Plessy Vs. Ferguson
We walk through Plessy v. Ferguson and how a planned railcar protest helps the Supreme Court legitimize Jim Crow through the “separate but equal” doctrine. We also dig into Justice John Marshall Harla...
2 Apr 18min
The Lodge Bill of 1890 and the Rise of Jim Crow
The Lodge Bill of 1890 should be as famous as the Compromise of 1877, yet most of us have never heard of it. We sit down with Dr. Sean Beienberg to unpack how a federal election oversight plan, built ...
1 Apr 13min
What the Black Man Wants by Frederick Douglass
Freedom is easy to celebrate in slogans and hard to define when the laws get written. Today we sit with Frederick Douglass at the end of the Civil War as he delivers one of the most direct speeches of...
31 Mar 8min
How The 14th Amendment Applies The Bill Of Rights To States
The Fourteenth Amendment promises a baseline of freedom, but the Supreme Court built that promise through a long series of workarounds. We start with incorporation: how protections in the first eight ...
30 Mar 29min
How Reconstruction Built Birthright Citizenship And Equal Protection
The Fourteenth Amendment is often treated like a simple shortcut for “civil rights,” but its real story is messier, more political, and far more useful for understanding today’s constitutional fights....
27 Mar 17min
How The 13th And 15th Amendments End Slavery And Redefine Voting
The Constitution can promise freedom and still fail to deliver it. We dig into the 13th and 15th Amendments and ask what they were really designed to fix after the Civil War and why their impact has s...
26 Mar 18min
Reconstruction Under The Constitution
Reconstruction sounds like a neat “after the Civil War” chapter until you look at the Constitution and realize the country is trying to do something almost impossible: bring the South back into the Un...
25 Mar 18min
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural
A president stands at the Capitol near the end of the Civil War, with victory in sight and grief everywhere and he chooses restraint over celebration. We dig into Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Ad...
24 Mar 11min
