Listening to America aims to “light out for the territories,” traveling less visited byways and taking time to see this immense, extraordinary country with fresh eyes while listening to the many voices of America’s past, present, and future. Led by noted historian and humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson, Listening to America travels the country’s less visited byways, from national parks and forests to historic sites to countless under-recognized rural and urban places. Through this exploration ...
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#1648 Hitting the Road With Lewis and Clark
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52:43Occasional guest host and LTA videographer Nolan Johnson joins Clay to talk about the epic Lewis and Clark Airstream journey of 2025, wherein Clay will follow the Lewis and Clark Trail from Jefferson’s Monticello in Virginia to Astoria, Oregon, and back again. Historian James Ronda said the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06 was “America’s first…
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#1647 The Future of the Public Lands
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52:39Clay's interview with Walt Dabney, who worked for over 30 years in the National Park System, including serving as America's Chief Ranger for five and a half years in Washington, D.C. Mr. Dabney is lecturing around the country about the threat to public lands from those who would return them to the states or privatize them altogether. Mr. Dabney ref…
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#1646 The Legacy of Louis L'Amour and American Western Fiction
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57:01Clay interviews Beau L’Amour, the son of Louis L'Amour, the celebrated author of multi-million best-selling Westerns. Beau L’Amour is the manager of his father’s literary estate. By his passing at 80 in 1988, Louis L’Amour wrote just under 100 novels and more than 250 short stories. All of his books are still in print. Clay and Beau talked about ch…
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#1645 The Resurrection of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798
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57:53Clay is joined by one of his favorite guests and favorite people, historian Joe Ellis of Vermont. The discussion is about the Trump administration’s attempt to pull the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 out of the historical dust and apply it to what it regards as undesirable foreigners in the United States. Two Alien acts, the Sedition Act, and the Natura…
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#1644 Thomas Jefferson and American Diplomacy and Trade
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1:15:19Guest host David Horton interviews Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, about his life as a diplomat. Jefferson served for five years as the American minister to the court of Louis XVI just before the French Revolution. Then, he served three years as America’s first Secretary of State — trying to keep the United States from b…
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Russ Eagle is the guest host for a discussion of Clay’s recent cultural tour of Cuba. Clay, Russ, and guests spent 10 days in Cuba, traveling in a small bus across the island. They began in Santiago, where the Cuban Revolution touched off on July 26, 1953, and ended in Havana, once one of the most vibrant cities in the Caribbean. It is still full o…
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#1642 The Myths That Hold America Back
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56:37Clay is joined by Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Dr. Casey Burgat to discuss a new book, We Hold These “Truths”: How to Spot the Myths That are Holding America Back. The book aims to tackle 13 myths at the core of political dysfunction: lobbyists are evil, Congress doesn’t do anything, the Supreme Court has become too political, and there is a demand t…
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#1641 Author, Hampton Sides on Captain James Cook’s Amazing Third Voyage
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56:18Clay interviews Hampton Sides, the author of a dozen outstanding books, including studies of Kit Carson, Martin Luther King’s assassin James Earl Ray, the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in Korea, and most recently, The Wide, Wide Sea, Sides’ study of the third and fatal voyage of Captain James Cook. How does one write about a British explorer like Jame…
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#1640 Traveling America in Search of Its History and Stories
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52:28Clay sits down with Nolan Johnson, fellow North Dakotan and Listening to America’s talented videographer and podcast editor. Nolan joined Clay with cameras and drone in hand at key points along Clay’s 21,000-mile Travels with Charley journey in 2024. The two discuss plans for this year’s Lewis and Clark trek from Monticello to Astoria, Oregon, and …
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#1639 Jefferson and the Lewis and Clark Expedition
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56:57Guest host Russ Eagle interviews Thomas Jefferson about the American West. When he became the third president in the spring of 1801, Jefferson hired Meriwether Lewis to be his private correspondence secretary. Two years later, he selected Lewis to explore the American West by traveling up the Missouri River to its source, crossing the continental d…
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#1638 Joe Ellis on the 2024 Presidential Election
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57:21Clay's discussion with Pulitzer Prize winning historian Joseph Ellis, author of over a dozen outstanding, award-winning books on the Founding Fathers and America's early national period. Joe shares his comments and insights on the 2024 election and the return of Donald Trump to the White House, only the second time this has occurred in American his…
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#1637 Historical Integrity in a Hyper-Partisan Time
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1:00:59Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Clay discuss the challenge of maintaining historical integrity during political turmoil and uncertainty. How does a professional historian differentiate between her personal politics, her status as an American citizen, and her responsibilities as a professional historian? In other words, how can the public trust a histori…
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#1636 Special Episode: Listener Mail On Clay's Great Steinbeck Adventure
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56:23Clay and special guest Russ Eagle take up listener mail about Clay's recently completed Travels with Charley tour of America. Thousands of people followed Clay's 210-day, 21,400-mile journey across America and sent along numerous suggestions and questions; these included recommended detours, great places to camp, restaurants to visit, and great spo…
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#1635 Peaceful Transfer of Power
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55:52Clay is joined by David Marchick, the author of the acclaimed book, The Peaceful Transfer of Power: An Oral History of America’s Presidential Transitions. The transfer of power in 2021 was not peaceful and it was not efficient. The transfer of power in 2025 will certainly be peaceful, but President-elect Trump is deliberately violating norms that h…
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#1634 AI and Quantum Computing, Ready or Not
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54:19Clay and frequent guest David Horton talk about the coming Artificial Intelligence revolution. Like it or not, we are already wading (if not rushing) into that brave new world, and we all better come to terms with what’s ahead of us. Horton’s portfolio at Radford University includes questions of technology, appropriate technology, and the laws of u…
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#1633 The History of Presidential Transitions
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56:30Clay and frequent guest Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky discuss how an incoming president prepares to govern the United States. In what ways does the outgoing administration advise and guide the one coming in, particularly when the new president wants to make a sharp break with his predecessor’s policies and style? We examine the first four presidencies: Wa…
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#1632 A Survival Guide for the Next Four Years
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55:13Guest host David Horton and Clay discuss New Year’s resolutions. Never more important than at present. People across the political spectrum are nervous about the next years of American life. But what’s to be done? Clay offers several ways of coping—taking up a craft that involves one’s hands and not merely one’s brain, reading with discipline and p…
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Guest host David Horton of Radford University and Clay discuss the history of Christmas, especially its modern invention during the mid 19th century in England and the United States. Thomas Jefferson, a deist, did not celebrate Christmas, but as someone who grew up in the Anglican tradition, he did not shun it the way New England Puritans of the pe…
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#1630 The Vietnam War: An Interview with Historian Geoffrey Wawro
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50:31Clay welcomes University of North Texas historian Geoffrey Wawro for a discussion of the War in Vietnam (1961–1975), which cost more than 58,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of deaths in North and South Vietnam. Wawro, the author of seven books on the history of war, explains how a superpower got into a quagmire in a small Asian country…
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#1629 The Declaration of Independence and Conspiracy Theories
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55:09One of Clay’s favorite guests, Beau Breslin, talks about the early National Period as rife with conspiracy theories. The Declaration of Independence, for example, argued that the ministry and crown of England were engaged in a systematic conspiracy to “enslave” the colonists. Beau argues that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was a conspiracy—e…
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#1628 Civil Rights Pilgrimage with Russ Eagle
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1:04:28Clay's and his close friend, Russ Eagle, journey from New Orleans to Shreveport. Then, from Jackson, Mississippi, to Birmingham, Alabama to visit civil rights sites and shrines. John Steinbeck witnessed the appauling white response to the integration of the schools in New Orleans in December of 1960 and was so repulsed by what he saw that he gave u…
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#1627 Clay and Steven Duchrow Talk Chautauqua
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50:31Clay welcomes fellow Chautauquan Steve Duchrow of Illinois for a conversation about portraying historical characters. Clay does six or seven; Steve portrays the poets Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay. They discuss how to choose a character. How do you prepare for your first performance and the five hundredth? Why is it important not to work from a …
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#1626 America’s Fascination with Conspiracy Theories
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50:49Clay talks with guest host David Horton about America’s obsession with conspiracy theories, from the notion that the moon landing in 1969 was faked on a Hollywood sound stage to the view that 9-11 was an inside job designed to secure more oil for the United States and justify a war against Islam. What is the psychology of this strange phenomenon? D…
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#1625 Do We Have an American Narrative?
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59:01In an interview recorded on October 29, 2024, Clay interviews the eminent classicist, Edward Watts of the University of California, San Diego, on the collapse of the American narrative. The old narrative that began when Columbus bumped into the New World and then moved through the colonial period, the American Revolution, the Westering movement, th…
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#1624 Thomas Jefferson on American Elections
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51:33Guest host David Horton welcomes the Third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, to the program to talk about what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they designed the system of American elections. Why did the Founders give two senators to each state? How was the controversy between big and little states resolved, and how has it infl…
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