Category Archives: Politics

S9E12 Podcast: Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters

As part of GHS’s ongoing commemoration of the US250, Stan’s guest this week is author and historian Edward J. Larson, discussing his new book, Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters (WW Norton, 2026). At the beginning of 1776, virtually no one in the American colonies advocated for independence: Americans based their grievances against Parliament on their rights as British subjects. By the mid-point of 1776, the United States was an independent republic. How did it happen, why did they choose a republic and not another king, and what does it mean for us now, 250 years later?

S9E6 Podcast: Tom Johnson: From LBJ to CNN

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Stan’s guest this week is Georgia native and journalist Tom Johnson, whose remarkable career took him from Macon, where he worked for legendary newspaperman Peyton Anderson, to UGA’s Grady College of Journalism, to White House Fellow during President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, to publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and finally as president of CNN during the crucial years of the 1990s during the invasion of Kuwait and the fall of the Soviet Union. Tom talks about his new memoir, Driven: A Life in Public Service and Journalism from LBJ to CNN, published this month by the University of Georgia Press.

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S8E11 Podcast: Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn

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This week Stan talks to Christopher Cox, Senior Scholar in Residence at the University of California, Irvine, about his new book, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, published in 2024 by Simon & Schuster. Cox’s focus is on Wilson’s role in the movements for women’s suffrage and racial equality, and his open hostility to both. This is a riveting, beautifully written reassessment of the heroes who fought so hard for decades to pass the Susan B. Anthony Amendment more than a century ago—and Wilson’s legacy in our own day.

S8E8 Podcast: John Lewis: A Life

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Stan’s guest this week is historian and journalist David Greenberg of Rutgers University, talking about his new tour-de-force biography of Civil Rights icon and longtime Georgia Congressman, John Lewis: A Life, published by Simon & Schuster. Greenberg interviewed Lewis and 275 others, including Presidents Clinton and Obama, about Lewis’s rise from Alabama poverty to Bloody Sunday to public servant, the man deemed the Moral Conscience of the Congress.

S8E6 Podcast: “That’s Not Who We Are”—Or is it? An Interview with Pulitzer Prize Winner Steven Hahn

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Stan interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn about his latest book, Illiberal America: A History, which argues that what happened on January 6, 2021, was not an aberration but has deep roots in the American past.