Think Back

In this episode, I speak with journalist Matthew Davis, author of the new book A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore. Davis’s deeply reported narrative traces the contested history of the monument, from its carving into the sacred Black Hills to the political battles that have shaped its meaning ever since.

Drawing connections between the monument’s origins, the dispossession of the Lakota, and Rushmore’s place in today’s culture wars, Davis explores how a democratic nation came to express itself through a mountain-sized tableau of presidential faces—and what that says about the ongoing debate over American ideals.

The conversation delves into the symbols and rituals of America’s “civil religion,” and how Mount Rushmore fits into (and unsettles) that tradition. Davis recounts beginning the project during the early pandemic, spurred in part by President Trump’s 2020 speech at the site amid the George Floyd uprising. We talk about why the monument was built, whose stories it erases, and how its meaning continues to shift—especially in an age when national myths are being fiercely reconsidered.

A Biography of a Mountain offers a fresh, accessible look at one of America’s most iconic and misunderstood symbols. Tune in for a lively discussion about the mountain, the monument, and what both reveal about the country today.

Thank you so much to Abaye Steinmetz-Silber for playing the music for this episode. Check out his songs at Apple or Spotify or (my preferred streaming service) Qobuz.

Matthew Davis, “The Empire Makers,” Slate, March 13, 2025.

In this episode of Think Back, I talk with historian Richard Bell about his fascinating new book The American Revolution and the Fate of the World—a work that completely rethinks the Revolution as a global story, not just an American one.

As the 250th anniversary of the Revolution heats up, Bell’s book stands out for how boldly it connects the struggle for independence to events unfolding in places like China, India, Ireland, and West Africa. We talk about the Hessian mercenaries who fought for the British and later settled in America, the Catholic monarchs who backed a generally Protestant rebellion, and why understanding the Revolution in this wider context changes how we think about what it really was and who it was for.

Bell teaches history at the University of Maryland and is also the author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home. I learned something new on nearly every page of his book, and really enjoyed this conversation—I hope you enjoy it too.

If you can think of someone who’d enjoy this episode—or who might be curious about the overlooked sides of the American Revolution as we enter this fraught anniversary year—please share it with them. Thanks so much for helping spread the word.

See also “The Hidden Origins of the American Revolution” (with Andrew Lawler), Think Back, April 16, 2025

In this episode, Scott Ellsworth talks about Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America. We revisit one of the most dramatic and transformative periods in American history and consider its resonances in the present.

Why, 160 years later, does studying the Civil War still yield new insights? How does Ellsworth’s framing challenge and change what we thought we knew about Lincoln’s presidency and his death. We discuss the tension and fear gripping Washington as Confederate forces threatened the capital in 1864 and Lincoln’s re-election that fall seemed unlikely, and we follow Booth’s path to the balcony at Ford’s Theatre.

See also: “What Really Happened on Sherman’s March?” (with Bennett Parten), July 9, 2025

On this week’s episode of THINK BACK, I speak with author Eden Collinsworth about her new book The Improbable Victoria Woodhull, a lively and surprising biography of the first woman to run for president. Woodhull’s 1872 campaign may have been a long shot, but it set off a national sensation—especially when she accused famed preacher Henry Ward Beecher of adultery, sparking one of the Gilded Age’s biggest scandals and leading to her own imprisonment and exile.

We explore what made Woodhull such a fascinating and contradictory figure: a radical reformer with a checkered past, a champion of women’s rights and free love who moved in elite social circles, and a political visionary who might feel right at home in today’s media-saturated, personality-driven politics. Even if Woodhull had no chance of winning in the 19th century, she might have a pretty good one in the 21st.

If you enjoy this episode, please consider sharing it. Thanks for listening.

In this episode of THINK BACK, I talk with writer J.C. Hallman about his 2023 book Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women’s Health. The book tells the story of J. Marion Sims, the 19th-century doctor often hailed as the “father of modern gynecology,” who carried out cruel and nonconsensual experiments on enslaved women—most notably a young woman named Anarcha. Hallman’s research not only brings Anarcha’s story to the forefront but also played a role in the campaign to remove a statue of Sims that once stood near Central Park.

We also get into his creative approach to history writing, the ethical questions of telling stories about suffering across racial and gender lines, and the need to move beyond overly rigid ways of narrating the past. I found our conversation to be eye-opening and deeply thought-provoking, and I hope you will too.

If you enjoy this episode, please consider sharing it. Thanks for listening.

In this episode, I talk with historian Nicole Eustace, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for History, about her book Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America. The book explores the aftermath of a violent clash on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1722, a moment that reveals the early formation of American political culture.

Though set three centuries ago, Covered With Night sheds light on enduring questions of justice, diplomacy, and power—issues that still resonate in today’s debates over race, policing, and punishment. We also discuss Eustace’s creative choices in storytelling and historical writing.

Thanks very much for listening.

This episode turns toward the Wild West—not the one of dime novels and Hollywood shootouts, but the murkier, more fascinating version uncovered by journalist and historian Bryan Burrough in his new book The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. Burrough brings his sharp storytelling to a cast of gunslingers, gamblers, killers, and showmen, exploring how the mythology of the American frontier—especially in Texas—was forged and later packaged for mass consumption.

We also delve into deeper questions about the craft of history writing itself. Come for the outlaws and six-shooters, stay for the serious reflection on how we tell the American story.

In the fall of 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman led his infamous “March to the Sea,” a military campaign long mythologized—especially in Gone With the Wind—as a brutal assault on the white South. But over the past several decades, historians have chipped away at that Lost Cause narrative, revealing it as a distortion that casts Confederates as victims rather than instigators of wartime violence. Still, few have offered a full alternative account of what the March truly meant—until now.

In this episode, I speak with historian Bennett Parten about his powerful first book, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation. In just over 200 pages, Parten reframes the March as a defining moment in the history of slavery and freedom, focusing on the experiences of enslaved people who risked everything to follow Sherman’s army in search of liberation. It’s a gripping, deeply thoughtful work—and a much-needed corrective to long-standing myths.

If you enjoy this episode, please consider sharing it. Thanks for listening.

This episode is the second half of my conversation with George William Van Cleve. Last week, we explored the chaos of the 1780s following the American Revolution, as told in Van Cleve’s 2017 book We Have Not a Government, and how the U.S. Constitution emerged as a last-ditch attempt to hold the country together. We then began discussing his follow-up, Making a New American Constitution (2020), which proposes not only that a new Constitution is necessary today but outlines how a modern constitutional convention might actually work.

Here we go deeper into the practical and political obstacles to such a convention—and why, in Van Cleve’s view, nothing else is equal to the scale of America's dysfunction. As he argues, the country’s most pressing problems didn’t begin with Trump and won’t end with him; they’re much older, and deeply embedded in the constitutional order itself.

If you’re new here, welcome; and if you’ve been listening a while, thanks—and please consider rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts to help others find it.

George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union:  Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (2010)

— We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution (2017)

— Making a New American Constitution (2020)

*** NOTE: I erroneously stated in the introduction to this episode that George William Van Cleve has taught at Georgetown University. In fact, he was a Dean’s Visiting Scholar from 2020-2025, but as a researcher, not a teacher.

Historian and legal scholar George William Van Cleve has written some of the most provocative and underappreciated works on the American constitutional tradition. His 2010 book A Slaveholders’ Union examined slavery’s central role in the framing of the Constitution, but it was his follow-up, We Have Not a Government, that made a lasting impression on me. That book explores the collapse of the American political system under the Articles of Confederation in the 1780s—a period of economic crisis, popular rebellion, and eventual constitutional overhaul.

Van Cleve followed that book in 2020 with Making a New American Constitution, a sweeping call to rewrite the U.S. Constitution for the present day. Unlike others who have floated the idea, Van Cleve outlines exactly how such a convention could work, where it would draw its legitimacy, and why it is urgently needed to address systemic dysfunction in American governance.

In this first of a two-part episode, we discuss the lessons of the 1780s and how that crisis spurred the drafting of an entirely new constitution. Next week, we’ll turn to the present—and what it would take to do the same today.

George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union:  Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (2010)

— We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution (2017)

— Making a New American Constitution (2020)