The Constitution is Amazing (and Ridiculous), Part One: A Troubled, Ambitious Origin Story

The Constitution is Amazing (and Ridiculous),...

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The Ridiculous Truth About Pirates, Chapter One: The Caribbean

Fellow Ridiculous Historians, Ben, Noel and Max are back on their pirate obsession. In this special two-part series live from the legendary Baha Mar, the guys welcome returning guest Matt Frederick for a fascinating exploration of some of history's most ridiculous pirates. Stay t ...  Show more

CLASSIC: Teddy Roosevelt May Just Have Saved Modern (American) Football

In recent years the public has become increasingly aware of the long-term dangers posed by sports injuries -- but at the turn of the 20th century this wasn't the case. Football players didn't wear protective gear, and in 1905 alone more than 15 players died from game-related inju ...  Show more

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Why Constitutions Matter
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David talks to historian Linda Colley about her new global history of written constitutions: the paper documents that made and remade the modern world. From Corsica to Pitcairn, from Mexico to Japan, it's an amazing story of war and peace, violence, imagination and fear. Recorded ...  Show more

The Shadows of the Constitution (2020)
Throughline

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 really about – who wrote it, who it was for, who it protected and who it didn't ...  Show more

Liberals Need a Clearer Vision of the Constitution. Here’s What It Could Look Like.
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For decades now, the conservative legal movement has been on a mission to remake this nation’s laws from the bench. And it’s working. On Friday we released an episode with th ...

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Christopher Capozzola, “Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of The Modern American Citizen” (Oxford UP, 2008)
New Books in Military History

I confess I sometimes wonder where we got in the habit of proclaiming, usually with some sort of righteous indignation, that we have the “right” to this or that as citizens. I know that the political theorists of the eighteenth century wrote a lot about “rights,” and that “rights ...  Show more