In its 41 years of existence, the Southeastern Guide Dogs organization in Palmetto, Florida, has created over 3,000 human-guide dog pairs. In 2006 they launched their program to help military veterans. One of the first things you learn if you take a tour of their facilities is: "We rely 100% on private donations. No government money is involved." Titus Herman, CEO of Southeastern Guide Dogs, has led the organization since 2008. We asked him to tell us their story. Learn more about your ad choice...
Feb 21, 2023•56 min
Historian Robert Kagan has been writing about foreign affairs for most of his 64 years. The first book in his planned trilogy on American foreign policy was published in 2006 and focused on U.S. history before the founding up to the Spanish-American War. Mr. Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has just completed the second book in the trilogy titled "The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941." He, in conclusion, writes: "Americans have complex at...
Feb 14, 2023•1 hr 10 min
In our most recent podcast, Roger Parloff gave us an inside look at the Proud Boys trial which has been underway in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia since January 12th. In this follow-up to Mr. Parloff, we asked Dr. Megan Squire, a computer scientist, how she applies data science techniques to track and expose what she calls "networks of hate and extremism" online. She has studied the Proud Boys since 2017. Dr. Squire recently joined the Southern Poverty Law Center to continue...
Feb 07, 2023•1 hr 4 min
In the two years since January 6, 2021, close to 1000 people have been charged with federal crimes relating to the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The legal process used by the federal justice system to deal with these cases is complicated and often out of sight to the American people. Attorney and journalist Roger Parloff, senior editor at Lawfare, has been live tweeting the trials of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys over the past several weeks. We asked him to explain to us, in some detail, how it ...
Jan 31, 2023•1 hr 14 min
The language of 2023: "threat to democracy," "Antifa," "Stop the Steal," "fascism," "Proud Boys," "Brexit," "artificial intelligence," "BleachBit." Who understands all this? Where does the language come from? We asked British author Dorian Lynskey, our guest this week, to help us. His latest book is titled "The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984." In the introduction, Lynskey writes that "The phrases and concepts that Orwell minted have become essential fixtures of politica...
Jan 24, 2023•1 hr 7 min
In Yale history professor Beverly Gage's 837-page cradle-to-grave biography of J. Edgar Hoover, she writes, "I do not count myself among Hoover's admirers." However, in the introduction, she says her book "G-Man" is less about judging him than about understanding him. Hoover ran the FBI for 48 years until he died at age 77 in 1972. Prof. Gage, who did her undergraduate work at Yale and received her Ph.D. from Columbia, writes that "Hoover emerged as one of history's great villains. Perhaps the m...
Jan 17, 2023•1 hr 5 min
Back in the period between June to November of 1962, Paul Gregory reportedly knew Lee and Marina Oswald better than anyone else. Two hours after President Kennedy's assassination, Mr. Gregory, then a student at the University of Oklahoma, was watching television and saw members of the Dallas police escorting a suspect into police headquarters. Paul Gregory said out loud, "I know that man," meaning Lee Harvey Oswald. Sixty years later he has written a book about his friendship with the Oswalds an...
Jan 10, 2023•1 hr 7 min
Steve Kornacki, our guest this week, is the national political correspondent for NBC News. You see him often around campaigns and election nights in front of what the network calls the "Big Board." He recently finished a 7-part podcast series called "The Revolution with Steve Kornacki." It's the story of how the Republicans took over the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. That happened in 1994 and was organized and led by former Georgia congressman and Speaker of the H...
Jan 03, 2023•1 hr 11 min
Gordon Chang, our guest this week, is a well-known opinion writer, book author, and graduate of Cornell Law School. His father was born in China. His mother is of Scottish ancestry. Gordon Chang was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up 25 miles outside of New York City. At Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, he was president of his class. Mr. Chang spent almost two decades in China, where he practiced international law. In the past 20 years, he has appeared regularly in the Am...
Dec 27, 2022•1 hr 9 min
On the cover of Bloomberg reporter Mark Bergen's most recent book, "Like, Comment, Subscribe," it says it will take the reader "Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination." Mr. Bergen, our guest this week, has reported on Google for the past seven years. YouTube was bought by Google in 2014 for $1.6 billion. In the prologue to the book, Bergen reports that more than 2 billion people visit YouTube every month, making it the second most visited search engine on Earth, second only to Google....
Dec 20, 2022•1 hr 9 min
The title of Dartmouth history professor Matthew Delmont's latest book is "Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad." Prof. Delmont, our guest this week, writes in his introduction that: "Nearly everything about the war – the start and end dates, geography, vital military roles, home front, and international implications – looks different form the African American perspective." He points out that ultimately, over one million Black men and women ...
Dec 13, 2022•1 hr 5 min
A couple of weeks ago, the conservative Heritage Foundation published its 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength. At that time, we discussed the Index's findings with the editor, Dakota Wood. The Heritage study concluded that the current U.S. military is at significant risk of not being able to meet the demands of a single major regional conflict. We wanted another point of view on the current U.S. military posture. So this week, we asked longtime observer and critic of the U.S. military procureme...
Dec 06, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Adam Hochschild, in his new book "American Midnight," writes about what he says is left out of the typical high school American history book, especially when the subject is the United States during and immediately after World War One. "This book is about what's missing," writes Hochschild, "It's a story of mass imprisonments, torture, vigilante violence, censorship, killings of Black Americans, and far more that is not marked by commemorative plaques, museum exhibits, or Ken Burns documentaries....
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr 7 min
To people who know him well, Mark Dimunation is, first and foremost, an accomplished storyteller. Second and not least, he has been for twenty-five years the chief of the Library of Congress' Rare Book and Special Collections Division. The library has over 850,000 items in the collection, including Charles Dickens' walking stick, the Bay Psalm Book, published in 1640, and the contents in Abraham Lincoln's pockets on the night he was assassinated. Mark Dimunation, our guest this week, has a lot m...
Nov 22, 2022•1 hr 8 min
Stacy Schiff has written books about Benjamin Franklin, Cleopatra, and the Witches of Salem. And now it's Samuel Adams, a Massachusetts man Thomas Jefferson called the Father of the American Revolution. Stacy Schiff, appropriately born in Adams, Massachusetts, is our guest this week. Her book is titled "The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams." Mr. Adams was born in Boston and lived for 81 years from 1722 to 1803. He's also been called the most Puritan and the most populist of the American Founders. If ...
Nov 15, 2022•2 hr 8 min
In October, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, released its 578-page 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength. Retired Marine Lt. Col. Dakota Wood edited the Index, which includes essays and analysis from over 16 experts chosen by the Heritage Foundation. The introduction to the Index concludes: "America’s leadership role remains in question, and its security interests are under substantial pressure. Challenges continue to grow, long-standing allies are not what they once were, and the U.S. ...
Nov 08, 2022•1 hr 18 min
At age 37, Vivek Ramaswamy has already built and sold several companies. Before he began his career as an entrepreneur, he managed to serve as the valedictorian of his 2003 senior class at St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was a nationally ranked junior tennis player. Then there was a Harvard biology degree and graduation from Yale Law School. Ramaswamy has written two books. His latest is "Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence." ...
Nov 01, 2022•1 hr 7 min
"The Great Stewardess Rebellion" is about the women who changed the working conditions for stewardesses in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The author, Nell Wulfhart wrote the New York Times "Carry-On" column from 2016 to 2019. In the introduction to her book, Ms. Wulfhart writes that: "It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that in the 1960s the airplane cabin was the most sexist workplace in America." Since then, she adds, the "flight attendants' achievements are, even from today's persp...
Oct 25, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Brad Snyder offers a full and fascinating portrait of the life and legacy of Felix Frankfurter. This is the biography of an Austrian Jewish immigrant who arrived in the United States at age eleven speaking, not a word of English, who by age twenty-six befriended former president Theodore Roosevelt, and who by age fifty was one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most trusted advisers. It is the story of a man devoted to democratic ideals, a natural orator and often overbearing justice, whose passion allowed...
Oct 18, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Charles Kupchan is a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. He has served on the National Security Council for both the Clinton and Obama White Houses. Prof. Kupchan has a doctorate and a master's degree from Oxford and an undergraduate degree from Harvard. He is the author of 10 books. His latest is titled "Isolationism: A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World." We asked Prof. Kupchan to appear on the podcast to give his perspective on Vladimir Putin...
Oct 11, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Jay Gould revolutionized the world of finance in the 19th century. In “American Rascal,” Greg Steinmetz tells his story. Jay Gould was a brilliant strategist in any scrap over money. For a good example of Mr. Gould’s cunning, consider how he outgeneraled his fellow robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt in what might be called the Bovine War. The former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and current partner at a money management firm in New York City sheds light on the life of Gould and his abiliti...
Oct 04, 2022•1 hr
Author Troy Senik says in his new book, "A Man of Iron," that Grover Cleveland was the self-made, scrupulously honest man Americans often say they want as their president. President Cleveland served two nonconsecutive terms as commander and chief, a term as Governor of New York, and even as sheriff in western New York's Erie County. In this episode, Mr. Senik, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, discusses Cleveland's political career. According to Mr. Senik President Cleveland became the m...
Sep 27, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Judy Shelton has been appearing on C-SPAN since 1989 and in this edition of the Booknotes+ podcast, she talks about the role of the Federal Reserve in our economy. . Her first visit was on Booknotes to discuss her book titled "The Coming Soviet Crash." During the past 33 years since her first appearance on C-SPAN, Judy Shelton has been in and out of politics. She worked for a time with three presidential candidates, including Bob Dole, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump. It was President Trump who nom...
Sep 20, 2022•1 hr 6 min
John Locke was born on August 29, 1632, in Sommerset, England. He lived for 72 years. University of Montana professor Claire Arcenas, in her new book, calls him "America's Philosopher." She writes in the preface: "Though he never set foot on America soil and died long before the creation of the United States, John Locke stands and has always stood at the center of American intellectual life." Prof. Arcenas focuses on how Locke has captivated our attention for three centuries and has had an unpar...
Sep 13, 2022•1 hr 8 min
On August 16, 1977, 45 years ago, Elvis Presley died at age 42. The autopsy found eight different drugs in his body. Just seven years earlier, Presley was with Richard Nixon in the Oval Office to offer his assistance in fighting the war on drugs. He asked for a special agent badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. A copy of the photo of President Nixon and Elvis on that occasion is the most requested from the National Archives. Our guest, cultural journalist Alanna Nash, has spen...
Sep 06, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Hey all you teachers and all you parents, and all you professors and all you students: Season #2 of the C-SPAN in the Classroom podcast drops this fall! Whether you're mowing the yard, on a peaceful weekend drive, or just relaxing on the couch with your favorite blanket, make sure to tune in to the first episode of Season #2 of C-SPAN in the Classroom on September 10th, available at c-span.org, on the free C-SPAN Now app, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure to like, subscribe, and shar...
Sep 05, 2022•4 min
Ron Liebman and Tim Baker are former assistant U.S. attorneys who were part of the prosecution team that brought down Vice President Spiro Agnew on October 10, 1973. On that day, Mr. Agnew appeared before the federal court in Baltimore and pleaded "no contest" to one felony charge for tax evasion in 1967. Messrs. Liebman and Baker talked about their role as the case unfolded. Agnew was fined $10,000 and placed on three years of unsupervised probation. This conversation was originally recorded in...
Aug 30, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Terence Smith's media career went from the Stamford Advocate the New York Times, then to CBS News, and finally the PBS Newshour. In his short memoir of his working life, titled "Four Wars, Five Presidents," Terrence Smith writes: "There is a great deal of hand-wringing these days about the news business. Young people don’t read, don’t know anything beyond what they see on their screen, and don’t see the value of independent knowledge as long as they have Google and can look it up. The sky, we ar...
Aug 23, 2022•1 hr 2 min
David Kertzer has studied and written about Italy, the Catholic Church, Nazism, communism, and fascism for over 40 years. His latest of 13 books is about the secret history of Pope Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler. It's titled "The Pope at War." In 2020, Pius XII's archives were finally open in the Vatican. Brown University professor Kertzer, according to Random House, his publisher, "paints a new, dramatic portrait of what the pope did and did not do as war enveloped the continent and as the Naz...
Aug 16, 2022•1 hr 11 min
In the history of Pulitzer Prizes and the Oscars, very few winners have turned down these awards. One of those who did was a famous Armenian-American, a writer from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. His name was William Saroyan. He turned down the Pulitzer for the drama called "The Time of Your Life" in 1940. Saroyan said he was opposed in principle to awards in the arts and was quoted as saying "such arts awards vitiate and embarrass art at its very source." His son Aram, a well-known poet in his own ri...
Aug 09, 2022•1 hr 14 min
