Thomas Ricks
speaker
222 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 4 Jul
Thomas Ricks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And he's constantly in the background.
I think he gets dista a little bit because he is not a memorable writer.
There's no phrases that really jump out from him.
He's small, five foot, five foot one, 110 pounds, sickly, suffers from some form of epilepsy throughout his life.
He doesn't have a good speaking voice, and he's not really a good orator.
Nonetheless, and he's not very social, by the way, which is unusual for a politician.
Yet, you know, here's the guy who during the 1780s, the Articles of Confederation period, starts beating the drum for a constitutional convention, gets a constitutional convention arranged,
is the first guy to show up in Philadelphia, having spent four years preparing for, researching ancient Greek city-states.
And he has all these things at his fingertips.
And that's why we wind up with big states and small states, each having two senators.
And he said, well, that's the way that league worked in ancient Greece, the city-states.
This is sort of the ancient version of kind of NATO or the EU.
Big city-states and small city-states each had two.
So, and then he leaves the ratifications.
campaign with Hamilton to get the Constitution ratified.
And then in the 1790s, Madison and Jefferson invent American politics, sort of the first version of it.
Then he goes on and has a kind of mediocre presidency.
But Madison really does so much in the background.
Daniel Allen, who wrote a terrific book on the Declaration of Independence called Our Declaration, sort of a meditation on equality.
Daniel Allen says that a lot of early American history is Madison talking to himself.
Showing 201–220 of 222 · page 11 of 12
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