For the Ages: A History Podcast

By New-York Historical Society

What's For the Ages: A History Podcast about?

Explore the rich and complex history of the United States and beyond. Produced by the New-York Historical Society, host David M. Rubenstein engages the nation’s foremost historians and creative thinkers on a wide range of topics, including presidential biography, the nation’s founding, and the people who have shaped the American story. Learn more at nyhistory.org.

Download our free app to listen on your phone

For the Ages: A History Podcast episodes:

04.14.2024
How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons from Our Top Presidents
Throughout history, Americans have looked to their president for guidance, seeking leadership from the nation’s highest office during times of turbulence. Historian and lawyer Talmage Boston speaks with David M. Rubenstein to discuss the leadership lessons that can be learned...
04.08.2024
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
J. Edgar Hoover was not only the inaugural director of the FBI, but the architect of modern American law enforcement. Hoover’s stewardship over America’s justice system was as robust as it was ruthless, while his connections to white supremacists and...
03.25.2024
Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War
In December 1941, Nazi Germany controlled much of Europe, Japan was fighting a brutal campaign in China, and the United States had yet to enter into combat on either front. The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, however, changed...
03.18.2024
River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile
In an exhilarating and, at times, harrowing account of exploration, survival, and betrayal, author and journalist Candice Millard joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss the story of two men’s search for the headwaters of the Nile River. Richard Burton, an...
03.11.2024
Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon, Part Two
Author and journalist Kate Andersen Brower rejoins David M. Rubenstein to continue their conversation on the legacy of the great Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor’s triumphs––her precocious rise to megastardom, her fight for fair and equal pay despite the sexism present in...
03.04.2024
Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon, Part One
Elizabeth Taylor, a legend of cinema known across the world, was one of the last great Classical Hollywood stars whose talent and beauty led her to universal renown. Beyond the artist, though, Taylor was a feminist trailblazer, a human rights...
02.26.2024
Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State
Kentucky fought alongside the Union for the entirety of the Civil War, yet in the decades that followed, the state embraced many political and cultural traditions of the Confederacy, enacting Jim Crow laws and erecting monuments to embrace this adopted...
02.19.2024
Mourning the Presidents
In an incisive analysis of national mourning following the deaths of presidents across US history, historian Lindsay Chervinsky joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss how such losses and the subsequent expressions of grief affected American culture and politics. Examining what...
02.12.2024
The Age of Lincoln
The arc of Abraham Lincoln’s political career existed in the context of the ideologically tumultuous 19th century. From a period of cultural pessimism in the 1840s and 1850s alongside the Millerites’ prediction of a Second Coming, this period saw the...
02.05.2024
Coolidge
In the wake of a pandemic and amidst deep partisan divisions and a looming budgetary crisis, Calvin Coolidge faced monumental challenges when he assumed the presidency following the abrupt death of his predecessor Warren G. Harding in 1923. From the...
01.29.2024
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, Part Two
Jonathan Freedland once again joins David Rubenstein to discuss the story of Walter Rosenberg, one of the few Jews to successfully escape Auschwitz. Following Rosenberg’s arrival in Auschwitz, this conversation dives into the details of the risky escape plan he...
01.22.2024
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, Part One
In April of 1944, Walter Rosenberg escaped from Auschwitz alongside Fred Wetzler, making them two of a very small number of Jews who were able to escape a concentration camp and make their way to safety during the Second World...
01.15.2024
John Quincy Adams: His Presidency and Final Years
Biographer James Traub continues the story of John Quincy Adams. Drawing on the sixth US president’s diaries, letters, and writings, Traub discusses Adams’ ascendance to the White House, his numerous achievements and failures in office, his stewardship of American foreign...
01.08.2024
John Quincy Adams: Early Life and the Road to the Presidency
As the son of a Founding Father and with a political career that lasted until his death in 1848, John Quincy Adams was eulogized by many of his peers as one of the last links between the founding generation and...
12.18.2023
Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty
Described by former mayor Ed Koch as “the closest we’ve got to royalty in New York City,” the Morgenthau family immigrated from Germany to the United States in 1866 and went on to build a powerful real estate empire and...
12.11.2023
Conflict: The Evolution of Modern Warfare
The conflicts that have marked the past 60 years have seen new weapons, new strategies, and complex new webs of alliance, enmity, and proxy violence. However, the evolution of warfare shows that certain challenges and solutions echo across history. General...
12.04.2023
Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court
While the Supreme Court is often presented in American history as a protector of civil liberties, its record across the centuries provides a more complex picture. While the short period of the 1930s to the 1970s saw the Court end...
11.27.2023
The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution
The US Constitution did not create or provide for the presidential cabinet. When George Washington called for the first convening of his department secretaries two and a half years into his presidency, he drew on his military experience to seek...
11.20.2023
The Liberation Trilogy: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945
Exploring the final installment of the Liberation Trilogy, historian Rick Atkinson discusses the titanic battle for Western Europe that defined the later years of the Second World War. Beginning with the commencement of D-Day, this period of the war saw...
11.13.2023
The Liberation Trilogy: The War in Sicily, Italy, and North Africa
In this first of two conversations, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson dives into the first two volumes of his monumental Liberation Trilogy, looking at North Africa during WWII and the harrowing campaigns that took place in Sicily and Italy. A...
11.06.2023
Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
Since the dawn of civilization, land stewardship has served as the foundation for how societies coalesce and interact. In a wide-ranging conversation that examines European imperialism, the dispossession of Native American populations, and Joseph Stalin’s brutal collectivization in Society territories,...
10.30.2023
The Witches: Salem, 1692
In the harsh New England winter of 1692, a minister’s daughter began to scream and convulse, as if possessed by a demonic spirit. This incident marked the beginning of a year-long panic in Salem, Massachusetts, which culminated in the infamous...
10.23.2023
Beyond the White House: From George Washington to Donald Trump
While American presidents are only eligible to serve two terms in office and are beholden to protect the peaceful transfer of power to their successors, their influence in politics and public service can span decades following their presidency. Douglas Brinkley...
10.16.2023
The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House
Although Jimmy Carter left the White House in January 1981 following a failed bid for reelection, his career in public service was far from over. Outside the boundaries of the Oval Office, he dedicated himself to finding peaceful solutions to...
10.02.2023
Virginia Dynasty: Four Presidents and the Creation of the American Nation
Making up the earliest class of United States presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were all born and raised within the same sixty-mile circle east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, making up a “Virginia Dynasty” that...
09.25.2023
American Republics, 1783–1850: Slavery, Native Americans, and American Identity
Historian Alan Shaw Taylor continues his conversation with David M. Rubenstein on the decades that followed the American Revolution. This defining era saw Native Americans seeking to defend their homes from a flood of American settlers, the intertwining of slavery...
09.18.2023
American Republics, 1783–1850: Democracy and Empire
Contrary to the popular narrative of a confident and stable young republic, the United States emerged from its constitution as a fragile, internally divided union of states still contending with European empires and other independent republics on the North American...
06.26.2023
The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
Hailed as the founding father of America’s conservation movement, President Theodore Roosevelt championed the protection of the nation's natural treasures and embarked on visionary initiatives to preserve 234 million acres of wilderness for posterity. In conversation with David M. Rubenstein,...
06.19.2023
American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race
In 1961, as the Cold War cast a shadow across the globe, John F. Kennedy inspired Americans to look up to the sky as he announced his goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the...
06.12.2023
Flora MacDonald: Journey to the New World and the Revolutionary War
Flora MacDonald’s life continued to be marked by dramatic political upheaval following her involvement in the escape of Prince Charles Edward Stuart. In this second conversation with David M. Rubenstein, Flora Fraser details Flora MacDonald’s marriage, her move to the...
06.05.2023
Flora Macdonald: The Escape of “Bonnie” Prince Charlie
Biographer Flora Fraser tells the thrilling story of the young Scotswoman who helped Prince Charles Edward Stuart evade capture following the defeat of the Jacobite army at Culloden, Scotland, which marked the end of the House of Stuarts’ attempts to...
05.22.2023
Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944–1945
World War II in the Pacific entered its endgame in June 1944, after the U.S. waged a crushing assault on the Japanese navy in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. In a conversation that explores the conflict’s harrowing final year—from...
05.15.2023
Our Composite Nation: The Reconstruction of American Democracy in the Age of the Civil War
The period of Reconstruction following the Civil War saw a transformation of the United States from a slaveholding republic into an interracial democracy, all alongside the rise of industrial capitalism and the violent and ambitious conquest of the American West....
05.08.2023
American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020
For decades, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist George F. Will has been regarded as one of this country’s leading columnists and public intellectuals. In an expansive conversation that encompasses American history, the Supreme Court, and beyond, Will shares his perspective...
05.01.2023
Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam
Half a century later, the contested history of the war in Vietnam continues to elicit national debate, deep soul-searching, and purported lessons for America's role overseas. In a conversation that visits new historical terrain of the Vietnam War past, award-winning...
04.24.2023
Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution
Long before the first battle of the American Revolution, the conflict between Loyalists and Patriots swept through all facets of American society, with colonists, Native Americans, and the enslaved all forced to choose a side. Would this constitute America’s first...
04.17.2023
Silent Spring Revolution: American Presidents and the Great Environmental Awakening
The post-World War II economic boom came at a high cost: smog made breathing difficult in cities, the oceans were dying, wilderness vanished, and species went extinct at alarming rates. Acclaimed historian Douglas Brinkley chronicles how Rachel Carson’s 1962 book,...
04.10.2023
The Year of Peril: America in 1942
In the United States, World War II is often regarded as a time of unrivaled national unity and optimism, however in reality this traumatic period tested the American resolve in the most significant way since the Civil War. How did...
04.03.2023
Cuba: An American History
Whether you are looking at proxy conflicts during the Cold War, the power of the Cuban-American voting bloc, or how Cuban-American relations are used as a cipher for a president’s foreign policy, the power of Cuba on American politics is...
03.27.2023
The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis: Part II
Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis, once again joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss the culture of violence, vigilantism, and censorship that permeated US government and society in the years...
03.20.2023
The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis: Part I
The US’s entrance into World War I marked the beginning of a period in American history characterized by lynching, aggressive union-busting, mass civilian arrests, and stringent government censorship of the press, all amidst the backdrop of the war, a pandemic,...
03.13.2023
Ways and Means: How the Confederacy Financed the Civil War
Roger Lowenstein once again joins David M. Rubenstein to discuss the complex financial circumstances of the Civil War. In this episode, he explores the financial challenges faced by the Confederacy; looking at the resources they had available to them compared...
03.06.2023
Ways and Means: How the Union Financed the Civil War
For both the Union and the Confederacy, one of the most persistent battles of the Civil War was financing. To meet this challenge head-on both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis attempted a number of strategies to tackle the enormous financial demands...
02.27.2023
American Inheritance: Slavery and the New Republic
How was slavery written into America’s founding? David M. Rubenstein is once again joined by historian Edward J. Larson to discuss this question and explore how legal frameworks around slavery evolved in the new republic. Looking at the battle between...
02.20.2023
American Inheritance: Slavery in the Revolutionary Era
While the Revolutionary War was waged as a fight for freedom, slavery was omnipresent in America before, during, and after the war. In this two-part conversation, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson discusses how the twin strands of liberty and...
02.13.2023
How to Invest: Masters on the Craft
In an age of global economic transformation, what lessons can we learn from the world’s most successful investors? Throughout his career, David M. Rubenstein, co-founder of one of the world’s largest investment firms, has interviewed some of the most internationally...
02.06.2023
The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, Part II
Author Walter Russell Mead joins David M. Rubenstein once again to examine the connections between Israel, the Jewish people, and American political history. In this conversation, they dive into the history of Jewish people in America, including their experience of...
01.30.2023
The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, Part I
The nuances of the Israeli-American relationship extend far into the past. Author Walter Russell Mead joins David M. Rubenstein for a two-part conversation to examine the connections between Israeli and American political history. This first of two episodes examines the...
01.23.2023
Lincoln and Emancipation
Edna Greene Medford, professor of history at Howard University, examines the ideas and events that shaped President Lincoln’s responses to slavery, following the arc of his ideological development from the beginning of the Civil War, when he aimed to pursue...
01.16.2023
And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle
A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Hated and hailed, excoriated, and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when implacable secessionists gave...

What's For the Ages: A History Podcast about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

For the Ages: A History Podcast episodes:

How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons from Our Top Presidents

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War

River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon, Part Two

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon, Part One

Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State

Mourning the Presidents

The Age of Lincoln

Coolidge

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, Part Two

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, Part One

John Quincy Adams: His Presidency and Final Years

John Quincy Adams: Early Life and the Road to the Presidency

Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty

Conflict: The Evolution of Modern Warfare

Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court

The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution

The Liberation Trilogy: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

The Liberation Trilogy: The War in Sicily, Italy, and North Africa

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World

The Witches: Salem, 1692

Beyond the White House: From George Washington to Donald Trump

The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House

Virginia Dynasty: Four Presidents and the Creation of the American Nation

American Republics, 1783–1850: Slavery, Native Americans, and American Identity

American Republics, 1783–1850: Democracy and Empire

The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race

Flora MacDonald: Journey to the New World and the Revolutionary War

Flora Macdonald: The Escape of “Bonnie” Prince Charlie

Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944–1945

Our Composite Nation: The Reconstruction of American Democracy in the Age of the Civil War

American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020

Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam

Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution

Silent Spring Revolution: American Presidents and the Great Environmental Awakening

The Year of Peril: America in 1942

Cuba: An American History

The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis: Part II

The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis: Part I

Ways and Means: How the Confederacy Financed the Civil War

Ways and Means: How the Union Financed the Civil War

American Inheritance: Slavery and the New Republic

American Inheritance: Slavery in the Revolutionary Era

How to Invest: Masters on the Craft

The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, Part II

The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, Part I

Lincoln and Emancipation

And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle