American History Hotline

Clara Barton spent the Civil War kicking butts and taking names … except she was actually SAVING butts. In fact, her efforts to treat injuries on the battlefield and identify missing soldiers changed war forever. But what led Clara Barton to become the “Angel of the Battlefield”?
Bob calls up historian Susan Rosenvold to get some answers. From the chaos of Antietam to the creation of the American Red Cross, Clara Barton redefined nursing, humanitarian aid, and disaster relief in the United States. Oh yeah, and she did it all with no formal training.
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You may have seen it on Broadway ... or maybe your high school gym. The Tony Award-winning musical Newsies is a favorite for school productions because the story centers around newspaper-hawking kids who stand up to titan-of-industry Joseph Pulitzer.
Of course, we've learned that we shouldn't take our history lessons from Disney. So we've called up Vincent DiGirolamo (Crying the News: A History of America's Newsboys) to give us the REAL story of the famous 1899 newsboys strike that inspired the Disney film.
You can find DiGirolamo's newest essay in the collection Newsies, Newsies — Read All About It!: Essays on the Film and Broadway Productions.
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John Quincy Adams may have been a failed one-term president, but he had one of the most amazing second acts in American political history. From the House of Representatives, he steered our new nation through one of its most tumultuous eras ... carrying the torch of American democracy from the Founding Fathers to Abraham Lincoln.
In this special episode, Robert Costa interviews Bob about his new book: America’s Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick. It's an amazing conversation recorded live in D.C. at Politics and Prose.
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And everywhere that Mary went, the typhoid was sure to go.
The story of Mary Mallon (AKA Typhoid Mary) is one we're living every day to a small degree: the balance between public safety and personal liberty. Luckily for us, we'll never be imprisoned for being an symptomatic carrier of a disease. Well, never say never.
To learn more about the life of Mary Mallon we call up author Susan Campbell Bartoletti (Terrible Typhoid Mary: A True Story of the Deadliest Cook in America). Why was Mary's story so popular in the early 1900s? And why is her name so familiar even today?

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It can be scary to learn how much our democracy relies on norms and convention when the rule of law is put to the test. But, at least our Founding Fathers had an excellent understanding of authoritarianism when they drafted the U.S. Constitution. Are the guardrails they created enough to prevent a dictator, though?
Bob calls up Jeffrey Rosen (former President and CEO of the National Constitution Center) to answer this question.
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