World War II left the country’s older urban centers in crisis. Revitalizing cities was no easy task, and many of the most inspiring plans for reconstructing America’s urban space went unfulfilled. These visions may have never come to fruition, but Lizabeth Cohen says there is much to learn from the visionaries. In this episode Dr. Cohen joins us for a conversation about post-WWII America, the pros and cons of biography, and her new book Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, which recently won her a second Bancroft Prize for American History.
Dr. Lizabeth Cohen is Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History at Harvard. Cohen’s previous books include Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer, and A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.
Note: Bob and Ben start off talking about the Covid-19 outbreak and plans for upcoming episodes of this podcast. We shift to our discussion with Dr. Cohen at about 10:30.
The Road to Now is part of the Osiris Podcast Network. This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.