For over 100 years, the National Park Service has maintained and protected some of America’s greatest treasures. Since its founding in 1916, the service has enjoyed broad support from the public as well as elected officials from both parties. Recently, however, the Trump administration has turned on the service for what it alleges are attempts to undermine the President, but its move to silence NPS may have inadvertently made park employees early leaders in the resistance to the new President. Was NPS attempting to provoke Trump with its social media, or was it simply following a course set long before? And is the current President’s animosity toward the parks an entirely new development, or have we seen similar moments in the past? In this episode of the Road to Now we speak with former National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis to find out.
Jonathan B. Jarvis spent nearly four decades as an employee of the National Park Service and served as NPS’ 18th Director from October 2, 2009 until his retirement on January 3, 2017.
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Fixing the American healthcare system has been one of the most difficult and divisive problems in modern US history. The Affordable Care Act has helped more Americans than ever gain insurance, yet the remaining problems have led the Republican-controlled Congress to put “repeal and replace” at the top of their legislative agenda in 2017. Why has health insurance been such a tricky issue in the United States? Why did our insurance model develop differently than in other industrialized countries, and how can understanding this help us overcome the problems we face today?
In this episode of The Road to Now, Dr. Melissa Thomasson helps us answer these questions by taking us through the history of the American health insurance system. We also offer up another installment of Path to the Present (the podcast within a podcast) in which Matt Negrin and Alex Trowbridge provide a concise history of the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Believe me- this episode is YOUGE!
Melissa Thomasson is Julian Lange Professor of Economics at the University of Miami and an expert on the economic history of the American health care system.
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On August 28th,1963 Clayborne Carson was a 19 year-old attending his first civil rights demonstration. That demonstration was the historic March on Washington, and what he remembers most about that day isn't Dr. King's historic speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, but the people he met.
Hitchhiking back home to Los Alamos, New Mexico, Carson couldn't have known that 22 years later Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, would ask him to edit her husband’s papers.
Today Dr. Clayborne Carson is Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of History and Ronnie Lott Founding Director of the Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1975.
As someone whose life and research are intertwined with the work and legacy of Dr. King, Dr. Carson is uniquely qualified to explain the importance of King’s leadership and his place within the greater struggle for justice in the US and abroad. We are thus honored to have Dr. Carson as our guest on The Road to Now as we celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King.
You can find more information on this episode and The Road to Now at our website: www.theroadtonow.com
Most people agree that the 2016 election marked a turning point for the Republican Party. Whatever the impact of this election in the long term, the changes we’re seeing today are part of a longer historical trajectory that took the GOP from the party of Abraham Lincoln to the party of Donald Trump. So how did this happen? How did a party that was despised in the American south in the 1940s come to dominate the region a few decades later? And where do great Presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan fit within this story. In today’s episode, we’re joined by Dr. Heather Cox Richardson to get the answer.
Heather Cox Richardson is a Professor of History at Boston College and co-editor at We're History. Her most recent book, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, was published by Basic Books in 2014.
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In the last few weeks, our listeners have submitted some great questions about the history of NASA, Presidential corruption, daylight saving time, & more. We’ve been working hard to get you the answers to these questions, so to kick off 2017, we offer you a Q & A extravaganza with an all-star team of historians featuring Heather Cox Richardson of Boston College, Bruce Carlson of My History Can Beat Up Your Politics, & Brian Odom of NASA!
Thanks to everyone who sent us the questions for today’s episode. Please keep sending your questions to roadtonowcast@gmail.com and we’ll continue to answer them as they come in!
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