Stay ConnectedProfessor Adam Smith from Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute explores the America of today through the lens of the past. Is America — as Abraham Lincoln once claimed – the last best hope of Earth? And why have so many people believed it was? Blending a documentary style with interviews with top scholars and public figures, Adam looks at America from the outside in to find out what makes it the place it is.
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Copyright: © 2022 The Last Best Hope?: Understanding America from the Outside In
The speech that triggered the Civil War? In a speech in the State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois, in 1858, Abraham Lincoln warned that a "house divided against itself cannot stand" and that the nation, like a house divided, could not remain "half slave and half free" but would have to become all one thing or all the other. The crisis had arrived; the choice was between complete freedom and complete slavery. Why did Lincoln say this, and what were the consequences? Adam travels to Springfield to find out. Featuring Professor Graham Peck, Distinguished Professor of Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield, and Christian McWhirter, Lincoln Historian at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
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Why is gun control so hard to accomplish in American politics, despite the number of mass shootings now averaging one a week? Adam talks to Saul Cornell, the leading historian of the Second Amendment, about how the Constitution shapes the politics and culture of guns in the United States.
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In the 1853, the closed society of Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate was suddenly confronted by the naval reach of the “last best hope of earth” – Commodore Perry’s naval expedition to “open up” Japan to American trade. The Americans were, of course, as alien to the Japanese as the Japanese were, to the Americans. Adam talks to historians Brian Rouleau and Robert Hellyer about how each side saw the other, and what happened next.
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Why is Gettysburg the Civil War battle that everyone remembers? How did it come to be seen as the “turning point” of the war? Adam goes to the battlefield to find out.
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It is conventional to say that the US is more polarised now than ever before – at least since the Civil War. But intense partisanship has been a feature of American politics since the Revolution. So what is different about polarisation today? And if there is a “cold civil war” in America at the moment, how will it end? Adam talks about this with the political scientist James Morone, one of the shrewdest observers of America’s ever-divided soul.
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Is 'fake news' new? Or have we always lived in a world of 'alternative facts'? Adam talks to John Maxwell Hamilton, who has written a book arguing that government propaganda started not in the age of social media or Donald Trump but with American entry into the First World War in 1917. Also joining Adam at the British Library's Breaking the News exhibition are curator Tamara Tubb and Professor Jo Fox from the University of London and one of the world's leading historians of propaganda.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused the deaths of over one million Americans to date. How have people memorialised their dead through grassroots memorials and how do we memorialise something that has affected different groups of people in vastly unequal ways? Should there be a national COVID memorial in the US and what form would it take? In this episode, RAI Fellow Dr Alice Kelly speaks to Professor Marianne Hirsch and Professor James Young about the challenges of a national memorial, the idea of ‘reparative memory’, and how we remember separately and together.
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In Manchester on new year’s eve 1862, thousands turned out for a public meeting to congratulate President Abraham Lincoln for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. What motivated these people to come along on a wet Wednesday night to listen to fiery speeches about a foreign war? Especially since the most obvious impact of the American Civil War on Lancashire was that the supply of raw cotton was cut off – the so-called ‘cotton famine’ – causing huge economic distress in the textile mill towns. The answer seems to lie in the faith that – somehow – the US represented the last, best hope of earth. Even to people in Lancashire. In this episode, Adam talks to David Brown of the University of Manchester and Richard Blackett of Vanderbilt, to find out about the impact of the cotton famine and what it tells us about the meaning of America in mid-Victorian Britain.
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is simultaneously the most American and the most 'un-American' of projects. Out of the intense religious revival of the 'burned-over district' of New York in the 1820s, "Mormonism" made the astonishing claim that the Risen Christ had literally walked on American soil. They were thus the first truly homegrown American religious movement even as they were reviled for being an alien threat to the Republic. In this episode, Adam talks to Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Rick Turley to find out how Mormonism related to the American nation, why they attracted so much opprobrium, and why, against all the odds, they succeeded.
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Has the Russian invasion of Ukraine restored America's role as the leader of the 'free world'? What are the challenges for US diplomats and politicians in trying to advance American interests while also speaking about universal values like democracy? In this episode, Adam explores these issues with Ambassador Philip T. Reeker, who served as the chargé d'affaires at the US Embassy in London. Reeker was present when the Berlin Wall came down, and his career -- mostly in Europe -- has spanned the post-Cold War decades. As the Russian tanks rolled into a European country in 2022, did he feel that the world has come full circle?
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The Dust Bowl: the ecological disaster within the larger disaster of the Great Depression. It’s a story that generations of Americans have come to know through John Steinbeck's classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath and Dorothea Lange's unforgettable photos of migrant families struggling on the road to make a living in Depression-torn California. In this episode, Adam talks to two prize-winning historians, Linda Gordon, author of a biography of Dorothea Lange, and Sarah Phillips, an expert on the environment and politics in the twentieth century and asks what the dust bowl tells us about the American Dream.
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The Battle Hymn of the Republic is one of the most recognisable songs in the world. Easy to sing, and to march to, its words are stirring and optimistic, and filled with vivid images: trumpets that never call retreat, watch-fires of a hundred circling camps, trampling of the grapes of wrath, loosing of the fateful lightning of the terrible swift sword, burnished rows of steel, lilies in whose beauty Christ was born across the sea. It contains the frisson of redemptive violence, too: as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. It is, in fact, the most perfect musical expression of the idea that America is peculiarly blessed by God -- the last best hope of earth. Adam talks to John Stauffer and Richard Carwardine to find out more about the song's origins.
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Was Richard Nixon responsible for the rightward turn of the Republican Party, or was he in fact the “the last liberal Republican”? John R. Price, who worked on social policy in Nixon’s White House, has written a book making the case that Nixon has been misunderstood, pointing to plans to reform welfare to introduce something like a universal basic income and expand health insurance. Rick Perlstein, author of four prize-winning books on the rise of the Right is unconvinced. So, was Nixon the first of a new breed of right-wing populist Republicans, or the last of an old liberal tribe? Adam talks to Rick Perlstein and John Price to find out.
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Billy Graham, with his film star good looks and his baritone voice, seemed to be everywhere in postwar America – the confidante of presidents, and the closest the nation came to having a national pastor. At a time when we often think of religion as in decline in the West, Billy Graham embodied a self-confident, even glamorous Christian faith. He sold Jesus as other people sold vacuum cleaners. And for him, a Christian faith fed the wells of his boundless patriotism and anti-communism. So who was Billy Graham and how should we assess his legacy? In this episode, Adam talks to Uta Balbier and Grant Wacker to find out.
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How did the Declaration of Independence come to be the signature document of the American nation? What was its role in forging Americans’ conception of themselves as somehow exceptional – the last best hope of earth? Adam talks to Professor Patrick Griffin to find out how a manifesto signed by rebellious colonists --most of them doing so several weeks after July 4 -- somehow became a pseudo-sacred text.
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Since the founding of the United States, Americans have been arguing about the correct balance of power between the federal government and the governments of the individual states. Many today still invoke the idea of 'states' rights' as they claim that state governments should retain exclusive power over numerous aspects of public policy, from gun control, to same-sex marriage, to healthcare. The call for 'states' rights' has also infiltrated the bitter debate over abortion and reproductive healthcare in twenty-first century America. In this episode, guest presenter Grace Mallon talks to Gary Gerstle (Cambridge) and Mary Ziegler (Florida State) about where the call for 'states' rights' came from, why it persists, and how the activities of the state governments continue to shape American lives today. The Producer is Emily Williams.
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From the 1980s until quite recently, the mood music of American politics was to “roll back” the public programmes created during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Now, taxes and spending are rising and the New Deal – maybe in the guise of the “Green New Deal” – is cool again. Maybe government is seen, once again, as the solution to our problems rather than the problem itself. And yet polls show that faith in government remains low while vicious polarisation stymies any 1930s-style attempt to use government to bring the country together. So, can government once again be the solution? Adam discusses these issues with Eric Rauchway and Sid Milkis.
The Producer is Emily Williams
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The American Civil War did not end ambiguously – it ended in complete military defeat for the South. And yet for a century and a half, it is the losers – the men who took up arms against the United States to defend the cause of human enslavement – were honoured as American heroes. None more so than Robert E. Lee. Now the immense statue of Lee that stood on Monument Avenue in Richmond has been removed. Why now? And why was it there so long? Adam talks to Ty Seidule, Emeritus Professor of History at West Point, retired Brigadier General in the US Army, about what Lee meant to him as a white boy growing up in Virginia -- and what Lee means to him now.
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The shocking attacks of September 11, 2001, were one of those "wake up" moments for the US, raising troubling questions about the nation's place in the world, how it could defend itself and what kind of a country it wanted to be. Looking back with Adam at how 9/11 changed America are Prof Nazita Lajevardi (Michigan State and Oxford), an expert in the experiences of the Muslim American community, and Prof Peter Feaver (Duke), who worked on the national security council staff in the Bush White House.
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At the close of the First World War, the U.S. Government gave the American people a choice unlike that of any other nation: to leave their dead loved ones where they fell, or repatriate them to the US for burial at home. Of the 116 000 dead, over 45 000 families made the choice to bring their dead home. In this episode, RAI Fellow Dr. Alice Kelly speaks to Dr. Lisa Budreau, Kevin Fitzpatrick and Professor Steven Trout about how and why the Americans did this. What impact did this homecoming have on the ways Americans remember the First World War today? Is WWI really a ‘forgotten’ war in the US?
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Why does Joe Biden often refer to his mother's Irish ancestry but not his father's English roots? Why does being "Irish" in America have such cachet? In this episode, Adam talks to Professors Kevin Kenny of New York University and David Gleeson from Northumbria University to explore the complex history of Irishness in American culture. From the "wild Irish" of the southern backcountry, through to the political fixers of Tammany Hall and the challenges that John F. Kennedy's (Irish) Catholicism caused him, Adam and his guests talk about how a community that was once so reviled came to embody key aspects of what it means to be an American.
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Has the "American Dream" died? If the "dream" is one of a confident expectation of increasing affluence across generations, then perhaps it has. While politicians in both parties talk about a crisis of the "middle class", young people in America now find it harder to get on the property ladder, to go to College, and even to make ends meet week by week, without falling into a debt trap. Adam talks to Devin Fergus, author of "Land of the Fee," and Jacob Hacker, co-author of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.
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What are we to make of the most famous of American Paradoxes: that Thomas Jefferson, who claimed as a "self-evident truth" the principle that "all men are created equal" was a slaveholder? In this episode, Adam discusses this problem with Pullitzer prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed. With the US undergoing one of the most profound racial reckonings for decades, how should the morally ambiguous legacy of the Founders be understood?
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Has America lost its allure to the rest of the world? Has it lost its confidence, its optimism, its sense of openness? In this episode, Adam talks to Nick Bryant, the BBC correspondent in New York and author of When America Stopped Being Great about the changing image of the US between the 1980s and the present. The two discuss whether America still has the capacity to solve its own problems – or to believe that it can. And Adam asks if the BLM protests have created a new progressive image of a US counterculture that is, once again, drawing idealistic young people towards a different kind of American dream?
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The soap opera of Meghan and Harry, the deploying of Prince Philip in America's culture wars: why does the British royal family exerted so strong an appeal in republican America ? This is not a new phenomenon. Queen Victoria's son, later Edward VII, toured America on the eve of the Civil War and was greeted with adulation. What's going on? Adam talks to Arianne Chernock and Frank Prochaska to find out.
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In 1980, Jimmy Carter's administration leaned on the US Olympic Committee to boycott the Moscow Games. Today, there are calls for the US to once again boycott the Olympics -- this time in Beijing. What are the lessons of the 1980 boycott? Can sport ever be an effective instrument of foreign policy? And does the US any longer have the credibility as the "leader of the free world" to take a stance on human rights. Adam talks to Joe Onek, Deputy Counsel to President Carter who managed the White House's efforts to boycott the Olympics, and the historians Nicholas Sarantakes and Patrick Andelic.
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Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale": a soprano who made strong men weep with the beauty of her voice. In this episode, Adam explores the Nightingale's sensational tour of the US in 1850-52. She was described as the "most famous woman in the world" by her promoter, the never-knowingly-unselling impresario P T Barnum. Her reputation for virtue did much to make theatre and performance respectable, but as Lind travelled across America, the country was riven by slavery. How would she navigate those divisions while retaining her reputation, and making money? The guests are Robert Wilson, author of Barnum: An American Life, and the music historian Katherine Preston. Reader: Dane Udenberg. Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith.
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Throughout the Victorian period, Black abolitionists toured the British Isles. In an effort to enlist British support for ending slavery in America--and later to enlist support for black rights--African Americans spoke not just in London or Leeds but in small towns and villages from the north of Scotland to the foot of Snowdonia and beyond. In this episode, Adam talks to Hannah-Rose Murray to ask why they came and how they were received. Abraham Lincoln may have thought America was the "last best hope" but at least strategically, abolitionists proclaimed Britain to be the land of the free and America to be a land of barbarism and hypocrisy.
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After their own successful secession from the British Empire in the War of Independence, Americans cheered on other plucky nations attempting to wrest themselves from the yoke of others. Whether in Latin America, Hungary, Poland, Ireland or Italy, Americans mostly thought that national self-determination was a good thing. So naturally, when they created the Confederacy, Southerners--some of them at least--hoped that the rest of the world would think them as heroic as Garibaldi. They were to be sorely disappointed. In this episode, Adam talks to Ann Tucker, author of a recent book about how the Confederates channelled the spirit of those European freedom struggles. What, after all, was the difference between the struggle for Southern independence and the Risorgimento? The answer is quite a bit...
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In this episode Adam talks to Eric Foner, the pre-eminent historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction, about the resonances of the Reconstruction era in the present day. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the US had to deal with a recalcitrant white population in the South who rejected the legitimacy of the Federal government's attempt to give political rights to Black people and who used political violence to achieve their aims. What lessons are there for the present day in an America that is once again profoundly divided over questions of racial justice and about the basic rules of the political game.
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Adam talks to Mitch Robertson and Kate Guy about Joe Biden's inaugural address and the prospects for his administration. Is this a “new page in America’s story” as Joe Biden says? Adam and guests discuss the new president's appeal to his understanding of the "American tradition" and whether it will work.
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When Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol on Jan 6, 2020, in an attempt to prevent the ratification of the election of Joe Biden, the immediate response of many in the American media was that it was "not who we are". But in this episode, Adam talks to Bruce Baker from the University of Newcastle and Grace Mallon from Oxford, who explain that in fact there is a long American tradition of insurrection. When groups of people who feel entitled to be in control feel like they’ve lost control, attempts at insurrection have often been the result. And the example of the Revolution is always there to serve as a justification.
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Why did the framers of the American constitution invest the President with so many of the powers and trapping of a king? Why does he have the power to pardon felons (including his friends), to command the army and to veto legislation? More to the point why did the framers end up creating a Presidency that although elected nevertheless wields more power than did King George III, or any British monarch since the reign of James II? Adam talks to Steve Sarson, Professor of American Civilisation at Université Jean Moulin in Lyon, and Nicholas Cole, Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, to ask if the American constitution created an elected king?
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Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was an outsized media event. No one in America in the 1850s could avoid knowing something of its characters and themes. It brought into the homes and hearts of millions of Americans a dramatic and heartrending story about an enslaved family. White people who wanted to avoid thinking about the reality of human enslavement found it harder to avoid. Uncle Tom reached places that nothing else had -- but did it really play a role in bringing about the Civil War? To find out, Adam talks to John Brooke, a historian at Ohio State University who thinks it did. The reader in this episode is Olivia Marshall.
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A week after election day in 2020, Joe Biden has won the election with a margin of at least 5 million votes but President Trump hasn't conceded and may never do so. A defeated incumbent, an election that underlined the deep partisan polarisation of the American nation and a President-Elect who appealed in his acceptance speech to the "better angels" of the country -- quoting, once again, who else but Abraham Lincoln. In this episode, Adam talks to Mitch Robertson and Kate Guy about what the election means for the US and its place in the world. Does Biden want to restore the "last best hope"?
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In September 1960 Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban revolution and hipster lodestar for the countercultural left visited the belly of the beast, New York City, to attend the UN General Assembly. It was a visit that exposed the contradictions and tensions within the United States' efforts to present itself as the last best hope for the free world at the height of the Cold War. Adam talks to Simon Hall about this extraordinary event and what it tells us.
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In this special episode, Oxford historian Charlotte Moberly tells the story of how the French intellectual and pioneer of second-wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir was personally and intellectually transformed by her visit to America in 1947. This is the first of a new occasional series of short podcasts exploring individuals' encounters with America -- both the idea and the reality.
In this episode Simone de Beauvoir was played by Olivia Marshall. Izzy Collie-Cousins was Janet Flanner, and Alex Hancock was Nelson Algren.
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We can't imagine a political campaign without music -- whether it's an election rally, a protest movement or a TV ad, music is essential. In this episode, Adam talks to Billy Coleman, author of a recent book about music and politics in the nineteenth century United States and asks him what music brings to politics and what we can learn from it about how politics works.
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In this episode Adam talks to Heather Cox Richardson about how the values the South fought for -- oligarchy, and racial and gender inequality -- outlived the Confederacy. Heather argues that American history can be understood as a conflict between oligarchs and masses. Adam asks her why that is. How does a "democracy" become an oligarchy? And is the politics of today an echo of the politics of 150 years ago?
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"We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth" -- Abraham Lincoln's phrase in his message to Congress in December 1862. What did he mean? In this episode, Adam talks to Rachel Shelden of the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State. They talked about Lincoln, his opposition to slavery, his vastly more complex view of racial equality... and why he coined that memorable phrase. If Lincoln thought America had a "mission", the Last Best Hope? podcast has a mission too: to understand why people thought, and many still think, that America has a mission. (The podcast features a special guest appearance from Barack Obama).
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Does America and the world need a new New Deal? If so, what lessons can we learn from how old orthodoxies in economic policy-making were challenged in the interwar period? In this episode, Adam talks to Eric Rauchway about the year 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office and immediately set a course that challenged some of the sacred shibboleths of economic policy-making.
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Is a country that’s had a successful revolution doomed to endlessly re-enact it? In this episode, Adam talks to Professor Margaret Weir (Brown University and Oxford) about why anti-lockdown protests take the form they do in America: armed men entering legislatures and the waving of flags with the slogan "Don't Tread on Me".
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What is the difference between a "crisis" and a "not-crisis"? How do crises happen and how have they shaped history? Adam talks to Jay Sexton of the University of Missouri, author of "A Nation Shaped by Crisis: A New American History" who thinks we're now in a crisis that, unlike previous crises, will leave the United States weaker.
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Dividing power between the Federal government and the states may have seemed a good idea in theory to the founding fathers but in practice it's led to confusion and conflict. Donald Trump claims that his power is "total". State governors -- and constitutional experts -- beg to differ. In this episode, Adam talks to Grace Mallon of Oxford University, an expert in the reality of Federal-state relations in the early republic who tells us that's it's always been like this.
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