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Civics In A Year: Daily Summaries Delivered
by The Center for American Civics
What do you really know about American government, the Constitution, and your rights as a citizen?Civics in a Year is a fast-paced podcast series that delivers essential civic knowledge in just 10 minutes per episode. Over the course of a year, we’ll explore 250 key questions—from the founding documents and branches of government to civil liberties, elections, and public participation.Rooted in the Civic Literacy Curriculum from the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University, this series is a collaborative project supported by the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. Each episode is designed to spark curiosity, strengthen constitutional understanding, and encourage active citizenship.Whether you're a student, educator, or lifelong learner, Civics in a Year will guide you through the building blocks of American democracy—one question at a time.
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- Today16 min
How Primaries Pick Candidates And Reshape Elections
Primaries decide far more than most voters think and the process that was supposed to make politics cleaner may be one reason it feels uglier. We sit down with Dr. Sean Beienberg to unpack what primary elections actually are, why they took off in the early 20th century, and how they replaced the old convention system where party leaders and delegates negotiated nominees behind closed doors. If you’ve ever heard “smoke-filled room” and assumed the cure was obvious, this conversation adds the m...
- Yesterday17 min
The Senate Filibuster Explained
The filibuster gets treated like an ancient feature of the U.S. Senate, but the version that drives today’s gridlock is surprisingly modern. We sit down with Dr. Sean Beienberg to unpack how a procedure that’s not even named in the Constitution ends up acting like a standing 60-vote requirement for most legislation. We start with the basics: what a filibuster is, what it is supposed to do, and why the classic image of someone heroically talking for hours is more myth than daily reality. From...
- 4 days ago30 min
Mary Todd Lincoln Unmasked
Mary Todd Lincoln gets talked about like a stereotype: the spender, the problem, the punchline. That story falls apart the moment you place her where she actually lived, in a White House worn down by constant crowds and a nation tearing itself apart in the Civil War. We sit down with Vicky Middleswarth, Education Coordinator at the Mary Todd Lincoln House, to look at what Mary did, why she did it, and why so many people were determined to read her choices as personal failures instead of the m...
- 5 days ago19 min
How Lorraine Waxman Pearce Turned The White House Into A Museum
The White House looks permanent on TV, but its history has to be protected one object at a time. We’re joined by Leslie Calderone, Director of the White House History Digital Archives at the White House Historical Association, to introduce a name most Americans have never heard: Lorraine Waxman Pearce , the first curator of the White House. We go back to the moment that quietly set everything in motion: Jacqueline Kennedy’s 1941 White House tour, when the rooms felt sparse on historic furnis...
- 6 days ago23 min
How The U.S. Capitol Historical Society Keeps Democracy Real
The U.S. Capitol is one of the most recognizable buildings in the world, but many Americans don’t realize there’s an organization dedicated to preserving its story and turning that history into practical civic education. We sit down with Roswell Encina, president and CEO of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, to talk about what it really means to “own” the people’s house and why the Capitol’s history includes far more than lawmakers, from preservation teams and librarians to the Capitol Poli...
- 1 weeks ago23 min
Elizabeth Willing Powel
A woman in Philadelphia tells George Washington, plainly, that the country needs him to serve again and she does not write for personal gain. That single moment opens a much bigger story about how influence works when you cannot vote, cannot hold office, and still refuse to stay silent. We sit down with Samantha Snyder from the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon to talk about Elizabeth Willing Powel, the subject of Samantha’s forthcoming full-scale biography (Univer...
- 1 weeks ago24 min
Social Media And Modern Elections
A single TikTok can redefine a candidate faster than a week of traditional ads, and that reality is changing American elections in real time. We sit down with educator Spencer Burrows to trace how campaign communication evolved from “earned media” moments to Facebook fundraising, Twitter as a direct line to voters, and now podcasts and short-form video that reach people who don’t even think of themselves as political. Along the way, we ask what this means for Gen Z voters, whose political inf...
- 1 weeks ago27 min
D-Day: What Does Courage Look Like When History Is Watching
D-Day gets reduced to a date and a diagram, but the truth is messier, riskier, and far more human. We sit down with historian Dr. Michael Butler to talk about June 6, 1944 not just as the Normandy invasion, but as a moment when thousands of ordinary people stepped into history without knowing how it would end. From the weight of memory carried by veterans to the hard reality of fear and loss, we ask what courage actually looks like when it isn’t a movie scene, but a job you have to do. We al...
About Civics In A Year
What do you really know about American government, the Constitution, and your rights as a citizen?Civics in a Year is a fast-paced podcast series that delivers essential civic knowledge in just 10 minutes per episode. Over the course of a year, we’ll explore 250 key questions—from the founding documents and branches of government to civil liberties, elections, and public participation.Rooted in the Civic Literacy Curriculum from the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University, this series is a collaborative project supported by the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. Each episode is designed to spark curiosity, strengthen constitutional understanding, and encourage active citizenship.Whether you're a student, educator, or lifelong learner, Civics in a Year will guide you through the building blocks of American democracy—one question at a time.
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