Think Back

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Ranking history

About the show

Latest episodes

• Abraham Lincoln, Party Boss

  September 29, 2026 · 53 min

  Historian Matthew Pinsker’s new book, Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln, portrays the 16th president as an ambitious and effective party leader who organized voters, courted donors, dug up dirt on opponents, and knew when…

• The Terrifying Power of the US Border Patrol

  September 2, 2026 · 1 hr 2 min

  Reece Jones has spent his career studying borders. His 2022 book Nobody Is Protected argues that for its entire century-long existence the US Border Patrol has been writing its own rules. Jones, a geographer at the University of Hawaii…

• Decoding the Declaration

  June 30, 2026 · 51 min

  “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations” King George III’s crimes against the colonists fill most of the Declaration of Independence. Yet almost nobody reads that part of the famous document. Robert G. Parkinson is a historian at…

• 'Badass' Harriet Tubman's Most Daring Deed

  June 2, 2026 · 51 min

  Has the Civil War’s single largest emancipation event been hiding in plain sight? In this episode of Think Back, I speak with historian Edda L. Fields-Black about her book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom…

• What the Frontier Myth Gets Wrong—and Why It Matters

  April 23, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min

  Why does the frontier myth refuse to die? In this episode of Think Back, I speak with historian and writer Megan Kate Nelson about her new book The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. The book takes direct aim at…

• The Unfinished Business of 1776

  March 25, 2026 · 57 min

  In this episode of Think Back, I speak with historian Thomas Richards Jr. about his new book The Unfinished Business of 1776: Why the American Revolution Never Ended. Richards opens with a deliberately provocative contrast: was the…

• How Slavery Ended

  February 24, 2026 · 37 min

  In this episode of Think Back, I talk with historian Tom Zoellner about his new book The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War. We dig into a dimension of emancipation that often gets overshadowed by…

• The Forgotten Movement for a Black State

  January 28, 2026 · 51 min

  This episode looks at one of the strangest political experiments in American history: a late-nineteenth-century movement to create an officially Black state in the land that would become Oklahoma. At its center was Edward McCabe, a…