The Road to Now

John Fea is taking on the history of Christianity and American politics in the 21st century. In three volumes. In this (single) episode, we talk about this tremendous task that John is undertaking and also get his thoughts on why the political Christian right came to feel disappointed in the Bush administration, why they later rallied around Donald Trump, and what this might mean for American politics moving forward. Dr. John Fea is Professor of History at Messiah University & author of multiple books including Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011). He posts regularly on American history, religion, politics, and academic life at his blog, The Way of Improvement Leads Home and hosts the podcast of the same name on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all podcast players. You can also hear him discuss his book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation in episode #222 and Why the 1776 Report Still Matters in episode #188.   This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

Juneteenth, which celebrates the emancipation of enslaved Americans at the end of the Civil War, has gone from a local holiday in Texas to a national day of celebration for many Americans. In this episode we speak with legal scholar and Pulitzer Prize winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed about her new book On Juneteenth and the ways that the holiday, her personal story and the history of the US can help us better understand the world today. Annette Gordon-Reed is Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University, where she is also the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a professor of history in the university’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences. You can follow her on twitter at @Agordonreed. Update: Since we recorded this episode on June 3, 2021, awareness and celebration of Juneteenth has spread across the country. On June 17th, 2021, President Joe Biden signed legislation that made Juneteenth a federal holiday, and, since 2021, 23 additional states have made Juneteenth an official permanent holiday, bringing the total to 28. This is a rebroadcast of RTN #198, which originally aired on June 7, 2021. This rebroadcast was edited by Ben Sawyer.

Mark McKinnon is a political advisor, reform advocate, and host of Showtime’s The Circus. In this episode he joins Ben & Bob to talk about his work to found the non-partisan group No Labels, which advocates for independent candidates in presidential elections, and what a third-party might mean for the elections of 2024 and beyond.   This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.

In the last few years, many on the left have been calling for a “Green New Deal,” but we might have already had that. Between 1933 and 1942, the Civilian Conservation Corps enlisted more than three million young men in a project that planted two billion trees, slowed soil erosion on forty million acres of farmland, and enjoyed support across political and geographic divides. In this episode we talk with Neil Maher, author of Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press, 2008) about how the CCC helped solidify FDR’s New Deal and spread the seeds of environmental activism for generations to come. Dr. Neil Maher is a Professor of History and Master Teacher in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University-Newark. He is also the author of Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017). You can find out more about his work at NeilMaher.com.   This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher

It’s been seven years since Ben & Bob launched the first episode of The Road to Now, so we invited two of our early guests – Doug Heye & Margaret Talev – to join us for a conversation about how things have changed since 2016 and the events of the preceding years that now appear to be most pivotal in creating those changes. Our conversation covers campaign finance reform, social media and the impact ai is already having on American politics. Doug Heye is a political commentator who previously served as Communications Director for the Republican National Committee and Deputy Chief of Staff for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. You can follow him on twitter at @DougHeye. Margaret Talev is Director of Syracuse University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship and Senior Contributor at Axios. You can follow her on twitter at @MargaretTalev. Enjoy this episode? Join us on Patreon to get the full unedited conversation from this episode and many others. Find out more at Patreon.com/TheRoadToNow. To our Patrons: thank you! This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

The “Amazon economy” seems like something new, but it rests on the physical and intellectual infrastructure built by those who came long before the age of the internet and leaves many of the same marks on the environment. Prominent in this story are five companies- Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Walmart, Bank of America, and FexEx-  all of which have global reach and southern roots. In this episode, Bart Elmore joins us to talk about his new book Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade our Economy and the Planet (UNC Press, 2023), and how understanding the history of American business can help us address the environmental challenges that are undeniably facing humanity today. Dr. Bartow Elmore is Associate Professor of History and a core faculty member of the Sustainability Institute at The Ohio State University. In addition to Country Capitalism, he is also the author of  Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (W. W. Norton, 2015) and Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future (W. W. Norton, 2021). You can hear his discuss these books in RTN episode 140 and episode 208 respectively. Bart is also a 2022 winner of the Dan David Prize. This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.  

Today's Republican party looks a lot different than it did just a few decades ago, but it rests on many of the same organizations and ideologies that formed the modern conservative movement in the 1970s. In this episode, Rick Perlstein joins us for a conversation about his newest book Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980 and how Ronald Reagan, Orrin Hatch and other prominent Republicans were able to harness the social and political forces of the 1970s to form the modern GOP. Rick Perlstein is the award-winning author of multiple New York Times bestsellers, including Reaganland (Simon & Schuster, 2020), Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner, 2009) and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Bold Type Books, 2009), as well as a board member at InTheseTimes.com. You can follow him on twitter at @RickPerlstein. In this conversation we also discussed Rick’s recent article “This Is Us: Why the Trump Era Ended in Violence,” The New Republic, January 20, 2021. This is an edited rebroadcast of RTN #199, which originally aired on June 14, 2021. Both the original episode and this rebroadcast were edited by Gary Fletcher.

In 2021, Neil King Jr. threw a few basic items into a backpack and walked from his home in Washington, DC to New York City. Along the way he met new people, uncovered forgotten moments of history, and spent many days thinking about America. In this episode, Neil joins Ben and Bob to discuss his new book, American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal, and the lessons he learned along the way. Before walking from his house in DC to New York City, Neil King Jr. worked as a journalist for outlets across the globe, including The Tampa Tribune, The Prague Post, and The Wall Street Journal. American Ramble is his first book, but we hope there are many more to come. You can follow Neil on twitter at @NKingofDC. This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’ is a historian whose work has shed new light on the roles that women played in American slavery. In this episode, she joins Ben and Bob to share some of the significant findings of her work, the sources she’s used to learn more about enslaved people and female slaveowners, and her new project, which reorients our understanding of the British Atlantic slave trade by centering the story on the lives of both free and captive women.  Dr. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is Associate Professor of History at the University California, Berkeley and the author of the award-winning book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019). She is also one of the recipients of the 2023 Dan Davis Prize, which recognizes outstanding scholarship that illuminates the past and seeks to anchor public discourse in a deeper understanding of history.  This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

For most of us, dust is a surface-level annoyance. For Anita Radini, it is a fountain of information about the past. In this episode, Anita joins us to share the fascinating new details about the lives of Medieval women that she discovered in the tiny remains of dust that collected in their dental plaque, and how her interdisciplinary work in archaeological science and paleoecology is reshaping the way we understand human history. Dr. Anita Radini is an Assistant Professor at the School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, and a recipient of the 2023 Dan David Prize. The Dan David Prize recognizes outstanding scholarship that illuminates the past and seeks to anchor public discourse in a deeper understanding of history. For more on the prize and the research its funding, visit dandavidprize.org. This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.