Jeremi and Zachary, with guest Dr. Christopher McKnight Nichols, draw upon perceptions of historical pandemics to learn how our nation can move beyond COVID-19.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "This Peaceful Dawn".

Christopher McKnight Nichols is Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Sandy and Elva Sanders Eminent Professor in the Honors College at Oregon State University, where he is an associate professor of history. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Nichols is best known for authoring Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (Harvard, 2011, 2015), and he is editor or author of five other books, including the recently published Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford, 2021). His next book, co-edited and co-authored, is Ideologies and U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (out from Columbia University Press in 2022).

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Sofia Salter.