America has tried the “tiny federal government” experiment before. After the War of 1812, Jefferson’s minimalist republic simply couldn’t handle a big-power world—so a new generation rebuilt the state.

This episode traces how Calhoun, Clay, Jackson, Adams, and the Marshall Court turned a weak agrarian republic into a nationalist market power between 1815 and the early 1820s.

America has tried “small government” in a big-power world before. After the War of 1812, Jefferson’s tiny federal state—low taxes, a skeleton army and navy, deep suspicion of banks—collapsed under the pressure of war, markets, and territorial expansion.

In this episode of How the HELL Did We Get Here?, I walk through Chapter 3 of Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 and show how a new generation of Republican leaders—John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Marshall Court under John Marshall and Joseph Story—rebuilt the United States as a national market state.

We’ll cover:

How the War of 1812 exposed the limits of Jeffersonian “small government”

Calhoun and Clay’s nationalist agenda: the Second Bank of the United States, the American System, and the Dallas Tariff of 1816

The constitutional fight over internal improvements and the Bonus Bill

The Marshall Court’s “market constitution”: Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, McCulloch v. Maryland, Dartmouth College v. Woodward, and Gibbons v. Ogden

Andrew Jackson’s wars against Native Americans as economic conquest—Creek lands, Florida campaigns, early Indian Removal—and the rise of the Cotton Kingdom

John Quincy Adams’s diplomacy: the Adams-Onís Treaty, Rush-Bagot, the Convention of 1818, and the road to the Monroe Doctrine

Why “national republicanism” looked triumphant in the early 1820s—and why slavery, Native resistance, taxes, and sectionalism were already tearing it apart

Along the way, I also draw on:

The American Pageant (AP U.S. History)

Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (Oxford History of the United States)

If you’re interested in how the Market Revolution, federal power, Native dispossession, slavery, and early 19th-century nationalism fit together, this is the episode for you.

In this episode of Past Is Prologue, John looks at more than 200 years of American economic history to answer a deceptively simple question:

Why does the United States keep crashing its own economy?

Starting with the Panic of 1819 and running through 1837, 1873, 1893, the Great Depression, and the 2008 financial collapse, John shows how the same boom-and-bust pattern repeats with stunning consistency. Rather than treating each crisis as a fluke or “black swan,” he traces the underlying structural forces that make meltdown a recurring feature of the American system.

He examines the development of the market economy, waves of reckless speculation, weak or nonexistent regulation, new financial instruments that outpace oversight, and political failures that allow predictable disasters to become national catastrophes. And he explains why the people who design the riskiest systems almost never pay the price — but ordinary workers, farmers, and homeowners always do.

If you’ve ever wondered why America has endured so many economic collapses — or why the next one shouldn’t surprise anyone — this episode lays it out clearly.

In this episode of How the Hell Did We Get Here?, John digs into Chapter 2 of Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 — a pivotal moment when the United States was pushed, pulled, and coerced into a radically new economic order.

Rather than a smooth evolution into a “modern” market economy, Sellers shows a far more turbulent reality: political battles over surplus capital, state-driven development, forced restructuring of everyday life, and deep conflicts between the winners of the new order and the many people who never asked to be part of it.

John walks through the major forces Sellers identifies:

The collapse of Jeffersonian agrarianism

Madison’s surprising embrace of nationalist economics

The foundational role of banks, credit, and internal improvements

How market relations began invading households, communities, and farms

The early psychological and cultural backlash against this new economic regime

Along the way, John explains why this chapter matters far beyond the 1810s and 1820s. Sellers’ arguments shed light on how economic revolutions actually happen: unevenly, with immense pressure, through political struggle, and often against the preferences of ordinary Americans.

This episode is for anyone trying to understand how the U.S. was pushed into capitalism — and how the tensions born in this period still shape American life today.

In this episode of Past Is Prologue, John looks at what 250 years of American history can teach us about the rise of artificial intelligence.

Rather than treating AI as a totally unprecedented rupture, John compares it to five earlier waves of technological and economic transformation:

1. The Market Revolution of the early 1800s

2. The First Industrial Revolution and the rise of wage labor

3. The Second Industrial Revolution, corporate power, and the Progressive backlash

4. Post–World War II globalization and the hollowing out of local economies

5. The Internet and digital revolution from the mid-1990s to the 2010s

Along the way, he traces familiar patterns: displacement and “creative destruction,” the concentration of power in the hands of a few actors, the lag between innovation and regulation, the gap between tech idealism and lived reality, and how badly societies tend to fail the people least equipped to adapt.

John argues that AI fits squarely inside this historical pattern—not as an omen of inevitable utopia or apocalypse, but as another turning point where choices about policy, power, and responsibility will matter far more than hype.

If you’re trying to make sense of AI without swallowing the sales pitch from the people building and owning it, this episode is for you.

What did the United States look like before canals, factories, and cash wages rewired everyday life? In this episode, John explores Chapter 1 of Charles G. Sellers’s The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846, reconstructing a largely cashless “subsistence” order where independence meant owning land, bartering with neighbors, and avoiding debt. We trace why profit was suspect, how reciprocity bound communities, and why patriarchal households sat uneasily beside republican talk of equality.

This episode is something different. After a year of tracing U.S. history from the pre-Columbian period through the War of 1812, I wanted to step back and talk about why I’m doing this — and what I think history can actually teach us about the world we’re living in now.

In this manifesto, I lay out the purpose behind How the Hell Did We Get Here?: to cut through the noise of hot takes and partisan shouting, and use history to make sense of the present. From Vietnam to Iraq, from Reconstruction to the Gilded Age, I explore how the pendulum of American politics keeps swinging — and what those patterns might tell us about where we’re headed next.

If you’re tired of volume over substance and want a deeper conversation about how we got here — and what “here” even means — this one’s for you.

🎧 New to the show? Start here. It’s the heart of what this project is all about.

In this episode, John discusses the social, political and economic evolution of the United States from the late 1700s to the end of the War of 1812. John talks about the evolution of the U.S. from a limited democracy with a decidedly agricultural bent toward a bustling trade hub and nascent manufacturing sector with a huge middle class that starts to flex its political muscle. This episode serves as an explanatory bridge between how the high-minded and elite-controlled economic and political institutions of the late 18th century gave way to a much more democratized and practical ethos that would drive how the United States developed in the early to mid 19th century.

John explains the expansion of infrastructure, education, trade and industry in the early 1800s and how almost all of it was driven by commerce in a way that many of the founders would have found trivial or even distasteful. He breaks down how a new generation of leaders, like John Calhoun, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, worked to knit the country together and forge a new identity for the young republic as a rising economic powerhouse. John contrasts the new society emerging in the U.S., contrasts it with what existed in Europe and explains just how revolutionary what Americans were building was--decades after the revolutionary war had ended.

John gives everyone an update about what's been going on and what they can expect from the next season of How the Hell Did We Get Here?

In this episode, John discusses how the War of 1812 continued and ultimately came to a conclusion. John talks about the campaigns of 1813 and the British offensives of 1814, how things continued to linger in a position of stalemate and how the U.S. managed to survive despite a serious financial crisis and the capital city of Washington D.C. being burned to the ground by the British. John covers the American triumphs at Fort McHenry and Lake Champlain, as well the resounding victory of the United States against British forces at the Battle of New Orleans that actually took place after the war was technically over!

Also in this episode, John talks about the revolt of the Federalists against the war and how it manifested in the Hartford Convention and why that proved to be political suicide for the Federalist Party. John goes through the peace negotiations and how the American representatives at the meetings in Ghent managed to get fairly favorable terms from Great Britain. Finally, John closes by discussing the legacy of the War of 1812 on the United States for the next generation of Americans who would continue to build the country up in its aftermath.

In this episode, John covers the first year of the War of 1812 and why it was such a struggle for the United States. John begins by talking about how the Madison Administration and the Congress prepared—or rather, did not—for the war against Great Britain. John discusses the state of the land and sea forces as the U.S. went to war, what Madison and Congress chose to do to prosecute the war and why they made the choices that they did.

John goes on to break down the planned invasion of Canada in 1812, how those who planned it and executed it conceived of it, why everyone was so convinced it would be so easy and why they were all very, very wrong. John goes through the war at sea as well, including surprising American victories against the vaunted British Royal Navy and the ways in which the blockade the British attempted to institute was ineffective. John further discusses the war on the frontier against Native Americans, and the severe difficulties that the U.S. had in financing the war. Finally, John discusses the Baltimore riots of 1812 and the presidential election that took place that year, in spite of the war.