New podcast series explores the meaning of America in the 250th anniversary year
The Last Best Hope? Series 16 explores the meaning of America in the 250th anniversary year.
As the US gears up for the 250th anniversary celebrations of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July, the RAI’s podcast, The Last Best Hope?, returns for our 16th series on 13 May. As always, each episode uses history to explore what makes America different.
Presenter Adam Smith explains, “We always try to examine that endlessly fascinating question: what makes America distinctive? The title of the podcast is a quote from Abraham Lincoln, who famously called the United States the ‘last best hope of earth’. This captures the essence of the extraordinary claims to exceptionalism that have been made about America, and continue to be made.”
In this series, Adam talks to the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland about the peculiar place of America in the British political imagination. Are Americans of us, or apart from us? Adam and Jonathan discuss why America has stimulated envy, resentment, condescension, and neediness, and why it has generated divisions – perhaps because America has so often clarified or distorted our understanding of ourselves.
Adam also travels to Richmond, Virginia, and talks to the Civil War historian Caroline E. Janney, about the white Southerners of the 1860s who revered the Declaration of Independence even as they invoked it to break up the Union.
On the eve of the World Cup, Adam explores how soccer went from the margins to the mainstream in America. And we discuss the fight over who owns the celebrations of the 250th anniversary and asks political scientist James Morone and historian Frank Cogliano whether there is any chance of a unifying celebration in such a bitterly polarised moment.
Nearly a hundred earlier episodes of The Last Best Hope? sit in the back catalogue. In this anniversary year, please check out the two-part documentary on The Declaration of Independence.
The Last Best Hope? is available wherever you get your podcasts.
