Consider the Constitution

The Declaration of Independence announced more than a separation from Britain. It made a claim about government itself: that people hold rights government did not grant and cannot take away, and that legitimate power rests on the consent of the governed. Those ideas were unprecedented in 1776. Two hundred fifty years later, they are still unfinished business. Judge Douglas Ginsburg joins Katie Crawford-Lackey to consider what the Declaration has meant at home and abroad. He served on the U.S....

We know James Madison the thinker. The architect of the Constitution. The author of the Bill of Rights. But Madison was also a working politician — and a very good one. Dr. Matthew Goetz, senior historian at the White House Historical Association, joins Katie Crawford-Lackey to look at the side of Madison we tend to skip. With Jefferson, he built the country's first political party and its first partisan newspaper — then wrote attacks on the Washington administration under a pen name an...

We tend to jump straight from the Revolution to the Constitutional Convention — from a young James Madison to the Father of the Constitution. But the years in between are where the promises of independence collided with the hard work of governing. Dr. Frank Cogliano, professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh and author of A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson, and the American Republic, joins Katie in the studio to walk through that chapter. They start with the ...

What can a bird's nest, a set of porcelain ice cream vases, and a portrait of Confucius tell us about the early American republic? In this episode, host Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey sits down with Dr. Lisa Goff, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia and former director of its Institute for Public History, to explore how historians read objects as evidence. Lisa walks us through the furnishings, art, and tableware inside James and Dolly Madison's Montpe...

The three most famous words in American government — We the People — were written by a founder most Americans have never heard of. Host Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey sits down with author and journalist Jesse Wegman to recover the story of James Wilson: a Scottish immigrant who arrived in 1765, signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, drafted the Constitution's opening words, and sat on the first Supreme Court — then vanished almost entirely from national memory. Wegman's...