The Last Best Hope?

Since the Civil War the president's party has lost ground in Congress in every single midterm election bar four. What's going on? Are voters punishing the administration they put into office just two short years earlier? Is it an attempt to balance power in Washington? Or is it just that the president's party's supporters don't turn out? To explore this issue, Adam is joined by Ursula Hackett, the Churchill Associate Professor of US Politics at the RAI. Adam and Ursula discuss some of the most dramatic midterm elections of the past -- from the 1874 repudiation of President Grant to Obama's 2010 "shellacking" to try to work out what explains a remarkably consistent phenomenon-- the President's party losing.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukJoin Adam Join Adam Smith, Molly Ball, Galen Druke and Ursula Hackett for The Midterm Elections: What Just Happened? on 5 November at 2pm UK time, in Oxford or online. Event details and registration.If you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/givingProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is an American political party? Unlike in parliamentary systems, they're not private organisations but quasi-public bodies, with no membership dues and with their candidate selection regulated by public law. And how do we explain the paradox that in an era of intense 'partisan' division, the parties themselves -- as organisations -- are by some measures weaker than ever before? Adam is joined by Sam Rosenfeld Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University, the author of The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era, and, with Daniel Schlozman, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukIf you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/givingProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As the United States gears up to mid-term elections, which may once again shift the political trajectory of the country, the Last Best Hope? returns for a brand-new season on the 8th of October.“Adam Smith is one of the UK’s foremost historians of America, and communicates his expertise with zest, wit and unforced passion. The Last Best Hope? brings him together with fellow scholars to provide a unique insight we can’t do without.” — Phil Tinline, BBC radio documentary-maker and author“The Last Best Hope is an absolutely brilliant podcast. Thoughtful, clever, engaging and accessible, Adam Smith always gets the best out of his guests, and I’ve learned an enormous amount from every episode. I love it.” — Dominic Sandbrook, historian and co-host of The Rest is History“The must-listen US podcast” Nick Bryant, former BBC Correspondent in New York.Presented by Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of American Political History at Oxford. Each episode explores history to understand what makes America what it is.In this season Adam asks what constitutes a U.S political party, and how they differ from parties in parliamentary democracies? And he takes the long view of midterm elections, going back as far as 1874, a contest in which the Republicans lost half their House seats. Why do these midterm contests so reliably go against the President's party?And 80 years after Winston Churchill delivered his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he used the phrase special relationship, Adam explores how that phrase has distorted British perceptions of the US. And he takes a deep dive into the surprising history of the Supreme Court as a highly political body.The Last Best Hope? Is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui.For details of RAI programming, go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/eventsProducer: Emily Williams Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the bicentennial summer of 1976, the United States staged what was, by some measures, the largest single celebration in the country’s history. Tall ships in New York harbor. Fireworks over the Mall. Specially-minted bicentennial quarters. A made-for-TV reconciliation after Vietnam and Watergate, after the assassinations and the riots and the burnings of the long sixties. The country told itself, for a few weeks at least, that it was still the country it remembered being.Fifty years on, the United States is preparing to mark a quarter-millennium since the Declaration of Independence, and it cannot even agree on who is meant to be in charge of the party. There is the official commemoration, America 250, which has been preparing for this moment since 2016, when Congress set up a statutorily bipartisan commission to do the work. And there is, as of last year, a rival: Freedom 250, a Trump White House task force set up by executive order and run by the president and his appointees, which has been quietly siphoning funds and branding from the official commission and staging its own splashier, more overtly partisan events. Meanwhile, the historic sites (Mount Vernon, Monticello, Independence Hall, Boston’s Freedom Trail) are each navigating the politics of all this in their own way, depending on their donors, their visitors, and their nerve.What does an anniversary do, exactly? Does it suspend our quarrels for a moment, or sharpen them? In a country whose civil religion has always run along the rails of the jeremiad (the sermon that calls a fallen people back to their founding promise), what kinds of jeremiads are being preached in 2026, and by whom?To discuss whether there is any chance of a consensual 250th celebration in such a polarised environment, Adam is joined by James Morone, the John Hazen White Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University and a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He’s the author, among other books, of Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. And by Frank Cogliano, Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh. His most recent book, A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson and the American Republic, came out last year. He is also editor of a new collection, The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding, published this spring.The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukIf you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/givingProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is there anything more distinctively American than its sports culture?In a previous episode of this podcast, we discussed the tragic decline and partial revival of American cricket. As the 2026 World Cup kicks off in the US Adam asks why a sport that took over the world has been so marginal for so long in America – and wonders if that’s finally changing.In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a form of football that had begun in English public schools became a global phenomenon, played almost everywhere except in the United States.There, a strange alternative form of football was played instead, one in which men in helmets stand around for long periods, interrupted by occasional violent bursts of energy.This is a story about culture, gender politics, race, class and migration – and, as with the story of cricket’s demise -- about nationhood.Guests on this episode: Frank Guridy, Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Professor of History at Columbia. His most recent book is The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play (Basic Books, 2024) which tells the story of the American stadium as an institution that has played a central role in American civic and political life and in the struggles for social justice over the last 150 years. And by Uta Balbier, Professor of US History at Oxford, a transnational historian of the modern United States with a particular interest in sport history. The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.ukIf you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/givingProducer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.