Think Back

Historian Matthew Pinsker’s new book, Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln, portrays the 16th president as an ambitious and effective party leader who organized voters, courted donors, dug up dirt on opponents, and knew when to hide his hand. Pinsker follows Lincoln from his early Whig days in central Illinois through his surprisingly political courtship of Mary Todd, his single term in Congress, and his gradual move into the anti-slavery Republican Party, then to the fateful four-way election of 1860 and beyond. In our conversation we discuss the hand-compiled voter charts that made Lincoln something of a pollster and how he balanced the ultraist and fusionist strains in antebellum politics.

We also look at how Lincoln kept the Republican coalition together during the secession crisis, why the shift to a “Union” party branding during the Civil War was in fact a major strategic change, and how Lincoln worked to win reelection in 1864. Pinsker draws out Lincoln’s belief that the Union bound together majorities and minorities, an idea that resonates in new ways in the aftermath of the attempted January 6th insurrection. We close with a fascinating discussion of what a second Lincoln term might have looked like, and what Pinsker believes a principled partisan like Lincoln can teach us in a new period of heightened political dysfunction.

Music for this episode: “The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, performed by Akiko Sasaki; “Reel Delisle,” by Joel Zifkin

For more on related subjects, check out these episodes of THINK BACK.

"How Slavery Ended" (with Tom Zoellner), Feb. 24, 2026

"Democracy vs. the Constitution" (with Stephen Skowronek), Dec. 4, 2025

"The Civil War's Wrenching Final Year" (with Scott Ellsworth), Oct. 21, 2025

Reece Jones has spent his career studying borders. His 2022 book Nobody Is Protected argues that for its entire century-long existence the US Border Patrol has been writing its own rules. Jones, a geographer at the University of Hawaii, traces the agency’s lineage from antebellum slave patrols and the Texas Rangers through the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that formally created it, showing how a little-known legal quirk puts roughly two-thirds of Americans within reach of an agency largely exempt from Fourth Amendment restrictions.

In this episode of THINK BACK, Reece and I talk through the Border Patrol’s origins, the landmark Supreme Court cases that expanded the agency’s authority, and how 9/11 and the drug wars accelerated a mission creep that had been building for decades. Jones’s history is even more significant and necessary in 2026 than when it was first published. He shows that the current administration isn’t inventing new abuses of power so much as exploiting a century of legal loopholes that nobody bothered to close.

See also Reece’s forthcoming book, written with Greg Boos, Smuggler: Drugs, Gangs, and Refugees at America’s Northern Border.

Music for this episode: “The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, performed by Akiko Sasaki; “Reel Delisle,” by Joel Zifkin; interludes by Zachary Solomon

Looking for more on related subjects? See these previous episodes of THINK BACK.

"The Chinese in America" (with Michael Luo), May 22, 2025

"The Wild West, Re-Examined" (with Bryan Burrough), July 23 2025

"Democracy vs. the Constitution" (with Stephen Skowronek), December 4, 2025

“a history of repeated injuries and usurpations”

King George III’s crimes against the colonists fill most of the Declaration of Independence. Yet almost nobody reads that part of the famous document.

Robert G. Parkinson is a historian at Binghamton University and the author, most recently, of Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence. Parkinson argues that the Declaration’s long grievances section—the colonists’ bill of complaints against the Crown—opens a window onto the real world of 1776 that we miss if we focus on the preamble’s celebrated phraseology.

The themes embedded in the grievances—race, violence, exclusion, the weaponization of the language of liberty—are still very much with us as the nation the Declaration created marks the 250th anniversary of its founding.

See also my essay for The Nation’s special 250th issue: “Our Revolution”

Music for this episode: “The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, performed by Akiko Sasaki; “Reel Delisle,” by Joel Zifkin; interlude by Zachary Solomon

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Has the Civil War’s single largest emancipation event been hiding in plain sight?

In this episode of Think Back, I speak with historian Edda L. Fields-Black about her book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (2024), co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History. The book reconstructs a remarkable and underexamined chapter of the war: a Union gunboat raid up South Carolina’s Combahee River, led in part by Harriet Tubman acting as scout and spy, that liberated more than 700 enslaved people in a single night.

We discuss how the South Carolina lowcountry’s geography shaped both the institution of slavery and the possibilities for resistance, what it meant for some of the first Black soldiers in the Union Army to return in uniform to the communities they had escaped, and how Tubman’s role in the raid fits into the larger arc of her extraordinary life. We also talk about the craft of this kind of history, how Fields-Black uses mountains of primary sources to reconstruct not just events but an entire world, and what it means to her personally to tell the story of an ancestor who was on one of those gunboats with Tubman the night of the raid.

Fields-Black brings formidable scholarly rigor to this story without ever losing her enthusiasm for it. The people she writes about are deeply alive for her, 160 years on, and she helps make it alive for us as well.

Music for this episode: “The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, performed by Akiko Sasaki; “Reel Delisle,” by Joel Zifkin; interlude by Zachary Solomon

Looking for more on the American West? See these previous episodes of THINK BACK.

"How Slavery Ended" (with Tom Zoellner)

"What Really Happened on Sherman's March?" (with Bennett Parten)

Why does the frontier myth refuse to die?

In this episode of Think Back, I speak with historian and writer Megan Kate Nelson about her new book The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. The book takes direct aim at one of the most durable stories Americans tell about themselves: the frontier myth, codified by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, which cast the westward march of white pioneers as the engine of American democracy. That myth, Nelson argues, has never really loosened its grip. When whole communities are erased from the national story, it becomes easier to treat them as un-American and to strip them of their rights.

To make that case, Nelson follows seven people traversing the 19th-century West, a cast that includes Sacajawea, the biracial fur trader Jim Beckwourth, the Hispanic gambling-saloon empire-builder María Gertrudis Barceló, the Northern Cheyenne chief Little Wolf, the Chinese immigrant Polly Bemis, and the Canadian-immigrant rancher Ella Watson. Together they reveal a West initially defined less by conquest than mobility, cultural encounters, and radical possibility, a place where people on the margins of society often found real opportunity, until the advance American law and settlement foreclosed those futures for good.

Nelson’s West was not a paradise of pluralism, but genuine possibilities existed there—for women, for people of color, for those living across cultural boundaries. The frontier myth distorts our understanding of the past, but it also limits our imaginations when it comes to the present and the future.

Music for this episode: “The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, performed by Akiko Sasaki; “Reel Delisle,” by Joel Zifkin; interlude by Zachary Solomon

In this episode of Think Back, I speak with historian Thomas Richards Jr. about his new book The Unfinished Business of 1776: Why the American Revolution Never Ended. Richards opens with a deliberately provocative contrast: was the Revolution an inspirational fight for freedom, or a vicious struggle for power? His answer sets up a book that refuses easy celebration or outright dismissal.

Rather than focusing on the Revolution itself, Richards trains his attention on the decades that followed, tracing how the fights ignited in 1776 continued to reshape American life long after the guns fell silent. We move through a series of connected episodes—the drafting of the Constitution, the Whiskey Rebellion, the little-known story of women voting in New Jersey in the early republic, Gabriel’s Rebellion, and ultimately the Civil War—each illuminating how debates over the Revolution’s legacy were also battles over the future.

Our conversation touches on how enslaved people and other excluded groups turned the Revolution’s language against its architects, why the Constitution was seen by some as a betrayal of revolutionary ideals, and how the turbulent period of “manifest destiny” forced Americans to decide what kind of country they were actually building.

With America’s 250th anniversary now underway, and the official commemorations already looking appallingly thin or worse, The Unfinished Business of 1776 arrives at exactly the right moment—a serious, searching, and genuinely useful reckoning with what the Revolution was, what it wasn’t, and what it might still become.

Music for this episode: “The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, performed by Akiko Sasaki; “Reel Delisle,” by Joel Zifkin

Looking for more on the American Revolution? See these previous episodes of THINK BACK.

In this episode of Think Back, I talk with historian Tom Zoellner about his new book The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War. We dig into a dimension of emancipation that often gets overshadowed by presidential proclamations and congressional acts: the ground-level pressure created by enslaved people themselves. Zoellner traces how thousands of self-emancipated men and women forced the Union to confront slavery not as an abstraction, but as an urgent reality. The Underground Railroad, in effect, became “above ground,” and the war’s meaning began to shift.

Our conversation explores how slavery both rose and fell through a series of piecemeal, improvised decisions—legal maneuvers, military necessities, human acts of courage that accumulated into an unstoppable revolution. We discuss Lincoln’s leadership, the messy realities of the contraband camps, the present-day politics of how this history is told, and why the struggle over emancipation’s meaning is far from over.

Music by Akiko Sasaki (“The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk) and Zachary Solomon

This episode looks at one of the strangest political experiments in American history: a late-nineteenth-century movement to create an officially Black state in the land that would become Oklahoma. At its center was Edward McCabe, a charismatic but elusive figure who envisioned Black self-government within the United States at a moment when Reconstruction had collapsed and white supremacy was hardening across the country.

My guest is Caleb Gayle, professor of history at Northeastern University and the author of Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State (2025). We talk about the nature and the limits of McCabe’s vision, and what this failed effort reveals about debates over Black politics, specifically regarding the conflict between separatism and inclusion, in post-Civil War America—and why the story still matters.

Music by Akiko Sasaki (“The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk) and Zachary Solomon

In this episode of Think Back, I’m joined by the historian Kathleen DuVal to talk about her extraordinary 2024 book Native Nations, a sweeping thousand-year history of Indigenous North America. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize, fundamentally reframes American history by restoring Native peoples to the center of the story, not as passive victims of conquest but as powerful political actors who shaped events for centuries.

Our conversation ranges from the rise and fall of vast Indigenous cities long before 1492 to the long periods in which Native nations and European empires dealt with one another as equals—or in which Native peoples clearly held the upper hand. DuVal challenges familiar narratives, showing instead a history marked by diplomacy, trade, adaptation, and resilience. We talk about why she uses the word “nation” to describe Indigenous societies, how Native history connects to global history, and how economic and political ties bound Native North America to Europe and the Atlantic world.

We also discuss how to balance stories of survival and continuity rather than erasure alone. It’s a deep, wide-ranging conversation about what American history looks like when Native nations are finally taken seriously.

* Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (2024)

* — , Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (2016)

See also my conversation last year with Nicole Eustace about her book, Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America (2022)

Music by Akiko Sasaki (“The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk) and Zachary Solomon

In this episode of THINK BACK, I speak with the political scientist Stephen Skowronek about his book, The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience. The book traces large-scale patterns across American history to understand how political change actually happens. As American democracy has expanded to include more people, Skowronek contends, the constitutional system has been stretched to its limits.

We now face a profound contradiction between democracy and the Constitution—a conflict present since the founding but increasingly acute. Skowronek outlines why partisan diagnoses fall short and why the country may be approaching a choice between abandoning constitutional forms to preserve democracy or risking the collapse of both.

The episode looks beyond day-to-day headlines to consider the structural forces shaping American politics and the challenges ahead. As we all struggle to make sense of our unsettled moment, Skowronek’s work offers a compelling framework for understanding, even as he rejects many of the usual prescriptions for how the country’s perilous political situation might be successfully addressed.

* Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (1993)

* Richard Kreitner, “What Time Is It? Here’s What the 2016 Election Tells Us About Obama, Trump, and What Comes Next,” The Nation (Nov. 22, 2016)

* — , “What History Tells Us About Trump’s Implosion and Biden’s Opportunity,” The Nation (Oct. 12, 2020)

Music by Akiko Sasaki (“The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk) and Zachary Solomon