150 episodes listed below
Founders, dissenters and the scholars who study them
Live at the National Constitution Center releases the programs the Center hosts in person and online, usually a Center moderator in conversation with historians, legal scholars or authors. The subjects run from Thomas Paine's Common Sense and James Wilson at the Constitutional Convention to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass.
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Live at the National Constitution Center collects the conversations and debates the Center hosts in person and online and releases them as episodes. The sign-offs also mention video of the same programs in the Center's media library. The structure is institutional, and that works in its favour. A presenter from the Center opens by naming the guests and their affiliations, then either moderates or introduces the colleague who will. Julie Silverbrook and Bill Pollack introduce episodes, Silverbrook moderates others, and Tom Donnelly, the Center's chief scholar, moderates a panel on the Declaration of Independence. Guests are historians, legal scholars and authors, frequently in pairs, and the pairs tend to build on each other's research. The ground is the founding era and the arguments it set loose. In 'Thomas Paine and the 250th Anniversary of Common Sense', Gary Burton and Scott Cleary connect the pamphlet to the Declaration through the pamphlet wars and Philadelphia politics, and Cleary suggests reading the two documents back to back. In 'The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution', William Ewald argues that treating Wilson as Madison's helper misreads a very different thinker. Jesse Wegman places Wilson at the center of the Convention from start to finish. The show also gives room to the Americans the founding documents left out, and to what they made of those documents anyway. Mary Beth Norton and Rosie Zagari discuss women in the Revolution, including a poet whose owners let her publish verses celebrating George Washington. One guest explains that letters between spouses separated by the war preserve what would otherwise have been said over the kitchen table. Ellen Du Bois, discussing her book on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, places Stanton among upstate New York's abolitionists, radical communities and challengers to orthodox medicine. Lucas Morrell and Melvin Rogers trace how Prince Hall, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr. and others invoked the Declaration to press for a freer, more equal America. Rogers adds a telling detail: Douglass gave his Fourth of July address in June, in Rochester, and aimed it at holding his white counterparts to account. The book club moves nearer the present. Jon Meacham gives his view that executive power under Article II is attempting to throw the constitutional structure out of balance, and he observes that people's support for that power tends to shift with whichever party holds it. His example is Jefferson, who, Meacham suggests, would have called a Hamilton purchase of Louisiana monarchical overreach. Some programs are framed around anniversaries and heritage months, with Women's History Month for the Stanton conversation and Black History Month for the Declaration panel. What a listener gets is specialists talking through documents, letters and reputations, with a moderator from the Center keeping the Constitution in view.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants the American founding, and the people who later claimed its promises, discussed by historians and legal scholars. It fits someone who enjoys hearing specialists build on each other's research in a moderated conversation.
What sets it apart: The episodes are the Center's own programs released as audio, so they arrive as moderated panels and author conversations tied to the founding documents, from Common Sense and the Declaration to the 19th Amendment. A single personality's commentary is not the draw.
Live constitutional conversations and debates featuring leading historians, journalists, scholars, and public officials hosted at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and across America. To watch National Constitution Center Town Halls live, check out our schedule of upcoming programs at constitutioncenter.org/townhall. Register through Zoom to ask your constitutional questions in the Q&A or watch live on YouTube at YouTube.com/ConstitutionCenter.
James Wilson enters the founding story, and your civics notes suddenly look a little thin.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A focused live discussion on women's revolutionary-era lives, from family letters to liberty's contested reach.
Women's history shifts this National Constitution Center conversation away from battlefield chronology and toward the social and political life of the American Revolution.
Ellen Du Bois situates Stanton's suffrage legacy in the radical world around Seneca Falls.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton comes through as a reformer formed by the restless world around Seneca Falls, where abolitionism, religious ferment, challenges to Orthodox medicine, and communal experiments all pressed against inherited rules.
A measured book-club conversation on presidential power, constitutional tension, and democratic aspiration.
John Meacham's American Struggle gives this National Constitution Center book-club conversation a steady center: the gap between democratic promise, constitutional limits, and the pressures of power.
A brisk live discussion places Common Sense on the road to the Declaration of Independence.
Thomas Paine's Common Sense sits at the center of a brisk conversation about how independence became politically imaginable while reconciliation still had serious backing.
A thoughtful constitutional conversation on how African American leaders used the Declaration's ideals to press demands for equality.
The Declaration's promise of equality sits at the center of this National Constitution Center town hall, as Lucas Morrell and Melvin Rogers trace how African American leaders and citizens have used its language in the long push toward a freer and more equal America.
Constitutional fury, headline by headline.
Phoebe Judge narrates true crime history and interviews the authors who uncovered it.
Dramatized deep dives into American history, from the Galveston hurricane to Harper Lee's Mockingbird.
Dana Schwartz narrates the violent lives of monarchs, warlords, and queens.
Tracy Wilson and Holly Frey narrate overlooked history, from Courbet's realism to IUD regulation.
Live at the National Constitution Center's "Women and the American Revolution" treats the founding as a story of boycotts, letters, spinning bees, and voting rules rather than only battles.
Ellen Du Bois argues that Elizabeth Cady Stanton should be read as a 50-year political thinker, not only as a suffrage icon.
["John Meacham tells the National Constitution Center that history has a moral utility and that the Constitution was built for moments when reason and deliberation must beat force and accident.", "Julie Silverbrook introduces the NCC book club, and Vince Stango moderates Meacham on American Struggle, Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union.", "Meacham moves through George Wallace, John Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Frederick Douglass to argue that American history is a record of constitutional conflict and reform.", "He ends up in the 1920s with the Ku Klux Klan, Smoot-Hawley, and Clarence Darrow's cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan in Dayton, Tennessee, to show why reform still matters."]
Live at the National Constitution Center streamed a February 9, 2026 program on Thomas Paine and the 250th anniversary of Common Sense.
Tom Donnelly's February 2, 2026 America's Town Hall conversation at the National Constitution Center tracks how Lemuel Haynes, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln used the Declaration of Independence to argue for Black equality.
Jesse Wegman and William Ewald present James Wilson as an overlooked founder who advocated popular sovereignty, proportional representation, and a popularly elected president.
Sam Tanenhaus and Matthew Continetti trace American conservatism from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 election and the New Deal to William F.
Live at the National Constitution Center examines Justice Robert Jackson's Youngstown concurrence, Nuremberg prosecution, and influence on presidential-power debates.
Jeffrey Rosen moderates a National Constitution Center discussion with Gerard Magliocca, Sanford Levinson, Michael Rappaport, and Stephen Sachs about whether Article V permits limited constitutional conventions.
Historian Edward Larson explains why 1776 became a defining year after patriot leaders moved from loyalty to independence, shaped by George III's October speech, the January bombardment of Norfolk, and Thomas Paine's Common Sense.
A conversation with historian David Levering Lewis about W.E.B.
A constitutional conversation reexamining Woodrow Wilson's legacy, focusing on his record on women's suffrage and race.
A debate on the Electoral College featuring experts arguing for and against its abolition, hosted by the National Constitution Center.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch discusses his book 'Overruled' on the human toll of too much law, hosted at the National Constitution Center on Constitution Day.
David Rubenstein discusses his book on the American presidency with NCC President Jeffrey Rosen.