The RAI’s podcast, The Last Best Hope?, is returning for its 14th series. With nearly half a million downloads to date and frequently in the top 10 UK History podcast charts, The Last Best Hope explores how history shapes contemporary America. In each story-filled episode, RAI Director Adam Smith talks to leading historians, political scientists and public figures with the aim of making academic research accessible and engaging. The podcast’s title is a quote from Abraham Lincoln, who called America “the last best hope of earth”, and the podcast explores this powerful, audacious claim about the universal mission of the United States from multiple angles. What makes America different? How has American history – and American divisions -- been shaped by the pursuit of the contested ideals of equality and liberty?
It's been almost a year since The Last Best Hope aired, and in that time America has changed dramatically. So in the new series we’ll be attempting to put Trump’s foreign policy in a historical context, we’ll be discussing the enduring myth of the frontier, and asking how history will judge Joe Biden. And in a special two-part documentary, we’ll return to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered in 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, and ask what significance it still has at another moment of national crisis.
The first episode, available on 15th October, explores the vital and contested role of journalism in democracy. It’s a fascinating discussion with Tom Arnold-Forster, Kinder Career Development Fellow at the RAI and author of Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography [add link] and Marty Baron, multiple-Pulitzer-winning former editor of the Washington Post.
You can listen wherever you get your podcast. Follows the links here or search for The Last Best Hope podcast.
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