Speaking to Tom in today’s second hour, Stanford historian David Kennedy noted that few would have predicted that the Democrats would nominate the nation’s first African-American president. The Democrats only “came over” on civil rights in the 1960s. The party of slavery before the Civil War, the Democrats espoused white supremacy after. Not one [...]

As you count down the hours to the end of this long, long election campaign, if you’re tired of staring at the endless polls and projection maps, here’s an excuse to give your eyeballs a rest and just use your ears for a while.
Clicking back through our ‘08 campaign archive just now, four shows leapt [...]

Sure, there’s a Halloween sound to our second hour today — a conversation with historian John Demos about his new book, “The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World.” But it strikes a more profound theme than trick-or-treating, one that still resonates.
Demos himself puts it this way in the book’s prologue:
Witch-hunting, large [...]