Happy Monday! Sam hosts Kidada E. Williams, associate professor of history at Wayne State University, to discuss her recent book I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction. Sam begins the show by talking about the upcoming debt ceiling battle, and how it seems increasingly likely that Biden is going to […]

The MR Crew is back! Sam sits down for a pre-taped conversation with Peniel Joseph, joint professor of public affairs and history at the University of Texas at Austin, to discuss his recent book The Third Reconstruction:America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century First, Emma runs through updates on Biden’s visit to Ukraine in the […]

Sam and Emma host Gerald Horne, Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, to discuss his recent book The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism. Then later in the show, they’re joined by  Camille Gix, member of the Initiative I-135 steering committee at House Our Neighbors, […]

Sam and Emma host Dale Kretz, visiting assistant professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to discuss his recent book Administering Freedom: The State of Emancipation after the Freedmen’s Bureau. First, Sam and Emma dive into updates on the US’ sanctions on Venezuela, Elon Musk’s targeting of left voices on Twitter, the collapse of Manchin’s […]

Sam and Emma host Donald Yacovone, Associate at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, to discuss his recent book Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity. First Emma dives into Lula taking a lead in the Brazilian Presidential election heading into the Runoffs, SCOTUS starting […]

Sam hosts William Forbath, Associate Dean for Research at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, and Joseph Fishkin,  Professor at the UCLA School of Law, to discuss their recent book The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of Democracy. Sam first runs through recent updates, from AOC and progressives pushing the White House to take action on […]

Sam and Emma host Adolph Reed, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss his recent book The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, on the lasting legacy of the racial order that defined the post-reconstruction era, and its intrinsic ties to labor and exploiting the Black workforce. Professor Reed first situates when the […]

Sam hosts William A. Blair, Professor of Middle American History at Penn State University, to discuss his recent book The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight Over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction, on how the true histories of reconstruction, both in the horrible violence and influential policy, has been obscured by a […]

Emma hosts Karen L. Cox, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, to discuss her recent book No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, on the history and reckoning over confederate monuments in the US. Professor Cox brings us back to the 1890s as the end of reconstruction and […]

Sam and Emma are back from the July 4th holiday with Smithsonian curator Jon Grinspan, author of his latest book The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915 on the last time partisanship was the primary driver in American democracy. Grinspan, inspired by the precedence for our modern political era that […]