How we started, how it's going

This is part two of our story about the original story of America we don't talk about...and how it ties to where we are today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy. Before we get going here, I just want to let you know this is part two of my conversation with Rebecca Nagel, journalist, author, and host of the new podcast First America, and Maggie Blackhawk, scholar, author, and professor of law. If you have not yet listened to part one, I recommend you start there. Because today Rebecca and Maggie take us from the origin story to the way the US is today. And it's really all one in the same. All right. Here's Rebecca Nagel.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Right now, I hear a lot of people asking this question of basically, how is this happening? How does my government look like this? And not really not understanding. And I've had those moments too, of watching the news and feeling shock and confusion. I think that's a really human reaction. And I would just argue that we don't know how we got here because we don't know where we came from. And we don't know how our country started. And that knowledge that the true story of the founding of the United States is not

• 1:13Speaker 01

  just important for history or truth, and those things are valuable, but it's truly critical and urgent for us to have a clear view of what our government is in this moment.

• 1:30Hannah McCarthy?

  When Rebecca started working on her podcast, First America, and you can listen to that right after you listen to this, she quickly realized that so much of what we see in the United States today has happened before. That the story of native people and how they were treated and legislated around in America is a huge part of the reason we are this way today. And that, as we talked about in part one, ignoring or avoiding that story means we don't really understand this country.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  But somehow, everyone's missed this?

• 2:06Hannah McCarthy?

  Today's political, governmental, and social climate is, as Rebecca and Maggie will tell you, 250 years in the making. None of this is unprecedented.

• 2:18Hannah McCarthy?

  And it is all very much American.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  You know, one thing that I have heard a lot the past year and a half is the statement, "This is un-American, this is un-American, this is un-American, or this is unprecedented."

• 2:51Hannah McCarthy?

  This, again, is Rebecca Nagel.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  And I feel like I keep hearing this idea that a lot of what we're seeing has never happened in the United States before. And that's not true.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  These are things that our government has done, that our government has done many times. It's just done it to people that we don't talk about.

• 3:16Hannah McCarthy?

  In part one of this conversation, we talked about the United States as a product of colonial empire-building, to get from sea to shining sea and beyond, and to do it fast, and to squash resistance. Our government created complex and contradictory systems. And those systems did not stay in the past.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  You know, again, you can tell that story of just like, well, indigenous people experienced that because that's how our government saw us. But all those forms of government that we created to do that to indigenous people, they're still part of the government of the United States, right? You know, it's like, we built up offices, we built up administrations, we built up departments, you know?

• 4:00Hannah McCarthy?

  Take, for example, the military.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  One of the things that's really interesting is actually, at the founding, our government didn't want a big military. They were scared of a big military after what British soldiers did to the colonists. There was one, at one point, the number of people enlisted in the US Army was less than 100 people. And then that tiny army went off to fight indigenous nations, a powerful military alliance in what is now Ohio. That's called the Tuwawa CPW Alliance, or sometimes people call it the United Indian Nations.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  And that army was not powerful enough to defeat that alliance. And so we, I mean, literally the reason we have a military and why it's so big and why it's centralized instead of relying on state militias is this war.

• 4:56Hannah McCarthy?

  And while we're on the subject, war powers.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  And one of the things that happens during that war is that Congress funds it, but never legally declared war.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  And so it's the first instance of the president under George Washington being able to order the military to fight a war without congressional oversight. And when Trump bombed Syria in 2017, lawyers for his administration actually cited that war as the reason why Trump could bomb a foreign country without congressional approval.

• 5:39Hannah McCarthy?

  And not just using the military abroad, of course, but right here at home.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  You know, when we think about other instances of presidential overreach, you know, like the idea that the National Guard or the military might be sent to US cities or deployed on US soil, it's like, do you know how often that has happened in the history of the United States? Do you know how often the military wasn't fighting a foreign war, but was governing people and families on US soil? It happened so often in the late 1800s. There are letters from military generals complaining about it, saying, hey, we were

• 6:22Speaker 01

  trained to fight wars, not run, you know, detention camps and look after these native families. Like, why is this our job now?

• 6:32Hannah McCarthy?

  Or take the question of citizenship, which, by the way, at the time that I talked to Rebecca was still very much a question not settled by the Supreme Court.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  You know, to say that people born here don't have a constitutional right to birth right citizenship, the Trump administration is trying to point to the fact that native people were actually carved out of the 14th Amendment. And so we're, we're born on US soil without birthright citizenship in the United States. And, and that's true, that happened.

• 7:05Hannah McCarthy?

  And while the Supreme Court has since upheld birthright citizenship, you've got to understand what made it fragile to begin with. Here's scholar and law professor Maggie Blackhawk.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  The knee jerk reaction initially was that simple constitutionalism. We have never done this before. This is un-American. To the extent that we have carved out constitutional birthright citizenship for people, it's always been for everyone. This isn't the case, which definitely left those challenging that executive order on constitutional grounds on really weak footing because the Trump administration quickly came back and said, no, actually, we have carved out constitutional birthright citizenship for native people. We even have a Supreme Court case saying that that's the case.

• 7:51Hannah McCarthy?

  That phrase that Maggie started with, "simple constitutionalism," it's something that we cling to in the US. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. It is America, and violations of it are un-American. But there are corners of American law where it really doesn't reach.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  You could ask scholars of constitutional law today, immigration, foreign affairs, war powers, the treaty powered territories, federal Indian law, all of these are areas where the normal rules of US constitutional law just don't apply. They're far more relaxed. They often are seen as potentially constitutional zones of silence or emptiness.

• 8:34Hannah McCarthy?

  These zones exist because of the way that generation after generation of leaders and lawmakers executed their vision of a nation and a government that stretches the length of a continent.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  The history of how the United States built that empire for liberty from sea to shining sea, the one that we often imagine sprung whole cloth from these founding moments, how the US built it was through the imposition of forms of government that were top down. Executive-driven and non-representative. So it's difficult to see them as anything but authoritarian from their beginnings. It was by design. And they were seen as a way to develop people towards a constitutional vision, rather than building a government to represent those people in all their diversity of language and religion.

• 9:25Hannah McCarthy?

  It's important to remember and to remind yourself again and again that while so many of the cracks in the foundation come from how we treated native people, that treatment made our government. It became our law.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  You know, at the founding, the states were the creator of the federal government and the US Constitution. But by 1861, the majority of states were created by the federal government. So it really shifts our vision of the United States on its head to track the development of these governments. And they were not representative. So we spent more of our time building executive power for top-down government, using the military, forms of military occupation and intervention to set the stage for these authoritarian governments. And then an authoritarian, top-down government that would govern some of our states for over 100 years.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  And so what you have there is the development of a constitutional system where the executive has extreme power. The courts have taught themselves lessons of deference in these areas of borders, of migration, of citizenship, of war. You can just think of all the mechanics of government in these areas, and all of a sudden, it makes sense.

• 10:53Hannah McCarthy?

  So what do you do when you start to learn the whole story of the United States? That's coming up after the break.

• 11:17Nick Capodice?

  Haven't you out there ever Googled your own name? Like, actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing. There are companies called data brokers whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over, so your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once, and they keep working in the background.

• 12:02Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 12:24Nick Capodice?

  Holiday season is coming, and I don't think I have to tell you this might be a tough one because things are expensive in the fall of 2026. Everyone I know is looking for ways to make a little extra money, prowling around the side hustle subreddits. But I will say, if you're looking to sell something, to launch a store fast before the holiday rush, Shopify is the one-stop-shop platform for making a professional-looking store without touching a line of code. You can sell anything, and you can sell it anywhere that people shop online. You can have it done in minutes, and you can launch before Black Friday, that time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy.

• 13:08Nick Capodice?

  So if you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/civics to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/civics. Just go to Shopify.com/civics today to hear your first.

• 13:29Hannah McCarthy?

  The older I get, the more I am looking for truly lovable closet staples that I know I will reach for just as often next year as I do right now. I want a closet that doesn't need constant updates or replacements, just high-quality clothes that last, especially the kind with tags that say 100%. As in, 100% Mongolian cashmere, 100% mulberry silk, 100% organic cotton, just like the Quince Fisherman Cropt Cardi and I am wearing right this very second. This sweater has kept its shape, color, and softness for years now. I reach for it every single fall, every time I want a warm and elevated look. Quince gives you the quality you expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. Find

• 14:14Hannah McCarthy?

  the fall pieces you will reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was Civics 101. It's a great way to support the show.

• 14:46Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. Before the break, Maggie Blackhawk explained a seeming contradiction in our American constitutional representative government by and for the people, an authoritarian streak that took root and grew, spreading into laws where the Constitution cannot quite reach. And if this is the case, why, today, are so many people surprised or shocked by certain displays of governmental control?

• 15:13Speaker 02

  I think we've resisted, especially today, understanding the ways that those structures of government have been applied to different peoples over time, in large part out of fear. We often want these authoritarian structures to only apply over there, and to the extent that we see them as authoritarian and we want to accept them. As part of our government, we often comfort ourselves by saying, oh, no, no, this can only be applied to Indians because Indians are Indians, some other explanation. But the reality is that these infrastructures were always getting applied to new and different people.

• 15:50Hannah McCarthy?

  Here's Rebecca Nagel again.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  One other thing I see happen a lot is that people, to try and understand fascism or to try to understand authoritarianism, look to other countries, right? So people are looking to Germany, Russia, Hungary to say, okay, how does authoritarianism grow up in a democracy? How does it work? And we actually don't need to go outside of the United States to understand how authoritarianism can exist within a democracy because it's right here in the United States in our own history. And then I think there's a question of like, well, where does this knowledge get us?

• 16:39Hannah McCarthy?

  To me, this is a pretty classic example of the principle that ignoring a problem does not make it go away. As we talked about in part one, the authoritarianism inherent to colonizing and subjugating people is what silenced the conversation about it in the United States. But that didn't make it go away.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  So that government that did all of those things to indigenous people, that's still our government. And so that's kind of the, I think, one of the reasons why we must grapple with this history, not just because it's moral, not just because it's right, not just because it's just, but actually because the stakes are quite dire.

• 17:28Hannah McCarthy?

  So as Rebecca said. Where does this knowledge get us?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  The way I kind of think about the moment that we're living through is that we created this version of our government that we thought would kind of stay like to the edge, right? That would stay on the margins. And what we're living through is not our government doing things it hasn't done before, but it's just pulling almost that face of government that was on the margins, pulling that to the center. And so I think we have to do some deep work to think about, well, what, what kind of power does a president have or the executive branch have over immigration? Why did we give them this much power? Why do presidential war powers work this way?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  It's because of wars with indigenous nations. If you look at the history and like, do we want to have a president that actually has that much power over the military where he can just unilaterally bomb another country? You know, and so I think we have to have some of those big conversations around what we have allowed our government to do in the past and how that means our government can do things today that maybe we wouldn't want it to do.

• 18:48Hannah McCarthy?

  And Rebecca pointed out that having those conversations and studying that history, it's not just about understanding how and that our government is this way.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  So we need to understand that history because we need to know what our government is fundamentally, what it did, what it's capable of. But also there are lessons in how indigenous people resisted colonization and how, I mean, in the face of unimaginable, extreme violence, we not only survived, but we, we protected, we kept our governments, we kept our languages together, we kept our cultures, you know, we, we were able to protect the things that were most important to us. And we, we came up with some, like, I think, very brilliant ways to push back on.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  American authoritarianism. And so I think that the the lessons there are not just lessons of the wrongs of history, but also lessons of what kind of resistance tools work, you know? And and I think we should we should look at, you know, what people have done everywhere, all times, you know, to resist authoritarianism. But I I would just argue that the most relevant examples are the people who've actually already been resisting American authoritarianism and the authoritarianism of this very government.

• 20:16Hannah McCarthy?

  There was a moment in my conversation with Rebecca and Maggie where I lost my own thread of America as a whole. There are times when working on this show, studying these histories, speaking to these people who know so much more than I do, learning truths about this country that I was ignorant of before, it actually, ideally temporarily, narrows my own lens. And that is very much not the point here. I feel that you've just you've painted a picture of, you know, we want we want the US to be this clean, shiny Columbia instead of this hulking beast that is dragging behind it everything that it has accumulated over time, except we're living with we're living

• 21:01Hannah McCarthy?

  with this beast and we're not we're not noting everything that that comprises it.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  So the US can be shiny and a hulking beast at the same time? Is that that's what governments are. They have they have good parts and bad parts. They have successes and failures, and the United States has had incredible successes. As I've said, you know, it it is a government where other countries, so New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Norway, most recently, have considered the most robust forms of US federal India law and colonial government and have rejected them for less empowering versions. So these places that we often see as much more supportive of indigenous cultural rights

• 21:50Speaker 02

  and aesthetics and visibility within their governments, they actually have far less sovereignty protective forms of government than the United States does. So we have successes at both implementing authoritarian government and also mitigating that government over time. And frankly, both are there. If we choose to face them for the first time, really in a deliberative, public fashion, and my hope is to offer both, so we can both love this big hulking beast that has made mistakes, because that big hulking beast is us. It's always been us.

• 22:58Hannah McCarthy?

  That does it for this episode. It was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy. Nick Capodice is my co-host. Rebecca Lavoy is our executive producer. Marina Hanke is our producer. Dana Cataldo is our digital producer. Music in this episode comes from Epidemic Sound and Chris Zabriski. What you heard in parts one and two of my conversation with Rebecca Nagel and Maggie Blackhawk is just the scaffolding for the stories that you will learn from Rebecca's new podcast, First America. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR. New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  What does it really take to start a startup? I'm David Rosenko, entrepreneur, investor, and the host of Leap Forward. In each episode, I go behind the scenes with successful founders and someone who knew them before they were famous: their college roommate, their first employee, or their mom. To hear the sometimes uncomfortable but very real inside stories of how companies actually get built: companies like Reddit, Airbnb, or Twitch. Listen to the new season of Leap Forward for never-before-heard stories behind the world's most iconic companies.