From Temperance To The 18th Amendment And The Politics Behind It
Prohibition didn’t rise because America suddenly forgot how to party. It rose because a lot of powerful groups saw alcohol as the key that unlocked the problem they cared about most, and they were wil...
22 Apr 20min
The 17th Amendment Rewrote Who Senators Answer To
One line in the Constitution used to decide whether your U.S. senator answered first to party voters or to state lawmakers, and changing that line reshaped American politics. We’re joined by Dr. Sean ...
21 Apr 17min
The 16th Amendment and the Federal Reserve Act of 1913
Tax Day raises a question most of us never get a straight answer to: why did the United States need a constitutional amendment just to tax income? We walk through the 16th Amendment with Dr. Sean Beie...
20 Apr 17min
Election of 1912: The Republican Breakup
A former president comes home, looks at his handpicked successor, and decides the country needs a completely different Constitution in practice. That’s the spark behind the Election of 1912, and we wa...
17 Apr 19min
Roosevelt, Taft, And Wilson Debate The Presidency
The presidency didn’t become powerful by accident. We trace today’s executive-branch arguments back to an early-20th-century clash between three outsized figures and three competing theories of Americ...
16 Apr 25min
Political Thought: T Roosevelt vs Wilson
Two presidents. One Progressive Era dilemma that still won’t go away: do you fix a modern economy by breaking up power or by controlling it with an even stronger federal government? We dig into Theodo...
15 Apr 21min
The Populist Moment
We trace what populism looks like in the 1890s and why it’s less a single doctrine than a coalition of anger, hope, and economic suspicion. We follow the money fight over gold and silver into the Pani...
14 Apr 18min
Sherman Antitrust Act
A law you can read in about five minutes still shapes some of the biggest fights in the American economy. We walk through the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 with Dr. Sean Beienberg and unpack what “res...
14 Apr 17min
