With political gridlock in Washington DC at an all time high, government shutdowns–or the threat of them–have become a routine occurrence. National parks close. Federal paychecks stop going out. The National Institute of Health stops admitting new patients. How did we get to the point where it has become normal for the US Government to halt in its tracks? The history, in this case, is quite recent.

In the live finale of season 2 of our podcast The Past, the Promise, the Presidency: Presidential Crises we invited three special guests to discuss the first government shutdowns of the 1990s, the political showdowns between Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, and what the political environment of the 1990s can tell us about gridlock in Washington today.

Dr. Julian Zelizer, a Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, CNN Political Analyst, and author of Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.

Dr. Leah Wright Rigueur, the SNF Agora Institute Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the award-winning study, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power.

Dr. Sharron Wilkins Conrad, one of your favorite voices from season one,  The Past, The Promise, The Presidency: Race and the American Legacy. Now, she is joining us from Tarrant County College, where she is an Associate Professor of History.

This week on The Past, The Promise, The Presidency, we are exploring a tragic national crisis that hits very close to home in 2021. The crisis of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Having lived through two years of a new coronavirus pandemic, we all intimately understand just how confusing and terrifying it can be for patients, doctors, and yes, presidents to confront a new and deadly disease. One of unknown origin, transmission, and incubation. Indeed, the only thing doctors could say with real confidence in the early 1980s about the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is that those who got it died.

We have gathered three guests to help us understand the Reagan Administration’s lethargic response during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. We also explore the key roles of patients, activists, and healthcare workers who pushed the US Government to do more to combat the AIDS epidemic.

First we spoke to Dr. David Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize winner, and director of Division of Medical Humanities at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and a professor in the NYU Department of History.

We then spoke to Dr. John Graybill an infectious disease specialist who was quite literally on the front lines of the first battles against this new virus in the early 1980s.

And finally, we spoke to Dr. Jennifer Brier, Professor of History and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. An award-winning public historian and activist, she is the author, among other works, of Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis.

Together they helped us understand a moment when public health ran headlong into presidential politics.

Maybe that sounds familiar. All right, let's get to it.

This week's crisis could have ended with the world in a giant blaze of nuclear flame, but it didn't. In fact, it's an example of how a crisis can be handled so effectively, that most people don't even remember it as a crisis. This week, we are talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

It's November, 1989. Reagan famously delivered his "tear down this wall" speech in 1987, but West and East Berlin are as divided as ever. In the summer of 1989, Chinese military forces had mowed down peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square. Horrified by the images of violence, American leaders, and George H.W. Bush in particular, were eager to avoid provoking a similar crackdown in Eastern Europe.

The stakes couldn't have been higher. Both sides were armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over, and they had itchy trigger fingers.

Then, unexpectedly, at a press conference, a mid-level bureaucrat ordered an enormous change in policy. He accidentally announced that residents would be allowed to leave East Germany. Word spread like wildfire. Within hours, thousands of residents were lined up at the gates to cross into West Berlin.

Why didn't this moment turn into one of violence and bloodshed? What were the repercussions of the collapse of a global superpower and its economic system? How might things have gone differently?

To answer these questions, we have two dynamite guests. First, we have a voice that you will probably recognize. Our podcast host, Jeffrey Engel. We then spoke to Dr. Mary Sarotte, who is the Kravis Professor of Historical Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Welcome to The Past, The Promise, The Presidency Season II, Episode VI: The Bonus Army & The 1932 March on Washington.

This Veteran’s Day, we are examining the time that World War I veterans organized their own March on Washington.

Most Americans associate the Great Depression with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But it was Herbert Hoover who was in office in 1932 when a group of World War I veterans decided to organize a March on Washington to demand an early payment of their bonus checks for serving in the military during WWI.

In 1932, the Great Depression was at its worst. Approximately one in four American workers unemployed. After three plus years of record-setting unemployment, poverty, hunger, and homelessness, many Americans were at a breaking point. WWI veterans, in particular, were furious that Herbert Hoover had bailed out the banks but he refused to sign a bill that would deliver their WWI bonus payment’s early. But Hoover did not respond with empathy. Instead, he sent federal troops to clear the protesters. Under the leadership of Douglas MacArthur, American soldiers used tanks, tear gas and yes, bullets to remove a gathering of American wartime veterans from the National Mall.

We first spoke to Eric Rauchway of the University of California Davis. He is one of the leading scholars of the New Deal, the Depression and the political history between the world wars. Our second historian also ranks at the top of any list of depression era experts, David Kennedy, the Donald J McLachlan professor of history emeritus of Stanford University. Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his history, Freedom from Fear: the American People in Depression and War.

Welcome to The Past, The Promise, The Presidency Season II, Episode V: Teddy Roosevelt & The Great Coal Strike of 1902. 

In 1902, miners under the leadership of John Mitchell and the United Mine Workers went on strike to protest long hours, low pay, and unsafe working conditions. Mine operators and owners were determined not to concede to the miners' demands or to recognize their right to organize as workers. With winter approaching, millions of Americans faced freezing conditions and would be unable to heat their homes without the anthracite coal that their work provided.

Enter Theodore Roosevelt, the young, active president eager to put an end to the conflict and to make his mark on the presidency. T.R. invited both Mitchell and the mine operators to a private conference in the oval office. The meeting itself was a sign of Mitchell and the mine workers’ legitimacy, and he could afford to be accommodating and pleasant. The coal operators, on the other hand, resented T.R.'s interference, refuse to compromise and swore they'd produce enough coal for the nation's needs that winter without the help of Roosevelt or the unionizing coal workers.

When the operators failed to follow through on that promise, and with Americans increasingly cold and anxious as a consequence, T.R. sprung into action once more. He proposed an independent commission to resolve the dispute and turned to his sometimes friend, sometimes foe, banker JP Morgan, to pressure the mine operators into agreeing to the commission.

What did the commission decide and did both sides agree to the terms?

What can the Great Coal Strike of 1902 teach us about the power of the president to intervene in disputes between unions and big business?

First we chatted with Susan Berfield, an award winning writer and reporter for Bloomberg. She's also the author of The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and the Battle to Transform American Capitalism. We then spoke with Michael Cullinane, a professor at the University of Roehampton and the author of Theodore Roosevelt's Ghost: The History and Memory of an American Icon.

Welcome to The Past, The Promise, The Presidency: Ulysses S. Grant and the Ku Klux Klan Act. In our previous episode on Bleeding Kansas and the Utah War, we discussed the intense violence and bloodshed that led up to the cataclysmic wrenching of the Union in half during the Civil War.

But what happened after the Union shattered? It's not easy to put the pieces of national unity back together after a civil war, nor was it a simple task to change the hearts and minds of people who were willing to die to defend slavery and white supremacy.

After the passage of the 15th amendment in 1870, African-American men in the South eagerly made the most of their new right to vote and elected many Black representatives to state and local governments.

In response, white supremacists organized into local chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, which waged vicious campaigns of violence, murder, and destruction to intimidate Black Americans and other Republicans that supported their right to vote. After investigators discovered the extent of the KKK’s reign of terror, President Grant asked Congress to pass legislation that gave him additional powers to address the threat on the ground.

Congress complied in 1871 and passed the Ku Klux Klan Act. Grant then issued a warning to Southern states, but especially to specific counties in South Carolina, that if they didn't stop their campaign of terror, he would declare martial law. Five days later, he fulfilled that promise and suspended Habeas Corpus in nine South Carolina counties. Grant sent in troops to arrest KKK members and deployed US Attorneys to try cases against the Klan.

These efforts were remarkably effective, but just a year later, Grant backed away from his efforts to protect civil liberties.

Why did Grant take such decisive action? And then why did he stop?
What were the motivations behind his handling of this crisis?
How did the public respond to the Ku Klux Klan Act?
How does this crisis inform our current moment?

We spoke with two fantastic guests. First, we spoke with Dr. Yohuru Williams, who is the Distinguished University Chair and Professor of History and Founding Director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas.

We then talked to Dr. Megan Kate Nelson, a writer, historian, and expert on the Civil War and the United States West. Her most recent book, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize.

This week on The Past, The Promise, The Presidency: Presidential Crises, we took a look at two crises from the 1850s: the violent struggle between pro and anti-slavery factions over the political fortunes of future states, known as "Bleeding Kansas," and the less well-known fight between federal authorities, president James Buchanan in particular, and Mormon leaders out of Utah.

 To put the coming Civil War into context and better understand these intertwined crises of federal expansion in the 1850s, we spoke with professor Sarah Barringer-Gordon--Sally, to her friends--the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Barringer-Gordon is one of the nation's experts on questions of constitutional religious freedoms. We then turned to professor Kellie Carter Jackson, who teaches in the department of Africana studies at Wellesley college. Dr. Carter Jackson’s work focuses on Black abolitionists and the role of violence in the ongoing battle for slavery’s abolition. 

This week on The Past, The Promise, The Presidency: Presidential Crises we examine how James and Dolley Madison responded to The War of 1812, often referred to by both contemporaries and historians as the "Second War of Independence."

Arriving at the White House, British troops thoroughly enjoyed the feast and fine wine before systematically setting fire to the building. They then turned their attention to the Capitol building, the Library of Congress, and every other public building in the city. Before long, most of the city was ablaze. It was only saved by the fateful intervention of a hurricane level storm that doused the flames.

By any definition, having your capital burned by foreign troops ranks as a crisis. So, how did the United States get into another war with Britain so soon after establishing its independence? How did President Madison, the third president and the first to lead the country during a full-fledged war, respond to this crisis? How did the country and the world respond to the outcome of the crisis and the war? And finally, what was First Lady Dolley Madison's role in the crisis?

Our first topic this season is our first president, George Washington, father of the country, general, surveyor, statesman, slave owner, whiskey distiller, debtor, and a man whose dental history every poor kid with braces hears about.

Washington was the first man to hold the office, of course, and some still argue that he was the best. Everyone agrees that he set the standard by which all other presidents would be judged. Today, we will explore the presidency of George Washington and his biggest challenge: the creation of the presidency itself.