Category Archives: Podcast

S10E3 Podcast: Whitfield Remembrance Project

Stan’s guests this week are three members of the Whitfield Remembrance Project, a community remembrance initiative in Dalton, Georgia, inspired by the Equal Justice Initiative. Their mission is to honor victims of racial injustice in Whitfield County, beginning with efforts to memorialize the last known lynching in Whitfield. Their current project focuses on honoring Juliette Derricotte, a gifted speaker, educator, and peacemaker who died in 1931 after a car accident near Dalton, when segregation prevented her from being taken to a whites-only hospital.

S10E2 Podcast: American Patriarch: George Washington

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As part of GHS’s ongoing commemoration of the US250, Stan’s guest this week is acclaimed historian H.W. Brands, talking about his new book, American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington (Doubleday, 2026). The biographer of American luminaries Ben Franklin, Andrew Jackson, U.S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and Reagan, turns his attention to Washington, from his early military career in the French and Indian War and his rise among the Virginia gentry, to his leadership during the American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention, to his reluctant return to public service as the first president of the United States.

S10E1 Podcast: National Treasure: The Declaration of Independence

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As part of GHS’s ongoing US250 commemoration—and just in time for July 4—Stan’s guest is author and historian Michael Auslin, talking about his new book, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2026), the inspiring story of the Declaration from the Philadelphia boardinghouse where Jefferson drafted it to its removal from Washington in 1814 to its evacuation to Fort Knox during World War II, its ink fading until it was painstakingly preserved and enshrined. Through it all, Jefferson’s words have inspired immigrants to become American and fueled a multitude of causes, from abolitionists to suffragists and Civil Rights leaders to groups waging war on the US government. As Jefferson hoped, the Declaration became a beacon to the world. But what lessons should we take from the Declaration today?

S9E22 Podcast: The Imperial Presidency

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As part of GHS’s ongoing US250 commemoration, Stan and GHS President & CEO Todd Groce discuss Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s historical classic, The Imperial Presidency, first published in 1973. Writing In the shadow of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, Schlesinger ominously argued that the presidency had become uncontrollable, king-like, and unaccountable to Congress or the people, exceeding its Constitutional authority in war-making and foreign policy, governing instead through executive orders and secrecy, ultimately threatening American democracy.

S9E21 Podcast: George Washington, Slavery, and American Memory

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Stan’s guest this week is historian John Garrison Marks, discussing his new book, Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), which tells the story of Americans’ long struggle to come to terms with Washington’s legacy of slavery. He traces how politicians, abolitionists, educators, activists, Washington’s former slaves and their descendants, and others have remembered, forgotten, and manipulated slavery’s place in Washington’s story, and how they have wielded versions of that story in the political and cultural fights of their time. Marks shows how generational struggles over our collective memory of Washington and slavery have always been part of a bigger conversation about defining the United States and its people.