Why Elected Leaders Subvert Democracy
When we think about threats to democracy, we often imagine dramatic breakdowns—military coups, constitutional crises, or sudden collapses. But today, a common danger is slower and less visible: democr...
26 Touko 0s
Oscar Winberg, "Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics" (UNC Press, 2025)
Political historian Oscar Winberg has a fascinating new book titled Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics. This book weaves together quite a few different threa...
26 Touko 50min
Julia F. Irwin, "Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century" (UNC Press, 2023)
Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century (UNC Press, 2023) offers a sweeping history of US foreign disaster assistance, highlighting its centrality to twentieth-c...
25 Touko 56min
Claudia Smith Brinson, "Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina" (U South Carolina Press, 2020)
In Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina (U South Carolina Press, 2020), longtime journalist Claudia Smith Brinson details the lynchings, beatings, bombings, cross burning...
25 Touko 1h 7min
Jason S. Spicer, "Co-Operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American?" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Co-operative enterprises, which are democratically owned and governed by their workers, customers, or suppliers, have long captured the imagination of activists and social scientists alike. In centeri...
24 Touko 37min
Stuart Schrader, "Blue Power: How Police Organized to Serve and Protect Themselves" (Basic Books, 2026)
In America today, police enjoy unmatched power. On the streets, officers employ violence at their own discretion. Behind closed doors, they are even more powerful. In city halls, police strong-arm l...
23 Touko 1h 24min
Mary T. Freeman, "Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026)
Mary Freeman, associate professor of history at the University of Maine, joins Michael Stauch to discuss her new book Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026), ab...
23 Touko 1h 12min
Kori Schake, "The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States" (Wiley, 2025)
One of the biggest worries of the US Constitution's Framers was the danger of a standing army to a democracy, so they designed a system to ensure civilian control over the state's armed forces. In The...
21 Touko 1h 4min
