Support for The Last Best Hope? Podcast

We are delighted to announce that a generous gift will enable the RAI’s podcast, The Last Best Hope?, to continue for at least another five years.

The donor is Tom Amraoui, a non-practising barrister and philanthropist. Tom matriculated in 1999 at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read for a joint honours degree in Modern History and Politics. He has been fascinated with American politics and history ever since graduating. 

RAI Director Adam Smith launched The Last Best Hope? in 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a way of continuing the RAI’s public engagement programming despite the lockdown. The purpose of the podcast is to explore, through interviews and scripted documentaries, what makes America different. The title is a quote from Abraham Lincoln, who called the United States “the last best hope of earth," and in each story-filled episode, we ask how America’s sense of itself has shaped the present. In a world in which there seems to be an ever-greater urgency to understand what America is doing and where it’s going, our podcast aims to provide thoughtful, evidence-based analysis, from the outside in. 

Six years and 75 episodes after it began, the podcast now attracts 20,000 listeners per episode. The most downloaded episode is 'The Geordie South: How Northumbrians Shaped Appalachia', from June 2023 in which Adam talked to Dan Jackson, the great historian of Northeast England. The most popular episodes in the most recent series were the two-part exploration of 'Why the Gettysburg Address Matters?'

The next series of the podcast, which includes an interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton and a two-part documentary on the Declaration of Independence, will go live on 11 February. 

The RAI is immensely grateful for Tom’s kind donation, which will cover the production costs of the podcast for five years

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