At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States faces a defining question: can a republic also be an empire? This episode traces how America’s long tradition of expansion moves overseas, from Manifest Destiny to warships, coaling stations, and new global markets. We explore the ideas that justified imperialism, the Spanish-American War, and the fierce debates over new territories like the Philippines. Then we pivot home to the Progressive Era, where reformers confront industrial capitalism, corruption, and inequality. Together, imperialism abroad and progressivism at home reveal a nation wrestling with power, reform, and its own contradictions.

In this episode, we step into the turbulent 1890s, when industrial capitalism collides with democracy. As railroads, steel, and oil generate unprecedented wealth, millions of Americans face unemployment, debt, and political corruption. We explore the Panic of 1893, patronage politics, and the limits of early reform efforts like the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. From the rise of monopolies to the birth of Populism, farmers and workers organize to challenge corporate power and demand a more responsive federal government. At the heart of it all is a moral debate over money itself—free silver versus gold—culminating in William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” and a defining referendum on America’s economic future.

APUSH for ALL dives into the Gilded Age from the ground up — inside factories, tenements, strike lines, and city halls. Building on America’s industrial rise, this episode asks a harder question: who did progress actually serve? We explore the daily realities of workers, the rise and limits of organized labor, and flashpoints like Haymarket, Homestead, and Pullman that revealed how power operated when capital and labor collided. Along the way, we trace exploding cities, immigrant life in overcrowded tenements, reform movements like City Beautiful, and the rise of political machines. This is the Gilded Age beyond tycoons and skylines — a story of pressure, protest, and democracy under strain.

In this episode of APUSH for ALL, we tackle the rise of American industrial supremacy and the fierce debates it sparked in the late nineteenth century. The United States becomes an economic powerhouse through steel, railroads, oil, and mass production—but that growth comes with slums, strikes, monopolies, and deep inequality. We explore the Gilded Age as both spectacle and system, from Carnegie and Rockefeller to railroads, assembly lines, and scientific management. Just as importantly, we examine the critics—labor unions, reformers, socialists, and utopian thinkers—who asked a question that still matters: can a nation be rich without becoming unjust?

This episode of APUSH for ALL tackles one of the biggest debates in American history by telling two stories of the West at the same time. We start with Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous frontier thesis, which casts westward expansion as a story of opportunity, democracy, and rugged individualism. Then we challenge that myth through the lens of Patricia Limerick and the New Western History, revealing a West shaped by conquest, conflict, labor, and power. From Manifest Destiny and the Homestead Act to railroads, immigration, Native resistance, and Wounded Knee, we explore how the story you choose changes what the West means—and who gets counted in it.

This review episode traces the broad sweep of U.S. history from 1491 through the end of Reconstruction, guided by W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of a widening circle of democracy and a narrowing circle of caste. Rather than memorizing dates, we move chronologically while returning to core questions about power, belonging, and resistance. From Native societies before Columbus to colonization, revolution, expansion, slavery, civil war, and Reconstruction, we examine who benefited from change, who was excluded, and who fought back. Along the way, we highlight continuities as well as turning points, showing how American ideals repeatedly clashed with American realities.

Reconstruction promised a new birth of freedom—and then slammed the door. In this episode, we trace that “brief moment in the sun,” from emancipation, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the battle over land and labor to Lincoln’s lenient Ten Percent Plan, Johnson’s racist “Restoration,” and the rise of Black Codes. We follow Radical Reconstruction, Black political power, public schools, and sharecropping’s trap, then turn to Grant, the fight against the Klan, and the violent “Redemption” that culminates in the Compromise of 1877. Along the way, we ask Du Bois’s question: was Reconstruction doomed, or was it abandoned?

Frederick Douglass said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” In this episode, that struggle explodes into civil war. We open 1861 by stacking Union and Confederate strengths and weaknesses, from industry and railroads to cotton and commanding officers. Then we trace how a “short war” fantasy dies at Bull Run, how new technology collides with old tactics, and how enslaved people, Antietam, and the Emancipation Proclamation turn a war for Union into a war for freedom. Finally, we ask how Gettysburg, Sherman’s march, Black soldiers, and “states’ rights” debates still shape American memory and American politics today.

Alexander Stephens bragged that the Confederacy’s “cornerstone” was slavery, not vague “states’ rights.” In this episode of APUSH for ALL, we follow the road from the Kansas–Nebraska Act and “Bleeding Kansas” through Dred Scott, Lincoln’s rise, and John Brown’s raid, into the election of 1860, Southern secession, and the firing on Fort Sumter. Using secession documents, speeches, and clashes in Congress, we peel back the myth of abstract “states’ rights” and ask: the right to do what? By the end, listeners will see how a war launched to “save the Union” was already rooted in defending slavery.

In this episode of APUSH for ALL, we trace how Manifest Destiny’s promise of continental expansion turned into a political time bomb. From Texas annexation, the Oregon Trail, and “Mr. Polk’s War” with Mexico to the Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850, we follow how every new acre raised the explosive question of slavery’s expansion. Then we move into the 1850s crisis: Kansas–Nebraska and Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, John Brown’s raid, and Lincoln’s rise in 1860. By the end, the West isn’t just a frontier—it’s the fuse that blows the Union apart.