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by The Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution
Consider the Constitution is a podcast from the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier. The show provides insight into constitutional issues that directly affect every American. Hosted by Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey, the podcast features interviews with constitutional scholars, policy and subject matter experts, heritage professionals, and legal practitioners.
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We know James Madison the thinker. The architect of the Constitution. The author of the Bill of Rights. But Madison was also a working politician — and a very good one. Dr. Matthew Goetz, senior historian at the White House Historical Association, joins Katie Crawford-Lackey to look at the side of Madison we tend to skip. With Jefferson, he built the country's first political party and its first partisan newspaper — then wrote attacks on the Washington administration under a pen name an...
We tend to jump straight from the Revolution to the Constitutional Convention — from a young James Madison to the Father of the Constitution. But the years in between are where the promises of independence collided with the hard work of governing. Dr. Frank Cogliano, professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh and author of A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson, and the American Republic, joins Katie in the studio to walk through that chapter. They start with the ...
What can a bird's nest, a set of porcelain ice cream vases, and a portrait of Confucius tell us about the early American republic? In this episode, host Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey sits down with Dr. Lisa Goff, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia and former director of its Institute for Public History, to explore how historians read objects as evidence. Lisa walks us through the furnishings, art, and tableware inside James and Dolly Madison's Montpe...
The three most famous words in American government — We the People — were written by a founder most Americans have never heard of. Host Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey sits down with author and journalist Jesse Wegman to recover the story of James Wilson: a Scottish immigrant who arrived in 1765, signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, drafted the Constitution's opening words, and sat on the first Supreme Court — then vanished almost entirely from national memory. Wegman's...
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison agreed on almost everything when it came to religious freedom. But they talked about it in completely different ways. Historian Dr. John Ragosta joins Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey to unpack that difference — Jefferson's intellectual, almost deistic case for separating church and state, and Madison's surprisingly reverential, scripture-laced language defending the same principle. Ragosta walks through the Memorial and Remonstrance, the Virginia Statute for Relig...
We know James Madison as the Father of the Constitution. But who was he before that? In this special episode, Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey takes the guest seat to explore the formative years that made Madison who he is. At 25, Madison was the youngest major figure of the founding era — small, sickly, quiet, and easy to overlook. He never commanded armies or delivered rousing speeches. What he had were ideas, and a framework for thinking about power, human nature, and government that no one else ...
What does the Constitution actually say — and why haven't most of us read it? Ben Sheehan, bestselling author and award-winning digital creator, joins host Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey to talk about the civic knowledge gap and how he used his background in comedy to make one of the most important documents in American history genuinely readable. Ben traces his own constitutional education — from dinner table civics lessons with his mom, a Senate staffer, to his years at Funny or Die and the Upri...
The words are familiar — life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness — but do we really know what they meant to the men who wrote them? As America marks 250 years of independence, Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey sits down with Dr. Lynn Uzzell, Julia Van Geest, and T.C. Le, co-authors of the forthcoming book Locking and Unlocking the Declaration of Independence: An Introduction to Jefferson's Philosophy on Revolution, to trace the ideas behind America's founding document back to their source: 17th-centu...
Consider the Constitution is a podcast from the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier. The show provides insight into constitutional issues that directly affect every American. Hosted by Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey, the podcast features interviews with constitutional scholars, policy and subject matter experts, heritage professionals, and legal practitioners.
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