History That Matters Now Archives - KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show

At the nearly two hundred fifty year mark, we’ve already lasted longer than most great nations. As with others which declined and fell, a loss of confidence led to anxiety and the impulse for a strong man to protect us

The post Is America on an Irreversible Path to Decline and Fall? appeared first on KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show.

Fear of the other. Fear of woke, of LGBTQ+, of Black liberation, and of course the old big fear: Communism. In the age of the Cold War, right after WWII, Americans believed the Soviet Union was bankrolling worldwide liberation movements,

The post Why is There So Much Fear in the Strongest Country in the World? appeared first on KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show.

When America was indeed great, the federal government brought theater to all people. Free. In a mirror opposite of Trump 2.0, under FDR there was the Federal Theater project in which one quarter of the nation’s population saw free performances

The post Public Theater: A Way to Measure Democracy appeared first on KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show.

After 2024, the mainstream of the Democratic Party is in the wilderness, but Zohran Mamdani may lead a way out. This week’s guest Fred Glass, talks about what early 20th century California history can teach us about the 2025 New

The post Why Mamdani May Revitalize the Democratic Party: 1911 CA Precedent appeared first on KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show.

There are reasons all autocrats need to erase history. Among the flood of executive orders is something called “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” In other words: erasing history he doesn’t like.  To people like him, history must fit a

The post Trump Wants to Abolish the Past. Historians Won’t Let Him. appeared first on KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show.

    You’ve probably heard of the famous Christmas Truce of 1914 between the trenches of the British and German soldiers. These were indeed brave men. But that was not the only such event: there were desertions, mutinies, and fraternizations.

The post Christmas Truce of WWI: Not So Isolated, Really appeared first on KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show.

Storytelling is a venerable and often the most accurate way to teach history. Our guest co-author of the new A Line In the Sand, Miles Spencer, traveled with his partner along the 1100 mile trail of clues left by TE

The post One Eternally Explosive Line in the Sand appeared first on KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show.

Can we ever learn from history?  November 11 is celebrated as the end of “the war to end all wars.” But in reality it was a peace that ended peace. Listen in as eminent historian Adam Hochschild cuts through the

The post 11/11 Armistice: The Germans Were Ambushed, A Peace That Ended Peace appeared first on KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show.

You remember: “that’s not who we are,” related to January 6, 2021? Turns out, maybe it is who we are. Was this too an outlier: Greensboro North Carolina November 1979 when the KKK shot and killed five people demonstrating for

The post Greensboro ’79: “White Supremacy Done Correctly” appeared first on KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show.

In a democracy, we expect to have our own say over how we are governed. There’s a great grumbling throughout America because many don’t feel listened to. That’s the impetus behind today’s Trumpist populism. This populism is the voice of

The post Heather Cox Richardson: Yes Democracy IS Awakening appeared first on KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show.