Grading America's First 250 Years: America, Actually with Astead Herndon
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Cara Swisher. We're off for the holiday today. So we have an episode of America Actually with Astead Herndon for you in this episode. Astead talks with historian Heather Cox Richardson about America's first 250 years and how the U.S. is facing its biggest stress test since the Civil War. Oh, joy. So you enjoy.
So we are 250 years into this American experiment, and I'd say it's going okay. I'd give us like a C plus. The Declaration of Independence, the women's rights movement, the invention of basketball or the iPhone, all good. Slavery, colonialism, income inequality, unequivocally bad. But what's gonna determine the next 250 years of America? And how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve?
How has America reinvented itself every 80 to 90 years?
That's this week on America Actually. Let's dig in.
Joining me now is Heather Cox Richardson. She's a historian and professor at Boston College, but you probably know her from her very popular sub stack, Letters from an American, and her YouTube channel. I am excited that Heather is joining us because she's going to help us think about not only the future, but how the past connects to it. Thank you for coming. It's such a pleasure to be here. I appreciate that. I mean, I wanted to kind of start by looking at your work. As I was preparing for this, I was reading about how you've argued that the country has basically reinvented itself every 80 to 90 years, from the founding to the Civil War to the New Deal. I wondered how you thought about those reinventions.
What forces shaped them? And are we in a reinvention period right now?
Oh, that's interesting. I'm not sure I've ever used the words reinvention because the way I think about it is that any country has to deal with new challenges all the time. And because we had set out at our foundation a series of principles that at the time were quite limited by who they covered but were expansive in terms of what they could cover.
Mm-hmm.
We have managed through our history to address new challenges like westward expansion, like industrialization, like globalization, like the advent of nuclear weapons, to expand American democracy to more closely adhere to those foundational documents, but to expand as they took on new issues. So are we in a moment like this now?
What challenges are shaping America's future today?
Absolutely.
Now, what forces shape these kind of shifts in the country? I don't know if it's reinvention is the right word, but if we think about those moments where we face new challenges, how do we muster up that kind of creativity? And what are the seeds that we should be looking for right now?
So there's a whole lot embedded in that question. And one of the places that I want to start with that is that the seeds for reinvention, I think, come from the arts. They come from music. They come from art. They come from new languages and new clothing styles and sculpture and all sorts of new ways to envision the world through our imaginations. And we could talk about the late 19th century, for example, and how extraordinarily creative that time was and so forth. But Those ideas, I think, come from there, but that's not enough.
What is the significance of a new social contract for America?
I think when you see reinvention, you see Americans reaching back for their stories, for their traditional history, and the places that they can see other Americans having exercised their agency to make those traditions our best traditions ever. come into law or at least come into practice. And, you know, it's an especially poignant time for us to be talking about this. On April 12th, Hungarian voters put a supermajority of opposition figures to Viktor Orban into power in their parliament. And they will, of course, have a different prime minister. One of the things that they appear to have done is to have reached back to Hungarian history and said, listen, We might disagree with each other about immigration and about finances and so on, but we can agree that we care deeply about our country and we must start there with people who are trying to build our country rather than tear it down.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:54
2
How has America reinvented itself every 80 to 90 years?
0:54–2:31
3
What challenges are shaping America's future today?
2:31–3:19
4
What is the significance of a new social contract for America?
3:19–5:51
5
How do the arts influence societal reinvention?
5:51–12:38
6
What role does history play in shaping current political narratives?
12:38–22:26
7
How can a new founding document address modern issues?
22:26–27:05
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from Pivot
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