History Matters Podcast

Keith and Patrick chat with economist Marshall Steinbaum of the Roosevelt Institute on ideology and history.

Keith and Patrick are finally back together after a hiatus, and the topic is narratives in history: how to write them, why they matter, and how much we should be using them to understand the past. We dig into two specific examples, the fall of the Roman Empire and the crisis of the 17th century, to tell us more.

In May 2016, the Federal Reserve reported that 46% of Americans would struggle to find $400 for an emergency expense. Debt and precarity have become increasingly important political issues recently but middle-class financial uncertainty has a long history. In this episode of History Matters, Keith talks with Dr. Tawny Paul about debtors' prisons in 18th century Britain, which are at the intersection of two huge issue--debt and mass incarceration.

During this past election many pundits claimed that Donald Trump's victory in the Republican primary meant the end of the religious right. Those predictions turned out to be wrong. In this episode, Keith interviews PhD candidate Christina Copland, who studies the rise of fundamentalist Christianity in Southern California.

Economic inequality is an increasingly major topic of discussion. Patrick and Keith discuss an excellent book on the topic, "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century," by the eminent historian Walter Scheidel.