Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson
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.
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#1662 Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail
07/28/2025
#1662 Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail
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 climbed to the top of Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet, the highest point in the lower 48 states. Claire spent about half of her great journey alone and half with others. She learned things about life and her own life that could only be discovered in this way. Claire now works at Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Recorded May 29, 2025.
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#1661 Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a New Constitution for the United States
07/21/2025
#1661 Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a New Constitution for the United States
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 States. Prairie Gunnels explained the methodology she used to give ChatGPT the information it needed to compose these draft constitutions. It turns out, for example, that on the whole, each generation wants to preserve the right to keep and bear arms. However, younger generations are much more comfortable with installing regulations to prevent mass shootings and mayhem. We discussed how to constitute a new generation of “founders,” provide them with the necessary information to draft a constitution, and then create a ratification system that is fair and representative. This podcast was recorded on July 10, 2025.
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#1660 Ten Things: The Real Patrick Henry (Live)
07/14/2025
#1660 Ten Things: The Real Patrick Henry (Live)
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 Virginia. Henry refused to attend the Constitutional Convention in 1787 because, he said, “he smelt a rat.” He opposed ratification in Virginia, but when Jefferson and Madison were considering secession in 1798 and 1799, Henry declared to George Washington that the constitutional settlement must not be disturbed by the Jeffersonians. This episode was recorded live on May 16, 2025. *Note, we posted this description in error for the podcast episode published on June 9, 2025.
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#1659 Theodore Roosevelt in Grand Canyon Country
07/08/2025
#1659 Theodore Roosevelt in Grand Canyon Country
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 sacred snake dance and got into the underground kiva, where scores of rattlesnakes slithered around. Harvey Leake has dozens of family photographs of this . It's a strenuous life story that could not possibly be connected to any other president of the United States. Recorded May 25, 2025.
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#1658 Jay Carson, Boulder Outdoor Survival School and National Service
06/30/2025
#1658 Jay Carson, Boulder Outdoor Survival School and National Service
Clay’s interview with Jay Carson, the executive director of the (BOSS), located in remote Boulder, Utah. Jay Carson had a long and successful political career, including stints with Chuck Schumer, Howard Dean, and Bill Bradley. Jay has also had a successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter. But his life changed when he took the 14-day Boulder Outdoor Survival School course in southeastern Utah. He's not done with Hollywood yet, but his main work now is as the CEO of BOSS. Meanwhile, just a few weeks ago in January, he was in Australia when the house he shares with his wife and four children burned down north of Los Angeles. He’s an amazing man. Clay and Jay discuss whether some form of national service can help turn our republic around. Program recorded April 22, 2025.
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#1657 Race in America: A Retrospective
06/23/2025
#1657 Race in America: A Retrospective
Clay’s conversation with Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander, professor of history at Norfolk State University in Virginia, about the status of race relations in America as we approach our 250th birthday. How should we read Thomas Jefferson's great sentence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”? Did Jefferson mean what he wrote? How accountable should we hold the Founding Fathers for making race a fundamental issue and condition of American life? Was Jefferson right or wrong when he said he was skeptical that we could ever be a biracial republic? Finally, what does the future look like to a distinguished African American scholar from Norfolk, Virginia?
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#1656 A Conversation with Novelist Anne Hillerman
06/16/2025
#1656 A Conversation with Novelist Anne Hillerman
Clay interviews the southwestern crime novelist Anne Hillerman, now publishing her 10th novel about crime-solving in the land of the Navajo in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. Anne is the daughter of the acclaimed and bestselling Tony Hillerman, who wrote 19 novels before he died in 2008. Anne decided to carry on the tradition, and her success has been extraordinary. We talked about what it is like to be the child of a great author, how her style differs from that of her father, and why she took one of her father’s minor characters, Bernadette Manuelito, and transformed her into a major figure in her work. We talked about the delicacy of non-Native writing about the Navajo world, about landscape and spirit of place, the universality of human nature, and the particularities of different cultures. We discussed the popular Hollywood TV series Dark Winds, which adapts the work of both Hillermans, Tony, and Anne.
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#1655 Clay and Lindsay Live: Religious Freedom
06/09/2025
#1655 Clay and Lindsay Live: Religious Freedom
Clay’s live conversation with Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky on Religious Freedom. Clay and Lindsay met in person at The Historic Christ Church and Museum in Weems, Virginia to discuss the history of religous freedom in the United States. They talk about how many Presidents have shared the faith, why there was an effort to separate the church and state from the beginning, and then take questions from a live audience. This episode was recorded live May 16, 2025.
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#1654 Wandering In Canyon Country — A Conversation with Craig Childs
06/02/2025
#1654 Wandering In Canyon Country — A Conversation with Craig Childs
Clay’s conversation with writer Craig Childs of western Colorado. Childs is the author of more than a dozen books about America’s backcountry. He’s spent months, even years, exploring the Grand Canyon and a hundred lesser but magnificent canyons in desert country. Childs has been a river runner, a guide, and a consultant, but mostly, he is a writer of beautiful, spare, sometimes mystical prose about the Colorado Plateau. Clay and Craig talked about how he became a writer, about taking risks in the backcountry, being lost, and getting oneself lost. They also discuss the great 19th-century explorer John Wesley Powell, Henry David Thoreau, and Edward Abbey — the author of the enormously influential book Desert Solitaire. Childs is currently wandering through mountain lion country in western Colorado, trying to understand the ways of these magnificent creatures. You’ll love this quiet discussion of things unrelated to America’s current politics. This interview was recorded March 20, 2025.
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#1653 Clay and the new History Channel Series, Kevin Costner's The West
05/26/2025
#1653 Clay and the new History Channel Series, Kevin Costner's The West
Guest host Russ Eagle interviews Clay Jenkinson about the forthcoming eight-part History Channel series, . Clay was interviewed as a historical expert twice for the series produced by Doris Kearns Goodwin and featuring Kevin Costner. Clay explains his intensive preparations to participate in a documentary by Ken Burns or Doris Kearns Goodwin, the books he reads, notes he compiles, and passages he memorizes. Russ and Clay discuss several of the series' episodes: Lewis and Clark, John Colter's famous 1809 run for his life; the abduction of young Cynthia Ann Parker by the Comanche and her subsequent rescue; and John Brown's anti-slavery raids against Missouri plantations and his 1859 assault on Harpers Ferry. This podcast was recorded on May 4, 2025.
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#1652 America's Public Lands: A Report Card
05/19/2025
#1652 America's Public Lands: A Report Card
Clay Jenkinson interviews Jonathan Thompson, the author of books about the American West, including Sagebrush Empire: How a Remote Utah County Became the Battlefront of American Public Lands. Thompson has written much about the pushback of western ranchers, irrigators, mining interests, and chambers of commerce against federal regulation (and even federal ownership) of the public lands in the West. How should we balance the varied interests in the West: agriculture, mining, motorized recreation, backpack recreation, Native American interests, and America's deep addiction to carbon extraction? Who should be at the table? Clay asked Thompson to look at the West from 38,000 feet and offer his predictions of its future in the second half of the 21st century. Will President Trump achieve his goal of privatizing whole swaths of the public domain?
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#1651 Ten Things About the American Revolution
05/13/2025
#1651 Ten Things About the American Revolution
Clay and frequent guest Lindsay Chervinsky discuss the American Revolution in a “live” podcast recording in Vail, Colorado. Was George Washington a great military strategist? How vital was Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence when it was written? Why weren’t women incorporated as full citizens — as Abigail Adams suggested — when America re-constituted itself in the 1770s and 1780s? Was what happened in those dramatic years a true revolution — or merely a separation from the mother country England? How important was Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense? This program was the first time Clay and Lindsay had met in person and one of the few live audience recordings of Listening to America. This podcast was recorded live on March 27, 2025.
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#1650 A New Look at Edward Abbey
05/05/2025
#1650 A New Look at Edward Abbey
Clay's conversation with Amy Irvine, the author of the 2018 book Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness. Ms. Irvine published the book on the 50th anniversary of Edward Abbey's blockbuster Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. Desert Cabal is a careful and nuanced conversation with the late Edward Abbey, who died in 1989. Wasn't his romance with the wilderness the benefit of white privilege? And wasn't he mostly pretending he was alone in that windblown trailer at Arches National Park? Amy Irvine believes that the wilderness is healing in every way and that America's National Parks, Monuments, Forests, etc., are endangered by the agenda of the Trump administration. She sees hope in finding people to trust, care for, and rebuild America by living well but also protesting in the streets when necessary. Interview recorded March 19, 2025.
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#1649 Sean Sherman and Native American Food
04/28/2025
#1649 Sean Sherman and Native American Food
Clay talks with noted chef, author, activist, and visionary Sean Sherman, an Oglala Lakota man who is changing the world of indigenous food. Sean is the author of an award-winning book, The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, and another book, Turtle Island, which is coming out in November. They discuss the white conquest of the North American continent, the shattering of Native American ways and traditions, the forced assimilation policies that have brought disease to Native communities, and how surplus white food — white flour, cheap cheese, sugary sodas, and noodles — have been dumped by the USDA farm program on Native communities. Sherman created an extremely popular restaurant in Minneapolis, Owamni — claiming one of the most coveted dining reservations in the Midwest. Based on the stunning success of his efforts so far, Sean Sherman is planning more restaurants in places like Bozeman, Portland, and Rapid City and freely sharing his ideas with Native communities who want to reform their diets and achieve food sovereignty. This interview was recorded on March 17, 2025
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#1648 Hitting the Road With Lewis and Clark
04/21/2025
#1648 Hitting the Road With Lewis and Clark
Occasional guest host and LTA videographer Nolan Johnson joins Clay to talk about the epic Lewis and Clark Airstream journey of 2025, wherein Clay will follow the Lewis and Clark Trail from Jefferson’s Monticello in Virginia to Astoria, Oregon, and back again. Historian James Ronda said the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06 was “America’s first great road story.” Clay plans to get himself on all the great rivers of the journey: Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, Clearwater, Snake, and Columbia. Nolan will join Clay at several Lewis and Clark sites across America, with video cameras and his celebrated drone work. Nolan and Clay talk about several adventures that have already been scheduled, including an absurd pontoon float from Fort Yates, North Dakota, up to Bismarck and beyond. Clay will begin his transcontinental travels in early May in North Carolina and make stops at Monticello, Harpers Ferry, and Philadelphia before joining the Ohio River at Pittsburgh. It’s a grand adventure, and we already ask, “What could go wrong?” This interview was recorded on March 22, 2025.
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#1647 The Future of the Public Lands
04/14/2025
#1647 The Future of the Public Lands
Clay's interview with Walt Dabney, who worked for over 30 years in the National Park System, including serving as America's Chief Ranger for five and a half years in Washington, D.C. Mr. Dabney is lecturing around the country about the threat to public lands from those who would return them to the states or privatize them altogether. Mr. Dabney refutes three myths about public lands: first, that the U.S. Government has no right to own property; second, that the U.S. Government retains public domain for nefarious reasons; and third, that individual states were promised at the time of their statehood that public land would be deeded over to them. All demonstrably untrue, says Walt Dabney. Although he's worried about current moves to reduce the size of National Monuments and allow greater resource extraction on public lands, Mr. Dabney believes the public will rally to protect and preserve one of the best things about America: our National Parks, National Monuments, game preserves, wildlife refuges, and National Forests. This interview was recorded March 19, 2025.
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#1646 The Legacy of Louis L'Amour and American Western Fiction
04/08/2025
#1646 The Legacy of Louis L'Amour and American Western Fiction
Clay 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 . Their conversation was recorded on March 17, 2025.
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#1645 The Resurrection of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798
03/31/2025
#1645 The Resurrection of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798
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
03/24/2025
#1644 Thomas Jefferson and American Diplomacy and Trade
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
03/18/2025
#1643 A Cultural Tour of Cuba
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
03/10/2025
#1642 The Myths That Hold America Back
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.
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#1641 Author, Hampton Sides on Captain James Cook’s Amazing Third Voyage
03/04/2025
#1641 Author, Hampton Sides on Captain James Cook’s Amazing Third Voyage
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
02/25/2025
#1640 Traveling America in Search of Its History and Stories
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
02/17/2025
#1639 Jefferson and the Lewis and Clark Expedition
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
02/10/2025
#1638 Joe Ellis on the 2024 Presidential Election
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
02/04/2025
#1637 Historical Integrity in a Hyper-Partisan Time
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
01/27/2025
#1636 Special Episode: Listener Mail On Clay's Great Steinbeck Adventure
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
01/20/2025
#1635 Peaceful Transfer of Power
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
01/13/2025
#1634 AI and Quantum Computing, Ready or Not
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.
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#1633 The History of Presidential Transitions
01/06/2025
#1633 The History of Presidential Transitions
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.
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