Yale University History Professor and Prize winning author, Greg Grandin, has published widely on US Foreign Policy, the Cold War, and Latin American politics in the Nation, New York Times, Harpers and the London Review of Books.
His books include: THE EMPIRE OF NECESSITY: SLAVERY, FREEDOM AND DECEPTION IN THE NEW WORLD; EMPIRE’S WORKSHOP: LATIN AMERICA, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE MAKING OF AN IMPERIAL REPUBLIC; FORDLANDIA: THE RISE AND FALL OF HENRY FORD’S FORGOTTEN JUNGLE CITY; THE END OF THE MYTH: FROM THE FRONTIER TO THE BORDER WALL IN THE MIND OF AMERICA, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
His latest book is AMERICA, AMÉRICA: A NEW HISTORY OF THE NEW WORLD, published by Penguin Press. We spoke with him on May 20, 2025.
University of Michigan Law Professor, Leah Litman teaches and writes on constitutional law, federal courts, and federal post-conviction review. Her research examines unidentified and implicit values that are used to structure the legal system, the federal courts, and the legal profession. With her fellow law professors, Kate Shaw and Melissa Murray, she co-hosts the popular podcast, Strict Scrutiny, providing in-depth and irreverent analysis of the Supreme Court – its cases, culture, and personalities.
Her book, LAWLESS: HOW THE SUPREME COURT RUNS ON CONSERVATIVE GRIEVANCE, FRINGE THEORIES, AND BAD VIBES, is published by Atria/One Signal Publishers. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse wrote this: “Lawless is a lively narration of how big special interests captured the Supreme Court and redeployed it to deliver on the least popular policy planks of the Republican Party. Litman ably documents the Court’s devolution, as it was yoked into service to a political party and a billionaire class.” We spoke with her on May 6, 2025.
Paul Pierson is the UC Berkeley John Gross Endowed Chair of Political Science. He was our guest in 2022 to comment on the midterm election and in 2020 when his book, co-authored with Jacob Hacker, LET THEM EAT TWEETS: HOW THE RIGHT RULES IN AN AGE OF EXTREME INEQUALITY, was published. They also collaborated on the books, WINNER TAKE ALL POLITICS; and AMERICAN AMNESIA: HOW THE WAR ON GOVERNMENT LED US TO FORGET WHAT MADE AMERICA PROSPER.
We were curious to learn what he was thinking of the first 90 days of the second Trump administration. We spoke with him first via Skype on April 21st, and when Skype refused to function half way through, he graciously agreed to another interview via FaceTime on April 22nd.
Susanne Mueller Redwood is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Montana State University. Her research focuses on the international dimensions of authoritarianism. She investigates the role that economic cooperation plays in the survival and breakdown of authoritarian regimes. Her work has analyzed the role of trade, central banking, and currency politics under dictatorship, and has been published in different outlets, including the Review of International Political Economy and Cambridge University Press.
The broadcast of this Forthright Radio program ended with an interview by The Kyiv Independent’s Chris York with U.S. historian and author, Marci Shore, who had announced that she — along with her husband, historian Timothy Snyder, and colleague Jason Stanley — would be leaving their posts at Yale University and moving to Canada to teach at the University of Toronto. It ended with John Lithgow‘s reading of Timothy Snyder‘s 20 Lessons on Tyranny. Due to copyright issues, we do not include them in this recording, however they can be accessed here:
This edition of Forthright Radio is in two segments. In the first part, award-winning author, Lydia Reeder, discusses her latest book, THE CURE FOR WOMEN: DR. MARY PUTNAM JACOBI AND THE CHALLENGE TO VICTORIAN MEDICINE THAT CHANGED WOMEN’S LIVES FOREVER, published by St. Martin’s Press. It explores the pseudoscience that ties women’s health issues to their reproductive biology, and highlights the women doctors, scientists and suffragists, particularly Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, who fought back against these attempts to control women’s bodies and lives. At the end of her book, she quotes Ely Van De Warker, who wrote, “A woman’s ovaries belong to the Commonwealth; she is merely their custodian.”
We spoke with Lydia Reeder via Skype on March 7th, 2025.
Mary Putnam Kennedy
Then, in our second segment, we speak with Pagan Kennedy about her latest book, THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE RAPE KIT: A TRUE CRIME STORY. Our interview with Pagan begins at 25:50.
Dana Frank, Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a longtime historian of labor, women, and social movements in the US and beyond. For many years she has worked on human rights and US policy in Honduras. She has been an expert witness testifying in the US Congress, The House of Commons in The Canadian Parliament, as well as the CA Legislature.
Among her seven books are Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism; The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup; and, with Robin D.G. Kelly and Howard Zinn, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century.
Her work has been published in diverse outlets ranging from the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, to Labor Notes, The Nation, The Baffler, The Jacobin, The Progressive, to Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, to mention just a few, as well as in many scholarly publications.
Her latest book is WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION? STORIES OF ORDINARY PEOPLE & COLLECTIVE ACTION IN HARD TIMES, published by Beacon Press.
We spoke with her on February 24, 2025, the third anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, via Skype from her home in Santa Cruz, CA.
Cory Doctorow is a multiple awards winning author, blogger, critic and activist. He has co-founded an open software company, been the European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and he helped establish their Open Rights Group. When he left the blog site, Boing Boing after 19 years of co-ownership, MetaFilter called it “the equivalent of the Beatles breaking up for the blog world.” He metablogs currently at pluralistic.net. Cory Doctorow popularized the term “metacrap” and created the neologism, “enshitification,” which the FCC does not allow us to use on the air, which we replaced with “enpoopification,” defined as “the process of degradation of an online environment caused by greed.” He is a prolific author in many genres, fiction and nonfiction. His nonfiction books include: THE INTERNET CON: HOW TO SEIZE THE MEANS OF COMPUTATON; CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM: HOW BIG TECH AND BIG CONTENT CAPTURED CREATIVE LABOR MARKETS AND HOW WE’LL WIN THEM BACK (written with Rebecca Giblin); and HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM.
His most recent fiction books include THE LOST CAUSE, A NOVEL OF TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION IN OUR POLARIZED FUTURE, which has been described as “A solarpunk, hopepunk novel of the climate emergency, endorsed by Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Rebecca Solnit and Kim Stanley Robinson.” The first of his Martin Hench books, RED TEAM BLUES, which actually features Mendocino County in a small but crucial role, was published in 2023. This was followed by Bezzle, and the third book, which will be published on February 18, 2025, PICKS AND SHOVELS. We spoke with him about it via Skype on February 11, 2025.
Wired Portrait of Cody Doctorow above by Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud (JUCO) 5
On December 18, 2024 in a 6-1 ruling, The Montana Supreme Court upheld District Court Judge Kathy Seeley’s verdict in favor of the 16 Youth Plaintiffs in the Held v State of Montana case. They had sued the state for violations of their rights to a clean and healthful environment under the Montana State Constitution.
Melissa Hornbein Western Environmental Law Center
After the ruling, I invited Western Environmental Law Center attorney, Melissa Hornbein, a member of the plaintiffs’ legal team, and Anne Hedges of the Montana Environmental Information Center, whose lawsuits over the decades were cited by Chief Justice Mike McGrath’s opinion, and who had been an expert witness during the trail.
Anne Hedges Montana Environmental Information Center
Below are links to our coverage during the June 2023 trial, as well as other articles, etc. pertinent to the case and our interview.
Dr. Timothy W. Ryback, PhD is an historian and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. He previously served as the Deputy-Secretary General of the Académie Diplomatique Internationale in Paris, and Director and Vice President of the Salzburg Global Seminar.
Timothy Ryback has written on European history, politics and culture for numerous publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal.
He is the author of numerous books, including Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, which has appeared in more than 25 editions around the world; his book, The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau was a New York Times Notable Book; and Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
His latest book is TAKEOVER: HITLER’S FINAL RISE TO POWER (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024). It explores the final days of the Weimar Republic and its incredibly rapid transformation into the Third Reich of Nazis Germany in just a few months. We discuss it and two of his other books, HITLER’S PRIVATE LIBRARY: THE BOOKS THAT SHAPED HIS LIFE, and HITLER’S FIRST VICTIMS: THE QUEST FOR JUSTICE.
Although there is some disputing it, Mark Twain is generally credited with observing that “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” In researching that quip, I came across this by humorist, Max Beerbohm from 1896. “History,” it has been said, “does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.” How many rhymes can you find in this interview with historian, Timothy Ryback, from his home in Berlin, Germany, recorded via Skype on Dec. 3, 2024?
This edition of Forthright Radio marks the 20th anniversary of the first program that day after Thanksgiving in 2004. I am deeply grateful to Mendocino County Public Broadcasting, KZYXfm, and all the listeners who support community radio, for having given me the opportunity to host and produce Forthright Radio.
Bruce Gourely is an historian specializing in American History and the editor of Church & State magazine, the publication of Washington D.C. based Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He is an award winning author and photographer. Among his nine books are Crucible of Faith and Freedom: Baptists and the American Civil War; Diverging Loyalties: Baptists in Middle Georgia During the American Civil War. He also owns and operates the website, Yellowstone.net.
I recently had the opportunity to hear Bruce Gourely speak right after the recent election, and I immediately invited him to share his thoughts as an historian and a person dedicated to to preserving our First Amendment rights to help prepare us for what will surely be challenging times ahead. We spoke with him on November 19th, 2024 in the Beyond the Deep End studio.
““The women in Congress had to wage virtually every battle alone,” Schroeder wrote in her memoir of those early years, “whether we were fighting for female pages (there were none) or a place where we could pee.” That’s right. For many years, women didn’t have a bathroom off the House floor like the men did. When Schroeder was there, women were forced to use the restroom inside the women’s reading room far off on another floor. Female members of the House didn’t get a women’s bathroom off the House floor until 2011.”
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