An Incomplete History

We are back!

Here is our 58 episode. We promise to get new epsiodes out at least every other week.

This week we're discussing the 14th Amendement. It has been in the news lately and we felt everyone could benefit from a bit of context.

Brown v Board of Education, Roe v Wade, Loving v Virginia - Supreme Court decisions in the 20th century have affected the lives of Americans in a myriad of ways. There were repudiations of prior decisions and expansions of how Constitutional protections were understood. There were unanimous decisions and ones more fraught with dissension in the court. Join us for this episode as we touch on a few of the most important decisions.  

Welcome to part two of our three-part series on the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. In this episode we discuss the Taney court (1836-1864) through the Fuller court (1888-1910). We break down two of the most landmark decisions of these courts with a discussion of Dred Scott vs. Sandford (1857) and Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896). Join us for a discussion of judicial overreach, precursors to Civil War, and the codification of racial segregation in the Jim Crow era.

The justices that sit on the US Supreme Court may be nine of the most powerful unelected officials in the world. Join us for the first of a multi-part deep dive into the story of the US Supreme. We'll cover that origins of the court as well as critical people and cases that fundamentally shaped the contemporary legal, political, economic, and social landscape of America.

This week we discuss the origin of the court and the tenures of John Jay, the first Chief Justice, and John Marshall, arguably the most importandt Chief Justice in the history of the court.

Join us as we kick off An Incomplete History season 3 with a discussion of presentism. This week, we do a deep dive into the divisive debate happening within the field of history as the result of the American Historical Association’s president who wrote an opinion piece regarding our role as historians. The piece received extreme backlash leading to the AHA having to lock their Twitter account and many members canceling their memberships to the association. This week we talk about the concept of presentism, why the accusation was offensive to many historians, and what we could or should be doing to promote respectful debate and an open sharing of ideas in such a politically charged moment.

The current conflict in Ukraine has raised a lot of questions about Post-World War II Europe, the creation of strategic alliances in the second-half of the twentieth century, and the collpase of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the effect it had on those relationships. At the center of many of these discussions sits NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Join us for this episode as we discuss, in rather broad terms, the rise of NATO and its reimagining after 1989. 

We continue our series on the history of the news and journalism in the United States with a look at the CNN Effect and the emergence of the 24-hour news cycle. How has it changed the way American's receive and respond to the news? Join us this week to find out.

Politicians and journalists alike often claim Americans are more divided now than at any point in the nation's past. Pundits and commentators point to the stark divisions in the news media we voraciously consume. MSNBC and Fox present strikingly different views on almost every subject. But is this really something new? Join us as we take a dive into the tawdry and titillating history news and newspapers in America. From colonial broadsides criticizing the British crown to abolitionists tracks to scandalous tales of foreign intrigue and even domestic violence, the news from America's past seems strangely familiar in the 21st century.

In this episode Hilary and Geoff discuss common misconceptions about medicine during the Civil War. They also talk about key advances that take place in medical professionalization, surgergy, the treatement of diseases, and even the expanding role of women.

So, this week we start an extended series about the history of medicine. We start in Ancient Egypt and move around the Mediterranean finally ending up in Colonial America. Along the way we discuss the idea of bodily humors, the principal of extractive therapy, as well as the naissance of scientific approaches to medicine. We also discuss the critical and often unwilling role marginalized people played in the creation of medical knowledge.