Think Back

I’ve always had a soft spot for what you might call “year books”—not the high school kind, but those immersive histories that zoom in on a single calendar year to show how change unfolds in real time. Some years lend themselves especially well to this treatment, and 1963 is one of them: the year of Birmingham and the March on Washington, of Dr. King’s “Dream” and JFK’s assassination. In his new book, Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution, historian Peniel Joseph captures the urgency and upheaval of that pivotal year, tracing how a movement long in the making finally broke through to reshape American law and society.

We spoke about how the momentum of 1963 led to the landmark Civil Rights Act—and how, disturbingly, the very gains of that era are now under renewed threat. In a moment when civil rights laws are being weakened or cynically repurposed, Joseph’s book offers both a reminder of what was achieved and a call to reckon with how much remains unfinished. It’s a timely and necessary look back at a year that still echoes loudly today.

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

What do most of us really know about the history of Chinese Americans? For many, it begins and ends with the railroads or the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That’s what makes Michael Luo’s new book, Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, such an essential work. It tells the sweeping, often harrowing story of a community that faced violence, discrimination, and expulsion—but nonetheless built a life here. It’s a deeply American story, both in its dreams and its brutal realities. Luo, executive editor of The New Yorker, traces not just how Chinese immigrants were excluded, but also how they insisted on belonging, even as they became targets of one of the most sustained racial backlashes in U.S. history.

In this episode of Think Back, Michael and I talk about the little-known lynchings that terrorized Chinese communities in the 19th century, the role of Chinese exclusion in shaping America’s racial and political order after the Civil War, and the eerie echoes of that past in our own moment—from the spike in anti-Asian hate during the Covid pandemic to debates over citizenship and immigration in the Trump era.

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

Donald Trump recently said he wasn’t sure if a president is obligated to uphold the Constitution—a striking admission from someone who’s twice sworn an oath to do just that. Trump’s indifference to the Constitution continues to pose a serious threat to American democracy. At the same time, this moment invites deeper reflection on the document itself: What exactly are we defending, and does the Constitution deserve the near-sacred status it's acquired in American political life?

In this episode of THINK BACK, I talk with Aziz Rana, professor of law and government at Boston College and author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them. We explore how the Constitution has historically limited democracy, from its roots in elite counterrevolution to its Cold War-era transformation into a quasi-religious symbol of American exceptionalism. Rana’s work urges us to revisit older debates—once common in American life—about the Constitution’s flaws and the urgent need for reform or reinvention in the face of democratic backsliding.

Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (2010) and The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (2024)

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The 250th anniversary celebration of the American Revolution is about to get underway in Lexington and Concord, the towns just outside Boston where British redcoats first clashed with colonial rebels. But just a day later and hundreds of miles south, a more complicated and perhaps more consequential clash occurred between the royal governor of Virginia and leading revolutionaries like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry. Those, though less well known, led to a British emancipation proclamation, which, like Abraham Lincoln’s later edict, though fourscore and eight years earlier, promised to arm enslaved people in exchange for their liberty.

Even if you think you know the American Revolution, you likely do not know this angle to the story, and definitely not in the kind of rich detail offered in a new book by Andrew Lawler called A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution. For this episode of Think Back, I spoke with Andrew about Dunmore, a figure either missing or badly mischaracterized in most books about the American Revolution, as well as larger questions about the meaning of the Revolution.

We seem to be living in a reenactment of the Gilded Age: tariffs, territorial expansion, oligarchic control of politics, assassination attempts, a democracy that is straining at the seams. Overlooked and misunderstood, it’s an important period to reconsider. What did it take to leave that tumultuous, surprisingly violent period behind—and what were the costs of the reforms adopted to end it?

The person to ask about this is Jon Grinspan, the political curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Jon is the author of three books, mostly recently Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War (2024), as well as The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915 (2019), which we mostly focus on in this conversation.

Thank you to everyone who has become a paid subscriber to this podcast; I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the support. If you have not yet, you can do so at www.thinkbackpod.com—and please remember to rate the show, review, etc. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Music: "The Union," by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, played by Akiko Sasaki; segue music by Zachary Solomon

I am wildly excited that publication day is finally here for my new book, Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery.

It’s a very strange feeling to have worked on something, largely in solitude, for so long, and now for it to finally be made available to the world.

In this episode I share some thoughts about the book’s origins and the six main characters whose lives in the period I follow against the background of a much larger story about the Jewish encounter with American slavery, the political debate over its future, and the four-year armed struggle that finally ended it. Many of the same debates we’re having today—about race, religion, morality, politics, justice—were had back then, in remarkably similar terms if in a completely different historical context.

There’s a lot more to the book than I could possibly get into here, so I do hope you’ll check it out. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “riveting…. Readers will be engrossed.”

I’ll be back next week with a proper Think Back episode, another interview with a historian who has some really insightful things to say about an often misunderstood era in American history. In the meantime, I’d be grateful if you’d follow, like, rate, and review the podcast—and above all share with friends. And please pick up a copy of the book!

Amy Greenberg, a historian at Penn State University, talks about the role of masculinity in the idea of Manifest Destiny, both today and in the era when that phrase originally became popular, the 1840s, a time of falling economic mobility for men and new opportunities for women. Greenberg is the author of several books about American history, including Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (2005); A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 U. S. Invasion of Mexico (2012); and Lady First: The World of First Lady Sarah Polk (2019).

If you enjoy this episode of Think Back, I’d be most grateful if you would hit follow, subscribe, like, and leave a review. Please share with friends, and if so moved you can help support this podcast by going to www.thinkbackpod.com.

One of Donald Trump’s first acts in office in his second term was signing an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. What does this focus on names obscure, what does it reveal? What is the real meaning of “America,” and how has its meaning varied across both time and space?

For this, the first episode of Think Back, I spoke with Greg Grandin, a professor of history at Yale and the author of several books, including The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America and America, América: A New History of the New World, which comes out next month. We spoke about how the different colonial experiences of North and South America have shaped both regions up to the present day, as well as what he thinks Latin America can teach us in the United States about how to resist authoritarianism.

Seeing as Think Back is a brand new podcast, I’d be deeply grateful if you would subscribe, hit like, comment, review,and share it with anyone you know who likes history. If you’d like to support the podcast, you can hit the button below and subscribe for $6/month, which will help me give this podcast the time and attention it deserves. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy the show.

Intro/outro: Louis Moreau Gottschalk, “The Union,” played by Akiko Sasaki; segue by Zachary Solomon

Music: "The Union," composed by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, performed by Akiko Sasaki

Logo by Lily Piyathaisere, based on John Frederick Kensett, "Hudson River Scene" (1857)

"You didn't kill Liberty Valance!"

William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (1925)