The Invention of Race
The idea that race is a social construct comes from the pioneering work of anthropologist Franz Boas. During a time when race-based science and the eugenics movement were becoming mainstream, anthropo...
19 Nov 202040min
BONUS: Louder Than A Riot
This week we're bringing you something extra, an episode from the NPR Music series, Louder Than A Riot. The series examines the relationship between hip hop and mass incarceration and you can find the...
16 Nov 202049min
The Shadows of the Constitution
The Constitution is like America's secular bible, our sacred founding document. In her play, What the Constitution Means to Me, Heidi Schreck goes through a process of discovering what the document is...
12 Nov 202044min
Bush v. Gore and Why It Matters in 2020
In the 2000 presidential election, results weren't known in one night, a week, or even a month. This week, we share an episode we loved from It's Been A Minute with Sam Sanders that revisits one of th...
5 Nov 202029min
The Most Sacred Right
Frederick Douglass dreamed of a country where all people could vote and he did everything in his power to make that dream a reality. In the face of slavery, the Civil War and the violence of Jim Crow,...
29 Okt 20201h 3min
How We Vote
Drunken brawls, coercion, and lace curtains. Believe it or not, how regular people vote was not something the founding fathers thought much about, or planned for. Americans went from casting votes at ...
22 Okt 202058min
The Electoral College
What is it, why do we have it, and why hasn't it changed? Born from a rushed, fraught, imperfect process, the origins and evolution of the Electoral College might surprise you and make you think diff...
15 Okt 202057min
(mis)Representative Democracy, A New Series From Throughline
America has never been a country of one person, one vote. And that's by design. Our system was built by a select few, for a select few. We were never all supposed to get a say. In this series, we'll t...
8 Okt 20201min
