This week, Clay Jenkinson’s conversation with Dr. Edward Watts, professor of history at the University of California San Diego. Watts, the author of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny, is a historian of the classical world or more than 2000 years ago, but his work inevitably asks the question, is the American republic in the kind of chaos and decline that led to the collapse of the Roman Republic about the time of Christ? Was the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, a harbinger of greater and more purposeful uses of political violence in our future? How much public corruption can a republic endure? We have a sense of who the Caesar might be, but where is the Cato in modern American life, or even the Cicero? Support the show by joining the 1776 Club or by donating to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, Inc. You can learn more about Clay's cultural tours and retreats at jeffersonhour.com/tours. Check out our merch. You can find Clay's books on our website, along with a list of his favorite books on Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and other topics. Thomas Jefferson is interpreted and portrayed by Clay S. Jenkinson.

#1543 Are We Rome?

Listening to America aims to “light out for the territories,” traveling less visited byways and taking time to see this immense, extraordinary country with fresh eyes while listening to the many voices of America’s past, present, and future. 

Led by noted historian and humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson, Listening to America travels the country’s less visited byways, from national parks and forests to historic sites to countless under-recognized rural and urban places. Through this exploration, Clay and team find and tell the overlooked historical and contemporary stories that shape America’s people and places. Visit our website at ltamerica.org.

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Clay Jenkinson interviews Pulitzer Prize winning historian Richard Rhodes, the author of 23 books including The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Topics include Rhodes' path to one of the most productive and acclaimed writing careers in recent American history; the strengths and weaknesses of Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer; the time Edward Teller abruptly stopped an interview and asked Rhodes to leave; the current status of the Doomsday Clock that tells us how close we are to nuclear war; and what's next in the illustrious career of the much awarded and universally celebrated author. 

#1600 A Conversation with Richard Rhodes

Clay Jenkinson and special guest host Russ Eagle discuss the first days of Listening to America’s Travels with Charley Tour. Clay reports from a campground near Cedar Rapids, Iowa en route to Sag Harbor out on the end of Long Island, New York, to touch base with Steinbeck’s starting point for his 1960 journey through America. Clay recounts his wrestling match with an uncooperative bike rack, and other details of getting underway on a twenty-week odyssey around the perimeter of the United States. Russ and Clay talk about Steinbeck’s state of mind—and declining health—as he set out in late September 1960, and the ways in which Steinbeck shaped his book Travels with Charley as a literary masterpiece and not just a dry reporting of verifiable road facts. They discuss the place of Travels with Charley in the larger trajectory of Steinbeck’s amazing career, and the places Clay will visit on his way to Long Island.

#1599 Underway! Tracing Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” Journey

 Clay Jenkinson interviews political cartoonist Phil Hands about the importance of cartoons in American history. Hands is the house cartoonist for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, Wisconsin, syndicated for a range of newspapers around the United States. We gave much of our attention to political cartoons about Thomas Jefferson, including one that depicts him as a prairie dog vomiting money in his quest to buy the Floridas, and another that depicts Sally Hemings as Jefferson’s consort. We also talked about the most cartooned political figure in American history, Theodore Roosevelt, including Clifford Berryman’s famous Teddy Bear cartoon of TR, as well as the difficulty of being a political cartoonist today with the aggressions of cancel culture. 

#1598 A Conversation with Political Cartoonist Phil Hands

Guest host David Horton of Radford University discusses America’s trees and forests with Third President Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson said, “No sprig of grass grows uninteresting to me.” He told his friend Margaret Bayard Smith that any unnecessary cutting down of a tree should be regarded as silvicide, the murder of a majestic living thing. Jefferson wanted future cities to be planned in a checkerboard pattern with every other square permanent parkland. One of his last requests, just months before his death, was that the University of Virginia plant an arboretum. Jefferson’s protégé Meriwether Lewis was so startled by the treelessness of the Great Plains that he wondered if they could ever be settled. Later in the program, Clay and David talk about the origins of the Soil Conservation Service and FDR’s idea of a single endless shelter belt down the hundredth meridian from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

#1597 Arbor Day and the Seeds of Liberty

Clay Jenkinson’s conversation with regular guest Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky about the doctrine of nullification. That’s when a state refuses to accept the legitimacy of a federal law. Nullification is nowhere enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, but through the course of American history a number of nullification crises have arisen. When the Adams administration passed the Alien and Sedition laws of 1798 Jefferson wrote a set of secret resolutions for the state of Kentucky resisting those laws, which Jefferson said were worthy of the ninth or tenth century. John C. Calhoun attempted nullification for South Carolina and other southern states in the 1830s, mostly over tariffs, and now again a number of states, led by Texas, are threatening to nullify federal laws they hate--or even to secede if necessary. Dr. Chervinsky has a hilarious response to the idea of Texas or Louisiana secessions.

#1543 Are We Rome?

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