We’ve all been told the American Revolution was fought over taxation and representation. But that's not what the Declaration of Independence says. According to our founders, in their own words, what they were most upset about was Native Americans. How did we all miss that? Rebecca sits down with historian Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) to talk about how hunger for Indigenous land drove the Revolution. Welcome to First America, the true story of how the United States came to be, and how our current political moment was 250 years in the making.

Resources:
- Dig into more of Ned Blackhawk's scholarship here

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Welcome to First America: the true story of how the United States came to be, and how our current political moment is 250 years in the making. Dropping June 22nd, with early episode releases for Pushkin+ subscribers.

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The This Land team is back with a new show! Stay tuned for First America, the true story of how the United States came to be, and how our current political moment is 250 years in the making. Dropping June 22nd, with early episode releases for Pushkin+ subscribers.

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Neil Gorsuch may not be the most well-known justice on the Supreme Court, but he might just be the key to understanding how and why the current court has come to wield so much power over our day-to-day lives. In the 11th season of Slow Burn, host Susan Matthews traces the rise of Neil Gorsuch, from his formative years as a young conservative through his nomination to a “stolen seat” on the U.S. Supreme Court. Through interviews, legal analysis, and archival research, this mild-mannered Westerner emerges as the court’s most unpredictable—and most important—sitting justice. 

In this first episode, Matthews examines Gorsuch’s early years, what he took away from his iconoclastic mother’s rocky tenure in the Reagan administration, and how his worldview was shaped by his time on a liberal college campus and in 1980s conservative circles. Plus: the controversial court case that might have gotten Gorsuch noticed by just the right people at just the right time.

Follow and listen now to the entire season on Slow Burn from slate.com. 

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The police tell us they are here to protect us. But what if their original purpose was something else altogether? Peabody Award-winning host Chenjerai Kumanyika takes listeners on a journey to uncover the hidden history of the largest police force in the world – from its roots in slavery, to rival police gangs battling across the city, to everyday people who resisted every step of the way. As our society debates where policing is going, Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD explores where the police came from.

From Wondery, Crooked Media and PushBlack.

Follow Empire City wherever you get your podcasts and listen to the second episode, available now. You can listen ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App or on Apple Podcasts.

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BY THE FIRE WE CARRY, the new book by Rebecca Nagle, is a powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later

Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. Nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests—in the emergence of this great nation, our government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples.

In the 1830s Muscogee people were rounded up by the US military at gunpoint and forced into exile halfway across the continent. At the time, they were promised this new land would be theirs for as long as the grass grew and the waters ran. But that promise was not kept. When Oklahoma was created on top of Muscogee land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed. Over a century later, a Muscogee citizen was sentenced to death for murdering another Muscogee citizen on tribal land. His defense attorneys argued the murder occurred on the reservation of his tribe, and therefore Oklahoma didn’t have the jurisdiction to execute him. Oklahoma asserted that the reservation no longer existed. In the summer of 2020, the Supreme Court settled the dispute. Its ruling that would ultimately underpin multiple reservations covering almost half the land in Oklahoma, including Nagle’s own Cherokee Nation. 

Here Rebecca Nagle recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our country. 

Learn more: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/by-the-fire-we-carry-rebecca-nagle

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Episode 1: The Police Officer and the Priest: One night back in the late 1970s, an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police pulled over a suspected drunk driver. When he walked up to the vehicle, he came face-to-face with a ghost from his past: a residential school priest. That officer was journalist Connie Walker’s late father. What happened that night on the side of the road compelled her to return home to Saskatchewan nearly 40 years later to try to investigate a secret in her own family. What she uncovers is a much bigger story. 

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Last week the Supreme Court made an historic ruling upholding the Indian Child Welfare Act. Rebecca Nagle takes us inside the courtroom to break down the decision, how we got here, and what it all means.

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