Matt Wasniewski, “Women in Congress, 1917-2006” (U.S. House of Representatives, 2007)

What does it mean to supervise a bank? And why does it matter who holds that power? In this episode, Sean H. Vanatta joins us to explore the hidden machinery behind American finance, as told in his new book Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America (Princeton UP, 2025), co-authored with Peter Conti-Brown. Spanning nearly 150 years, the book traces the evolution of bank supervision from a patchwork of state-level oversight to a complex, layered system involving federal agencies, private actors, and political discretion. Sean takes us from the wildcat banks of the 1830s to the rise of the Federal Reserve, through crises, reforms, and the quiet work of bank examiners who shaped the rules behind the scenes. We discuss why supervision differs from regulation, how discretion has become central to managing financial risk, and what the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 reveals about the enduring tension between private profit and public responsibility. Along the way, Sean shares stories of forgotten institutions, colourful characters, and the surprising role of gender and civil rights in shaping financial oversight. Whether you're a policymaker, historian, or simply curious about how money and power interact, this conversation offers a fresh perspective on the institutions that quietly govern our financial lives. Tune in for a rich and engaging journey through the history and current state of banking politics.The interview on "Plastic Capitalism" is available here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

29 Aug 53min

In its first edition, this book focused on the representations of Islam that circulated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks – representations that scholars, pundits, and politicians alike used either to essentialize and demonize it or, instead, to isolate specific aspects as apolitical and thus tolerable faith. This little book’s larger thesis therefore argued for how the classifications that we routinely use to identify and thereby negotiate our social worlds – notably such categories as “religion” or “faith” – are explicitly political. The new edition of Religion and the Domestication of Dissent: Or, How to Live in a Less Than Perfect Nation (Routledge, 2025), which updates the first and adds a new closing chapter, continues to be relevant today – a time when assertions concerning supposedly authentic and homogenous identities (whether shared by “us” or “them”) continue to animate a variety of public debates where the stakes remain high. Thinking back on how Islam was often portrayed in scholarship and popular media in western Europe and North America offers lessons for how debates today unfold on such topics as Christian nationalism – a designation now prominent among pundits intent on identifying the proper and improper ways in which religion intersects with modern political life. But it is this very distinction (between religion and politics) that ought to be attracting our attention, if we are interested not in which way of being religious is right or reasonable but, instead, in determining why some social groups are known as religious in the first place. Seeing the latter question as linked to studying how socially formative categories function in liberal democracies, Religion and the Domestication of Dissent offers an anthropology of the present, when the longstanding mechanisms of liberal governance seem to be under threat. Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and, for 18 years, was the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, USA. His publications include a variety of works on the history of the field, the everyday effects of the category “religion,” along with a number of practical resources for scholars, teachers, and students. This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

28 Aug 1h 7min

In early 2025, headlines announced that the Trump administration would move to dramatically slash USAID—the United States’ flagship development agency. For many, the move was surprising, even self-defeating: why would a president so focused on countering China weaken one of Washington’s most effective tools of soft power? At the same time, China’s development finance continues to expand, and geopolitical competition over infrastructure intensifies, raising alarm bells across Washington and beyond. To help us make sense of this moment—and the broader politics of foreign aid—we’re joined by Jack Taggart, an expert on global governance and development, who discusses what these cuts mean for U.S. strategy, China’s rise, and the contested terrain of development and aid in today’s world. BIO: Jack Taggart is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at Queen’s University Belfast. His research spans international political economy, global governance, and global development, focusing on shifting dynamics in development cooperation, such as the rise of new state and private actors, aid financialization, and development finance transformations. He also examines global governance institutions and the growing role of “multistakeholderism” in areas ranging from economic policy to environmental treaties. Links: The Second Cold War and Demise of the Western Foreign Aid Regime by Jack Taggart, SCWO Dispatch How to DOGE USAID by Daniela Gabor in Phenomenal World Industrial Policy and Imperial Realignment by Ilias Alami, Tom Chodor, Jack Taggart in Phenomenal World Rethinking d/Development by Emma Mawdsley and Jack Taggart in Progress in Human Geography Fictions of Financialization by Nick Bernard Rendering development investible: the anti-politics machine and the financialisation of development by Jack Taggart and Marcus Power in Progress in Human Geography Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

28 Aug 52min

From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers in the United States of America. His words and ideas had a powerful impact on American liberalism and his writings on the media are still taught today. Lippmann is now the subject of Tom Arnold-Forster’s Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton UP, 2025). Arnold-Forster explores Lippmann in his evolving historical context, from the Progressive Era to the Cold War. He argues that Lippmann was a much more complicated thinker than is usually recognized who went from being a liberal socialist to a conservative liberal. Arnold-Forster is a historian at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University, where he works on the political and intellectual history of the modern United States and the history of political thought. His articles have appeared in scholarly journals and general interest publications. His article on Lippmann and public opinion, published in American Journalism, won the 2024 Dorothy Ross Prize for best article from the Society for United States Intellectual History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

27 Aug 42min

Elaine Weiss, acclaimed author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, follows that magisterial work with a work of equal scholarly significance and narrative excellence, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement (Simon and Schuster, 2025), "the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.""In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement.” Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker. In addition to Spell Freedom, she is the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army of the Great War; and The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. Elaine lives with her husband in Baltimore, Maryland. Find out more at her website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

26 Aug 1h 5min

Much has been written about political polarisation in the United States, but no one has examined it through the lens of recent U.S. history. There is nothing deterministic about how we became polarised, and it happened more recently than many think. To fully understand the problem, we must take the long view, the perspective provided by history, with its attention to change over time and the role of contingency. That’s what The Path to Paralysis does. The book illuminates the broad forces that have shaped and reshaped American society and politics since the mid-1960s: the shift from an industrial to an information economy that produced economic inequality not seen since the 1920s; dramatic, unsettling changes in gender and sexuality; sharp conflict between those who embrace the culture of personal freedom that was a legacy of the 1960s and politically mobilised White evangelicals; persistent racial discord that transformed Southern politics and shattered the New Deal coalition; and dramatic changes in communication that transformed broadcasting into narrowcasting, creating alternate news and truths. These developments had their origin in the late 1960s and have generated sharp political conflict for six decades. But they didn’t overwhelm the system until the 21st century. Ronald Reagan moved American politics to the right, but Republicans and Democrats forged compromise on issues as diverse as economic policy, civil rights, and immigration. After the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush tacked to the centre and sought bipartisan solutions to issues like welfare, education and immigration. Sharp conflict and governance were compatible. The tipping point was the election of the nation’s first Black president and the economic collapse he inherited. Fault lines of religion, region, gender, sexual orientation, class, education and, especially, race widened. People chose sides and identified enemies, the number of true swing voters shrunk, fewer states and congressional districts were competitive, the two major parties became more monolithic, and appeals to the base drove strategy and what passed for policy. It was an atmosphere that provided fertile ground for a demagogue whose norm-busting appeals to White grievance and Christian Nationalism, as well as to regional and class resentment strengthened his appeal to an angry base and threatened the peaceful transition of power, the bedrock of American democracy for more than two centuries. Donald G. Nieman is an authority on modern U.S. law and politics, and professor of history and provost emeritus at Binghamton University – State University of New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

25 Aug 53min

Steve Luxenberg has created an unusual history of the famous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson and the 19th century’s segregationist practices in his book Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation (Norton, 2019)  It is unusual because it is chiefly an ensemble biography of Henry Brown, John Marshall Harlan, and Albion Tourgee, three men intimately connected with the Plessy case.  The book covers the Antebellum period youth of the three men, each from a different part of the young nation and each encountering freedmen, slaves, and the institution of slavery in different social and political contexts.  We follow these men through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the post-Reconstruction period leading up to the Plessy decision.  The Plessy case helped solidify official, state-enforced segregationist practices throughout the United States.  It made the now-infamous phrase “separate but equal” a constitutional doctrine that was the law of the land until the 1950s and 1960s. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

24 Aug 48min

Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution (LSU Press, 2024) unearths a long-hidden factor that led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. While historians have generally acknowledged that patriot leaders assembled in response to postwar economic chaos, the threat of popular insurgencies, and the inability of the states to agree on how to fund the national government, Timothy Messer-Kruse suggests that scholars have discounted Americans' desire to compel Britain to return fugitives from slavery as a driving force behind the convention. During the Revolutionary War, British governors offered freedom to enslaved Americans who joined the king's army. Thousands responded by fleeing to English camps. After the British defeat at Yorktown, American diplomats demanded the surrender of fugitive slaves. When British generals refused, several states confiscated Loyalist estates and blocked payment of English creditors, hoping to apply enough pressure on the Crown to hand over the runaways. State laws conflicting with the 1783 Treaty of Paris violated the Articles of Confederation--the young nation's first constitution--but Congress, lacking an executive branch or a federal judiciary, had no means to obligate states to comply. The standoff over the escaped slaves quickly escalated following the Revolution as Britain failed to abandon the western forts it occupied and took steps to curtail American commerce. More than any other single matter, the impasse over the return of enslaved Americans threatened to hamper the nation's ability to expand westward, develop its commercial economy, and establish itself as a power among the courts of Europe. Messer-Kruse argues that the issue encouraged the founders to consider the prospect of scrapping the Articles of Confederation and drafting a superseding document that would dramatically increase federal authority--the Constitution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

23 Aug 1h