Episode Details

Luke talks with Professor Kermit Roosevelt about his latest book, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story. The conversation covers several topics, including problems with the American “triumphalist narrative," Reconstruction and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as alternative foundations for American identity, shifting views of the Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, how the Constitution changed and didn’t change after the Civil War, and the need for a Third Reconstruction.