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The Road to Now

Bob Crawford (The Avett Brothers) & Dr. Ben Sawyer (MTSU History) share conversations with great thinkers from a variety of backgrounds – historians, artists, legal scholars, political figures and more –who help us uncover the many roads that run between past and present. For more information, visit TheRoadToNow.com If you'd like to support our work, join us on Patreon: Patreon.com/TheRoadToNow
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Now displaying: Category: general
Sep 11, 2023

Jason Thomas Gordon spent nearly a decade interviewing some of the greatest vocalists in modern music to find out about their earliest experiences singing, the voices that influenced them growing up, and how they learned to find their own unique voice. In his new book, The Singers Talk: The Greatest Singers of Our Time Discuss the One Thing They're Never Asked About: Their Voices, Jason shares some of the insights from his conversations with more than seventy artists from diverse genres, including Emmylou Harris, Chuck D, Lionel Ritchie, and Ozzy Osbourne, and where they fit within their generation and in the greater history of music.

Jason also shares with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which was founded by his grandfather, Danny Thomas. 100% of the royalties from The Singers Talk will go to Music Gives to St. Jude Kids, an organization that Jason created to support St. Jude. Click here to buy the book!

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

Sep 4, 2023

The Kinks are one of the great rock bands of the 20th century and, like all artists, they reflect the times and places they’ve inhabited. In this episode, we speak with Mark Doyle about his excellent book  The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached (Reaktion Books, 2020) and how the band, their origins, and Ray Davies’ lyrics reveal a lot about both the real and imagined spaces of mid-20th Century England.

Dr. Mark Doyle is Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, where he specializes in the history of the British Empire. His research and teaching have won him numerous awards including the Stansky Book Prize (co-winner, 2017) and MTSU’s Outstanding Teacher Award (2014-15). Ben once described him as “the Patton Oswalt of academic twitter,” so we recommend you follow him there at @DrMarkDoyle.  

We’re excited to announce that Ben & Bob will be recording a live episode of RTN on the history of Americana music in Nashville on September 18, 2023 w/ guests Emmy Lou Harris, Rodney Crowell and Jefferson Cowie! Click here for tickets. Hope to see you there!

This is a rebroadcast of the Road to Now #169, which originally aired on April 27, 2020. This version was fully re-cut and edited by Ben Sawyer.

Aug 28, 2023

The war between the US Army and the Native American confederation during the war of 1812 is a buried story in an often-overlooked event, yet its impact on the history of North America is profound. The leading figures on both sides of the war, Shawnee Chief Tecumseh and US Army General William Henry Harrison, had come of age in the struggles over what is today called the Midwest United States, and both understood that losing the war would mean losing the future they imagined for their people. In this episode, Ben & Bob do a deep dive on the story behind that war with Peter Stark, author of the incredibly accessible new book, Gallop Toward The Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison’s Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation (Random House, 2023).

Peter Stark is an adventure and exploration writer and historian who was previously a correspondent for Outside magazine. His previous book, Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America’s Founding Father, was named a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize in 2019. You can follow him on Instagram at @peterstark_adventure_historian.

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

We’re excited to announce that Ben & Bob will be recording a live episode of RTN on the history of Americana music in Nashville on September 18, 2023 w/ guests Emmy Lou Harris, Rodney Crowell and Jefferson Cowie! Click here for tickets. Hope to see you there!

Aug 21, 2023

Washington D.C. in the 1850s was a tale of two cities. It was the Capitol city of a rapidly expanding new nation while at the same time ground zero for a politically fractured and divided nation hurtling toward disunion. Standing in the middle of it all was Montgomery C. Meigs, a military engineer who led the construction of two massive public works projects at the same time: the expansion of the Capitol building and an aqueduct to provide water to the residents growing city. Meigs would go on to serve as Quartermaster for the Union Army under Abraham Lincoln. Meigs was an innovator, public servant, and one of the most important patriots of the nineteenth century.

This week Bob welcomes author and journalist Robert O’Harrow Jr. to discuss his 2016 book, The Quartermaster: Montgomery C. Meigs, Lincoln's General, Master Builder of the Union Army.

For thirty years Robert O'Harrow Jr. was an investigative journalist and contributing writer at The Washington Post and was among the first national journalists to cover cybersecurity. In 2017, he part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of notorious Alabama political Roy Moore.

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

Aug 14, 2023

The recent changes to Florida’s education system have gotten nationwide attention, with similar stories playing out across the US. In this episode, Ben & Bob investigate the nature of these reforms, who is behind them, and how they may impact the students and teachers whose daily lives are directly affected by these changes. They are joined by Ana Goñi-Lessan, a Tallahassee-based journalist who covers the Florida legislature for USA Today and Dr. Andrew Polk, a history professor and former high school teacher who directs the history and social studies education initiatives for the Department of History at Middle Tennessee State University.

 

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher

Aug 7, 2023
Ben & Bob have been on the road for most of the summer, so in this episode they catch up to talk about the 100th anniversary of the death of Warren G. Harding, the feedback they got from their conversation on ai, chat gpt and the future of tech w/ Roger McNamee, and their responses to the recent Congressional hearings on UAP (formerly known as UFO) sightings. This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher. Warren G. Harding Sources: Jordyn Phelps, “Ex-President Warren Harding’s Love Child Confirmed Through DNA Testing,” ABCNews.com, August 13, 2015. “President Warren Harding's Love Letters Open to the Public,” News from the Library of Congress, July 29, 2014. Megan Gambino, “Warren Harding’s Love Letters Finally Give Us Something to Remember Him For,” Smithsonian.com, August 29, 2014. Daniel McCarthy, “Warren Harding’s Read Scandal was his Conservatism,” New York Post, August 1, 2023. Bryan Pietsch, “Exhume the Body of Warren G. Harding? A Judge Says that Won’t be Necessary,” New York Times, Dec. 1, 2020. Jordan Michael Smith, “The Letters that Warren G. Harding’s Family Didn’t Want You to See,” New York Times Magazine, July 7, 2014.
Jul 31, 2023

Slavery was an integral part of the American republic from the moment of independence until the abolition of the so-called “peculiar institution” with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. The social and economic impact of the slave system, however, are much larger in terms of both time and geography. In this episode, Bob and Ben speak with Edward Baptist about slavery’s origins, its evolution, and how enslaved people’s work laid the foundation for modern capitalism. He also shares stories of the people who suffered under- and those who profited from- the inhumane system of American slavery.

Dr. Edward E. Baptist is Professor of History at Cornell University and author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014), which won the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize.

This is an enhanced rebroadcast of RTN #117, which originally aired on January 14, 2019. This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.

Jul 24, 2023

George Carlin had a comedy career that spanned half a century, and his take on the US remains relevant more than a decade after his death in 2008. The new HBO documentary George Carlin’s American Dream tells Carlin’s story as he evolved from a clean-cut comic in the 1950s into the edgy critic who remains one of the most influential comedians of all time. In this episode, Michael Bonfiglio, who directed the film (along with Judd Apatow) and Kliph Nesteroff, a historian of comedy who is featured in the film, join Bob & Ben for a conversation about the life and times of George Carlin.

If you enjoy this episode, check out our previous conversation w/ Michael Bonfiglio in RTN #174 Direction w/ Michael Bonfiglio.

This is a rebroadcast of RTN #237. This rebroadcast was edited by Bob Crawford. 

Jul 17, 2023

Roger McNamee has spent decades helping American tech companies secure financing. In the last few years, however, he’s become well-known for helping American citizens secure themselves against tech companies. After helping convince Mark Zuckerberg to retain control over Facebook, Roger documented social media’s role in amplifying social division in his 2019 New York Times Best Seller Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. Recently he’s turned his attention to AI, and he has a warning for us: don’t believe the hype.

In this conversation Roger joins Bob and Ben to discuss Artificial Intelligence, why he says it’s far from the disruptor its proponents have claimed it to be, and how our current assessment of AI actually causes many of the problems that will likely come from this new technology. Roger also shares his solution to better tech regulation, why he’s more hopeful about the future of the US than he has been in decades, and his second career in his band Moonalice (click here for music and tour dates). 

If you enjoy this conversation, you can hear our uncut conversation, which includes almost 30 minutes of additional audio, but joining us on Patreon at Patreon.com/TheRoadToNow. Already a Patron? Click here to listen to the uncut episode!

You can hear our previous conversation w/ Roger in RTN #178 “The Facebook Catastrophe w/ Roger McNamee.” 

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

Jul 10, 2023

In the years after World War II, Americans moved to the suburbs in search of the peace and safety that many came to equate with the “American Dream.” By the end of the 1970s, however, suburbanites had come sense that their privileged was under siege from satanic cults, drug dealers and kidnappers. In this episode, Bob and Ben talk w/ Kyle Riismandel whose new book Neighborhood of Fear examines how Americans responded to the real and perceived threats of suburban life and in doing so, shaped American society and politics in the late-20th Century and beyond.

Dr. Kyle Riismandel is Senior University Lecturer and Interim Director of the Law, Technology, and Culture Program in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers-Newark and Director of the Graduate Program in American Studies. His book Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001 was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2020.

This is a rebroadcast of RTN #194, which originally aired on April 12, 2021.

This episode was oroginally edited by Gary Fletcher. This reair was edited by Ben Sawyer.

 

Jul 3, 2023

It’s difficult to fathom how Benjamin Franklin accomplished so much in a single lifetime. It’s equally difficult to imagine how to take such an incredible life and consolidate it into four hours of documentary film. In this episode, we cover both feats with writer Dayton Duncan and producer David Schmidt, two of the great minds behind Ken Burns' documentary on Benjamin Franklin. Dayton and David discuss Franklin’s life, the work that goes into creating a historical documentary film, and their process for deciding the best way to tell an American icon’s story in a pair of two-hour episodes.

If you enjoy this episode, check out Ben and Bob’s conversation with Ken Burns in episode #191.

If you want to learn more about American indepenence and the July 4th holiday, check out Ben's curated list on Hark audio!

If you want to catch Bob or Ben live, check out The Avett Brothers tour dates here and Ben's standup comedy schedule here!

This is a rebroadcast of RTN #229, which originally aired on April 4, 2022. 

Jun 26, 2023

The Allman Brothers’ 1971 album At Fillmore East features one of the era’s great rock bands at its prime, selling over a million copies despite not producing a single “hit” song. It is also the last album produced by the Allman Brothers prior to the death of the band’s founder, Duane Allman. In this episode we speak with Bob Beatty, whose new book Play All Night!: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East, tells the story behind the creation of the album and how the Allman Brothers pioneered a style that continues to influence rock music today.

Dr. Bob Beatty is a historian and musician who has worked in museums and nonprofits for more than 25 years. You can follow him on twitter and Instagram at @longlivetheabb.

This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.

Jun 19, 2023

John Fea is taking on the history of Christianity and American politics in the 21st century. In three volumes. In this (single) episode, we talk about this tremendous task that John is undertaking and also get his thoughts on why the political Christian right came to feel disappointed in the Bush administration, why they later rallied around Donald Trump, and what this might mean for American politics moving forward.

Dr. John Fea is Professor of History at Messiah University & author of multiple books including Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011). He posts regularly on American history, religion, politics, and academic life at his blog, The Way of Improvement Leads Home and hosts the podcast of the same name on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all podcast players. You can also hear him discuss his book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation in episode #222 and Why the 1776 Report Still Matters in episode #188.

 

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

Jun 12, 2023

Juneteenth, which celebrates the emancipation of enslaved Americans at the end of the Civil War, has gone from a local holiday in Texas to a national day of celebration for many Americans. In this episode we speak with legal scholar and Pulitzer Prize winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed about her new book On Juneteenth and the ways that the holiday, her personal story and the history of the US can help us better understand the world today.

Annette Gordon-Reed is Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University, where she is also the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a professor of history in the university’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences. You can follow her on twitter at @Agordonreed.

Update: Since we recorded this episode on June 3, 2021, awareness and celebration of Juneteenth has spread across the country. On June 17th, 2021, President Joe Biden signed legislation that made Juneteenth a federal holiday, and, since 2021, 23 additional states have made Juneteenth an official permanent holiday, bringing the total to 28.

This is a rebroadcast of RTN #198, which originally aired on June 7, 2021. This rebroadcast was edited by Ben Sawyer.

Jun 5, 2023

Mark McKinnon is a political advisor, reform advocate, and host of Showtime’s The Circus. In this episode he joins Ben & Bob to talk about his work to found the non-partisan group No Labels, which advocates for independent candidates in presidential elections, and what a third-party might mean for the elections of 2024 and beyond.

 

This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.

May 29, 2023

In the last few years, many on the left have been calling for a “Green New Deal,” but we might have already had that. Between 1933 and 1942, the Civilian Conservation Corps enlisted more than three million young men in a project that planted two billion trees, slowed soil erosion on forty million acres of farmland, and enjoyed support across political and geographic divides. In this episode we talk with Neil Maher, author of Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press, 2008) about how the CCC helped solidify FDR’s New Deal and spread the seeds of environmental activism for generations to come.

Dr. Neil Maher is a Professor of History and Master Teacher in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University-Newark. He is also the author of Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017). You can find out more about his work at NeilMaher.com.  

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher

May 22, 2023

It’s been seven years since Ben & Bob launched the first episode of The Road to Now, so we invited two of our early guests – Doug Heye & Margaret Talev – to join us for a conversation about how things have changed since 2016 and the events of the preceding years that now appear to be most pivotal in creating those changes. Our conversation covers campaign finance reform, social media and the impact ai is already having on American politics.

Doug Heye is a political commentator who previously served as Communications Director for the Republican National Committee and Deputy Chief of Staff for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. You can follow him on twitter at @DougHeye.

Margaret Talev is Director of Syracuse University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship and Senior Contributor at Axios. You can follow her on twitter at @MargaretTalev.

Enjoy this episode? Join us on Patreon to get the full unedited conversation from this episode and many others. Find out more at Patreon.com/TheRoadToNow. To our Patrons: thank you!

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

May 15, 2023

The “Amazon economy” seems like something new, but it rests on the physical and intellectual infrastructure built by those who came long before the age of the internet and leaves many of the same marks on the environment. Prominent in this story are five companies- Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Walmart, Bank of America, and FexEx-  all of which have global reach and southern roots. In this episode, Bart Elmore joins us to talk about his new book Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade our Economy and the Planet (UNC Press, 2023), and how understanding the history of American business can help us address the environmental challenges that are undeniably facing humanity today.

Dr. Bartow Elmore is Associate Professor of History and a core faculty member of the Sustainability Institute at The Ohio State University. In addition to Country Capitalism, he is also the author of  Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (W. W. Norton, 2015) and Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future (W. W. Norton, 2021). You can hear his discuss these books in RTN episode 140 and episode 208 respectively. Bart is also a 2022 winner of the Dan David Prize.

This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.  

May 8, 2023

Today's Republican party looks a lot different than it did just a few decades ago, but it rests on many of the same organizations and ideologies that formed the modern conservative movement in the 1970s. In this episode, Rick Perlstein joins us for a conversation about his newest book Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980 and how Ronald Reagan, Orrin Hatch and other prominent Republicans were able to harness the social and political forces of the 1970s to form the modern GOP.

Rick Perlstein is the award-winning author of multiple New York Times bestsellers, including Reaganland (Simon & Schuster, 2020), Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner, 2009) and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Bold Type Books, 2009), as well as a board member at InTheseTimes.com. You can follow him on twitter at @RickPerlstein.

In this conversation we also discussed Rick’s recent article “This Is Us: Why the Trump Era Ended in Violence,” The New Republic, January 20, 2021.

This is an edited rebroadcast of RTN #199, which originally aired on June 14, 2021. Both the original episode and this rebroadcast were edited by Gary Fletcher.

May 1, 2023

In 2021, Neil King Jr. threw a few basic items into a backpack and walked from his home in Washington, DC to New York City. Along the way he met new people, uncovered forgotten moments of history, and spent many days thinking about America. In this episode, Neil joins Ben and Bob to discuss his new book, American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal, and the lessons he learned along the way.

Before walking from his house in DC to New York City, Neil King Jr. worked as a journalist for outlets across the globe, including The Tampa Tribune, The Prague Post, and The Wall Street Journal. American Ramble is his first book, but we hope there are many more to come. You can follow Neil on twitter at @NKingofDC.

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

Apr 24, 2023

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’ is a historian whose work has shed new light on the roles that women played in American slavery. In this episode, she joins Ben and Bob to share some of the significant findings of her work, the sources she’s used to learn more about enslaved people and female slaveowners, and her new project, which reorients our understanding of the British Atlantic slave trade by centering the story on the lives of both free and captive women. 

Dr. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is Associate Professor of History at the University California, Berkeley and the author of the award-winning book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019). She is also one of the recipients of the 2023 Dan Davis Prize, which recognizes outstanding scholarship that illuminates the past and seeks to anchor public discourse in a deeper understanding of history.

 This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

Apr 17, 2023

For most of us, dust is a surface-level annoyance. For Anita Radini, it is a fountain of information about the past. In this episode, Anita joins us to share the fascinating new details about the lives of Medieval women that she discovered in the tiny remains of dust that collected in their dental plaque, and how her interdisciplinary work in archaeological science and paleoecology is reshaping the way we understand human history.

Dr. Anita Radini is an Assistant Professor at the School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, and a recipient of the 2023 Dan David Prize.

The Dan David Prize recognizes outstanding scholarship that illuminates the past and seeks to anchor public discourse in a deeper understanding of history. For more on the prize and the research its funding, visit dandavidprize.org.

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

Apr 10, 2023

On Thursday, April 13th, the first episode of Bob’s new audio documentary Founding Son: John Quincy’s America premieres (on all podcast platforms), so Ben & Bob decided to celebrate the occasion by talking Adams’ life, his place in American history, and inspiration behind Bob’s decision to create the series.

Subscribe to Founding Son:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Stitcher

Or anywhere else you get your podcasts

 

This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer

Apr 3, 2023

On September 11, 2012, al-Qaeda-affiliated militants attacked a US mission in Benghazi, Libya and killed four Americans. That tragic loss of life abroad turned into a political fiasco at home, as the story of the attack became interpreted within the context of a Presidential election and a widening ideological gap between America’s two major political parties. In this episode, we speak with Ethan Chorin, who has years of experience on the ground in Libya, was in Benghazi the day of the attack, and whose new book, Benghazi! A New History of the Political Fiasco the Pushed American and its World to the Brink, examines the Benghazi attack and what we might learn from it.

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

Mar 27, 2023

Ken Burns joins Bob and Ben for a conversation about American history and the themes he sees playing out in the US today. Ken shares his process for selecting subjects for his films and explains how his new 3-part film Hemingway (co-directed w/ Lynn Novick) highlights Ernest Hemingway’s individual genius while also revealing the universal aspects of life that we all share. We also discuss how our time and place influence the way we view the past, the importance of acknowledging both the light and dark in American history, and why Ken argues that much of life’s meaning comes from the struggle.

Ken Burns’ new film Hemingway, which he co-directed with Lynn Novick, premieres April 5-7 on PBS. For more on the series visit https://kenburns.com/hemingway/

UNUM is a new site by Ken Burns and PBS that allows users “a new way to explore American history through select scenes from across our over 40 films” with the goal of “providing historical context for the conversations we are having today.” You can visit UNUM at: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/unum

You can follow Ken Burns on twitter at @KenBurns

This episode is a rebroadcast of RTN #191, which originally aired on February 15, 2021.

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

We’re happy to share a clip from our friends at Southern Songs and Stories!

This episode of The Road to Now features a clip from Southern Songs and Stories, a podcast hosted by our friend Joe Kendrick at WNCW. Listen after the credits to hear a portion of “The Shelton Laurel Massacre, Part One: The Past That Would not Die.” You can hear the full episode on Apple Music, Spotify, or on any podcast player where you get The Road to Now.

 

  

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