Presidential History Podcasts

Before covering Donald Trump's first term, the host of [Abridged] Presidential Histories puts his sourcing notes up front rather than at the end, because some listeners are "operating from totally different facts." That small change shows what presidential history does best in audio. It takes the most argued-over office in American life and shows its working, so a listener can hear where the record ends and the reading of it begins.

All The Presidents, Man has a history teacher tell America's story through the presidents in order, without notes, and the looseness is the point. In #35. John F. Kennedy the Cuban missile crisis becomes, behind closed doors, "a showdown between Kennedy and his own military advisers." It is quick and opinionated.

Election College | Presidential Election History is chattier. Early in Benjamin Harrison - Part 1, the hosts, Jason Goff and Ben Smith, admit they were sure they had covered him already and decline to search 319 episodes to check. The banter is part of the deal, but so is plain storytelling: Richard Milhous Nixon - Part 1 carries Nixon from boyhood football to a winning 1946 campaign.

Some of the most rewarding listening sits one step from the Oval Office. Early in We Cannot Surrender Our Institutions: Calhoun, Bruce Carlson's Vice Presidents of The United States Podcast recalls Charleston's city council voting to remove John C. Calhoun's statue, a decision the mayor tied to his defense of slavery. Make It Big: Nelson Rockefeller follows a vice president's $100 billion energy-bank proposal, then Rockefeller's reported warning, recalled in Walter Mondale's memoir, that bold initiatives without clear boundaries "spiral."

Q & Abe, from President Lincoln's Cottage, answers visitors' questions. Callie Hawkins and Joan Cummins take on Weren't they friends?, which one host calls "sort of a dad question," by tracing the meetings of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Among them is Douglass's visit to confront Lincoln over the fate of captured Black soldiers. LIVE: Was Willie's death preventable? treats the death of the Lincolns' son with care, noting how vague the period's terms for his illness were before turning to modern medicine.

Nixon Now Podcast, from the Richard Nixon Foundation, gives Pat Nixon her due in President's Clup Bonus Episode: First Ladies. In it, curator Bob Bostock recounts how she arranged a private viewing so Jacqueline Kennedy could see the official portraits without a public ceremony. The show's foundation origins are worth keeping in mind.

In FDR Fireside Chats On Party Primaries 6/24/38, FDR Fireside Chats and Speeches catches Roosevelt noting it is "one of the warmest evenings that I have ever felt in Washington." The talk will still be called a fireside talk, he says. 10 American Presidents Podcast threads archive recordings, among them a statement on the Iceland summit, through Tearing Down Walls: Reagan's End Game.

President Lincoln's Attitude Towards Slavery and Emancipation by Henry Watson Wilbur (1851 - 1914) is a reading of a book. Its Reconstruction chapters carry racial language and arguments a modern listener must weigh, though 07 - Chapters 15-16 does caution that one account of Lincoln's conversation rests on memory. Cory Hughes Bloody History reads files from Jim Garrison's investigation aloud, stopping in The Perry Russo Interview Under Hypnosis Part 2 to argue that a date cannot be right. His conclusions, including his account of who fled Dealey Plaza, are his own case against the official record.

Author interviews make judgement audible. In the 10 American Presidents Podcast's Ronald Reagan Q&A with professor Iwan Morgan, Morgan calls the extent of Reagan's dementia "a question that has not fully been resolved as yet." He then explains why the diary and papers make him doubt serious decline in office. On [Abridged] Presidential Histories, Candice Millard says she found in Garfield "a really extraordinary human being who was completely forgotten." Country Over Self states its thesis up front: each episode has a historian tell of a president's choice made without regard to its cost to him, as in Lyndon B. Johnson and Civil Rights with Julian Zelizer. That frame is an argument, and worth hearing as one.