Podcasts relevant to Unit II available online at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

Aliens and Sedition: A Panel Discussion
The war on terror has sparked a vigorous debate over how many of our civil liberties, if any, should be sacrificed to keep the public safe from terrorist attack. The conflict between civil liberties and national security has come up before in American history — most notably in the Alien and Sedition Acts at the end of the eighteenth century, President Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Join moderator Richard Menaker (Menaker & Herrmann LLP) as he discusses this issue with panelists Alan Brinkley (Columbia University), Joanne Freeman (Yale University), Thomas Kean (Chairman of the 9/11 Commission and former Governor of New Jersey), and Mark Neely (Pennsylvania State University).

Inheriting the Revolution: Joyce Appleby
The first generation of Americans — those born after 1776 — were different from the colonists that came before them. Shaped not only by the nation’s founding principles, they were also affected by increasingly global commerce, culture, and the growing diversity of the American people. Historian Joyce Appleby explores the lives of four early Americans and the profound differences between their world and that of their parents’ generation.

Thomas Jefferson: Joseph J. Ellis
As inscrutable as he was influential, Thomas Jefferson casts a mighty shadow on American history. In this lecture, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis explores Jefferson’s political ideology — his preference for an agrarian nation and a weak national government, his feelings about democracy, his insistence on the separation of church and state, and belief in individual rights — and suggests that as the United States emerges from the twentieth century, it may be moving toward a more Jeffersonian ideal of limited government and the primacy of the individual.

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