Rebroadcast: Historian Jon Grinspan on the last time Americans fought for democracy
This rebroadcast originally aired on December 9, 2021.
Historian Jon Grinspan travels across the country to talk to Americans of all kinds.
“Talking to people, the thing they kept coming back to was that it didn’t feel normal to them,” he says.
The “it” being the overwhelming anger and divisiveness in American politics right now.
But Grinspan says, that’s not new:
“If you look at how politics was for most of American history, especially the late 1800s, the things that we are worried about today, the kind of anger, the rage, the frustration … [was] more severe than what we know today.”
Today, On Point: Historian Jon Grinspan on how Americans fought for their own democracy, before.
Guests
Jon Grinspan, curator of political history at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Author of “The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy.”
, On Point news analyst. ()
