The Context

For the third installment of our month-long collaboration with the This Day podcast, we go to 1964 and a moment when the two major parties in this country, in a sense, switched. This Day hosts Jody Avirgan, Nicole Hemmer, and Kellie Carter Jackson are joined by Eric K. Ward, executive vice president of Race Forward, to trace the story from Jim Crow through the New Deal and into the Civil Rights Act—and to understand why the Democratic coalition that produced it was always too contradictory to survive. How did Black voters move from Lincoln’s party to LBJ’s? And what did White Southerners do when their party started to leave them behind? Be sure to check out Eric’s documentary White with Fear on PBS: https://www.pbs.org/show/white-with-fear/ Learn more about this special series here: https://kettering.org/america-250-podcast-series-begins-in-september/ If you enjoy this episode, go over to This Day’s feed for two more episodes on each of these historical topics. The Context’s host, Alex Lovit, will be the guest in the third episode each week. Listen to all episodes here: https://www.jodyavirgan.com/political-history-show Attention, Washington, DC-area listeners! Join us on Monday, October 19, 2026, for a live taping of This Day. The Context host, Alex Lovit, will join This Day hosts live on stage. The featured guest is Kettering Senior Fellow Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. They will be in conversation about the moment of democratic realignment we are living through right now. Are we witnessing a fundamental shift in who holds power, who gets left out, and how race and class are reshaping the coalitions that define American politics? And what can history teach us about moments like this one? The event is open to the public, and tickets are available through the Howard Theatre: https://www.unionstagepresents.com/shows/this-day-live-the-next-realignment-presented-by-the-charles-f-kettering-foundation-19-oct Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For the second installment of our month-long collaboration with This Day, we go to western New York in the summer of 1848. This Day’s hosts, Jody Avirgan, Nicole Hemmer, and Kellie Carter Jackson, are joined by Deva Woodly, Kettering research fellow and professor at Brown University, to discuss the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights—the characters who cooked it up over afternoon tea, the Declaration of Sentiments they wrote in the shadow of the Declaration of Independence, and the one resolution that nearly didn’t pass, until Frederick Douglass stood up to speak. Plus: why western New York was the hotbed of basically every radical idea of the 19th century. Deva Woodly is a research fellow at the Kettering Foundation: https://kettering.org/fellow/deva-woodly/ Be sure to check out her book, Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements: https://academic.oup.com/book/39098?login=false Learn more about this special series here: https://kettering.org/america-250-podcast-series-begins-in-september/ If you enjoy this episode, go over to This Day’s feed for two more episodes on each of these historical topics. The Context’s host, Alex Lovit, will be the guest in the third episode each week. Listen to all episodes here: https://www.jodyavirgan.com/political-history-show Attention, Washington, DC-area listeners! Join us on Monday, October 19, 2026, for a live taping of This Day. The Context host, Alex Lovit, will join This Day hosts live on stage. The featured guest is Kettering Senior Fellow Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. They will be in conversation about the moment of democratic realignment we are living through right now. Are we witnessing a fundamental shift in who holds power, who gets left out, and how race and class are reshaping the coalitions that define American politics? And what can history teach us about moments like this one? The event is open to the public, and tickets are available through the Howard Theatre: https://www.unionstagepresents.com/shows/this-day-live-the-next-realignment-presented-by-the-charles-f-kettering-foundation-19-oct Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Special series announcement! For the next four weeks, we’re bringing you a special series as part of Kettering’s America 250 initiative, “Democracy, Under Construction.” It’s about key events in American history that have brought us toward, or away from, an inclusive democracy—and the work that remains to be done. We coproduced this series with our friends at a podcast called This Day. It’s a history show, and they’re doing a whole year of episodes about major events that shaped our nation. So, for the next four Tuesdays, you’ll be hearing episodes of This Day in our feed, where their three cohosts and special guests discuss these important moments in American history. Learn more about the series here: https://kettering.org/america-250-podcast-series-begins-in-september/ If you enjoy this episode, go over to This Day’s feed for two more episodes on each of these historical topics. The Context’s host, Alex Lovit, will be the guest in the third episode each week. Listen to the episodes here: https://www.jodyavirgan.com/political-history-show For our kickoff episode in the series, we go to 1789. That’s when the Founding Fathers spent months that summer hammering out the Constitution—and nearly forgot to include freedom. This Day hosts Jody Avirgan, Nicole Hemmer, and Kellie Carter Jackson are joined by Dahlia Lithwick of Slate to look at how the Bill of Rights came to exist: the philosophical fight over whether rights even needed to be written down, what ended up in it (and what didn’t), and what it tells us about who the Founders were actually building this government for. Be sure to check out Dahlia’s Amicus podcast and all her work at Slate. https://slate.com/author/dahlia-lithwick More about This Day: This Day podcast, hosted by Jody Avirgan and historians Nicole Hemmer and Kellie Carter Jackson, takes listeners beyond the head-spinning headlines of today and into the unexpected historical moments that have shaped American life and politics. This Day is part of the Radiotopia podcast network. Listen to the show here: https://www.jodyavirgan.com/political-history-show And finally: if you’re in the Washington, DC, area, join us on Monday, October 19, 2026, for a live taping of This Day. Alex Lovit will join This Day hosts live on stage. The featured guest is Kettering Senior Fellow Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. They will be in conversation about the moment of democratic realignment we are living through right now. Are we witnessing a fundamental shift in who holds power, who gets left out, and how race and class are reshaping the coalitions that define American politics? And what can history teach us about moments like this one? The event is open to the public, and tickets are available through the Howard Theatre: https://www.unionstagepresents.com/shows/this-day-live-the-next-realignment-presented-by-the-charles-f-kettering-foundation-19-oct Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Faith-led movements in the US have catalyzed some of our greatest expansions of civil rights. But, at the same time, Christianity has also been used as justification for some of the worst evils in American history. How do people of faith reckon with this tension? And what will it take for Americans of all racial backgrounds, ethnic origins, and faith traditions to commit to dismantling faith-cloaked racism? Jemar Tisby joins host Alex Lovit to discuss how to protect the progress toward racial equity, while continuing to take steps forward toward an inclusive democracy. Jemar Tisby is a historian, author, and the founder and CEO of Tisby Media. He studies and writes about history, race, and faith in the United States. He’s a New York Times bestselling author, and his popular Substack, Footnotes, is one of the most read in its category. https://jemartisby.substack.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@JTisby Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How long do people have to live in America before they’re considered American? How long does it take to prove themselves as productive, peaceful members of society? For millions of immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades, the answer seems to be, “never.” Immigrants without documents or with temporary status are vulnerable to exploitation by their employers and have been made scapegoats by xenophobic politicians. Patricia Campos-Medina joins host Alex Lovit to discuss how problems with the United States’ immigration, labor, and democratic systems are connected—and what it will take to fix them. Patricia Campos-Medina is a scholar of race, immigration, and labor. She’s the executive director of the Worker Institute at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She coauthored the 2025 book Legalized Inequalities: Immigration and Race in the Low-Wage Workplace. https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/worker-institute https://www.russellsage.org/publications/book/legalized-inequalities Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.