US History
07 Feb 2024
Featuring Luke Messac on Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine. An estimated 100 million people in the US are in debt because they sought medical treatment. Medical debt exacerbates poor and...
01 Jan 2024
Read the transcript here: https://jacobin.com/2022/11/j-edgar-hoover-g-man-beverly-gage-liberalism-interview
06 Nov 2023
Featuring Beverly Gage on her masterful biography G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. Guest hosted by Micah Uetricht.
24 Aug 2023
Featuring Amna Akbar, Gabriel Winant, and Thea Riofrancos on the emerging terrain of struggle. Is American liberalism exhausted or revitalized? What are the successes and limits of the new US left electoral strategy? Is there...
13 Aug 2023
Featuring Amna Akbar, Gabriel Winant, and Thea Riofrancos on the American conjuncture. Did an era that began with Occupy and Ferguson—marked by teachers strikes, two Bernie campaigns, the explosive growth of DSA, Standing Rock, and...
06 Jul 2023
Read the transcript here: https://jacobin.com/2023/07/black-radical-tradition-class-struggle-oppression-us-history-racism-freedom-dreams
27 May 2023
A sonic memorial to the Black women of the Peoples Temple.
23 Mar 2023
Read Jacobin’s edited transcript here: https://jacobin.com/2023/03/greg-grandin-interview-us-policy-latin-america
13 Mar 2023
Featuring Nelson Lichtenstein on his life and scholarship, from membership in the International Socialists and studies of the early United Auto Workers and CIO to his later turn to studying Walmart and international supply chains....
27 Jan 2023
Featuring Robin D.G. Kelley on Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
11 Jan 2023
Read the transcript here: https://jacobin.com/2023/01/inflation-class-struggle-economic-policy-federal-reserve-the-dig
17 Dec 2022
Featuring Edward Goetz on his book New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy. Goetz tells the story of American public housing and then its destruction and dismantling, which took off in the...
16 Dec 2022
Read Jacobin’s transcript of the interview here: https://jacobin.com/2022/12/conservative-movement-roots-capitalist-backlash-new-deal-order-kim-phillips-fein
02 Dec 2022
Astra Taylor interviews William Hogeland on his book Founding Finance: How Debt, Speculation, Foreclosures, Protests, and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation. Hogeland recovers a fascinating crop of mostly-forgotten rebels, the movements they led, and their...
07 Nov 2022
Read the transcript here.
25 Sep 2022
Featuring Laura Weinrib on The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise. Did you know that the ACLU was founded as a radical labor organization allied with the IWW? Weinrib traces the rise of...
18 Sep 2022
Featuring Thulani Davis on The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom, a monumental history of freedpeople organizing amid the Civl War and Reconstruction.
30 Jul 2022
Featuring Matt Christman on how American history brought us to this awful present.
14 Jul 2022
Read the transcript here.
18 Jun 2022
Know Your Enemy hosts Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell on terrifyingly protean right-wing American politics.
10 Jun 2022
Patrick Blanchfield analyzes the long history of US gun violence and the American death drive.
05 Jun 2022
Dan’s second episode with historian Lily Geismer, who he interviewed in 2019 about Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. This interview is on Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt...
26 Feb 2022
Dan interviews historian Kim Phillips-Fein on Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan.
06 Jan 2022
Read Jacobin’s transcript of the interview here: https://jacobin.com/2023/01/public-housing-us-history-destruction-neoliberalism-hope-iv
25 Sep 2021
It’s Occupy Wall Street’s tenth anniversary. Dan interviews Astra Taylor.
12 Aug 2021
Dan interviews historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez on her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. “Having replaced the Jesus of the Gospels with the vengeful warrior...
28 Jul 2021
Inflation is once again at the center of political debate. Dan interviews Tim Barker to put monetary policy in its historical and class war context.
29 Jun 2021
Who governs? Upon closer inspection, the composition of the ruling class has undergone huge changes that are driving this political moment. Dan interviews Doug Henwood, the author of “Take Me to Your Leader,” an extensive...
21 Jun 2021
The history of the United States is in no small part the history of US intervention in Latin America. Historian Greg Grandin on his classic book Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the...
15 May 2021
Dan interviews historian Robin D.G. Kelley on his classic book
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression.
03 Jan 2021
Dan interviews historian and essayist Gabriel Winant on the social worlds that make US politics and how that sociality is rooted in the economy, carceral state, social media, religion, and more. Read these n+1essays and...
29 Nov 2020
Guest host Astra Taylor interviews Thomas Frank about his book
The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism.
02 Oct 2020
Bathsheba Demuth on her monumental book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. From the 19th century through today, governments and capitalists on the Russian, Soviet, and American Arctic borderlands extract energy from...
03 Sep 2020
Dan interviews historian Matthew Countryman on his book
Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia.
16 Jul 2020
This is an incredible moment to learn about the Young Lords from historian Johanna Fernández, the author of
The Young Lords: A Radical History.
25 Jun 2020
Mike Davis on his classic book about why the US has long lacked strong socialist and labor politics. One recurrent answer: racism.
13 Apr 2020
Dan interviews historian Kim Phillips-Fein about her book Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics and about how the destruction of social democracy made today’s city where coronavirus is killing...
01 Nov 2019
The divide between Latin American and the United States was not always so evident. Across the hemisphere, creoles—the descendants of European settlers, born in the Americas—launched revolutions to cast off European rule and preserve their...
26 Jul 2019
Dan is taking his first week off ever in Dig history to finish his book. Here’s a classic from deep in the archives: our first interview with Aziz Rana, on his book The Two Faces...
27 Jun 2018
Everyone wants to know what’s wrong with Appalachia. But beginning in the 1960s, it was “white ethics”—Italians, Irish, Polish, Jews and other non-WASPs—who broke from the New Deal coalition, embracing their Ellis Island immigrant roots...
05 Jun 2018
For libertarians, liberty means something different. It’s about liberty for property owners. And in their quest to preserve that absolute freedom for the ownership class—whether their assets be human slaves, factories or extractive industries—democracy must...
02 Jun 2018
Fifty years ago, a mainstream group of high-profile Americans declared the following: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and...
21 Mar 2018
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14 Feb 2018
What if the Cold War only just ended in November 2016, as Donald Trump grotesquely encircled and then captured the presidency, finding it, to his surprise, unguarded? The Cold War proper, of course, ended with...
30 Jan 2018
We are living on land from which indigenous people, over hundreds of years, were violently removed. On some level, everyone knows this—yet it’s mostly nowhere to be found in stories that Americans tell themselves about...
24 Jan 2018
Everyone agrees that the 1970s was the beginning of the end of capitalism as we had known it since the New Deal. But historian Lane Windham makes it clear that it wasn’t for a lack...
16 Jan 2018
Martin Luther King Jr. launched the Poor People’s Campaign alongside other organizers shortly before he was assassinated 50 years ago. Today, organizers nationwide are relaunching that movement as The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call...
09 Jan 2018
Chattel slavery made black women’s reproduction the source of private property—and in doing so invented race and American racism. Ever since, the denigration and regulation of black women’s childbearing has been central to the construction...
03 Jan 2018
The protest movement against the onset of the Iraq War was countered by a call to “support our troops” from militarists on the right. Venerating American soldiers, of course, is not about supporting actual American...
13 Dec 2017
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05 Dec 2017
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01 Dec 2017
Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary, explains one of Clintonism’s most dreadful results: President Trump. The new film available on Netflix, is Reich’s quasi-autobiographical documentary about the origins of contemporary political-economic inequality. The premise that...
14 Nov 2017
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández tells the story of human caging in Los Angeles, from the Spanish Conquest to the mid-twentieth century, in her new book. It’s a story of indigenous exploitation and elimination, immigrant detention...
31 Oct 2017
Rana overturns conventional accounts of American history, from settlement and Revolution to the Populists and the present day. In reality, settler-colonialism, empire, and a brutally exploitative economic system grounded in racial subjugation have always been...