How We Got Here

How We Got Here


Latest Episodes

Genders and Sexualities
August 16, 2021

Gender and sexuality can feel natural and even immutable, but science and the lived experience of numerous humans tell us that these categories are far more variable than they may seem. At a time when

Unwelcome to America
August 16, 2021

The American Dream is often portrayed as the hook that pulls people to the United States. What is usually left out of the story is the hell many flee, sometimes a hell fed by the very country in which

Class
August 10, 2021

Steel produced in Youngstown, Ohio, helped America win World War II, and it was used to build the bridges that we cross and the buildings in which we live. But in the 1970s, the mills began closing. S

Empire
August 09, 2021

There is a long tradition of imperial denial in the United States. After all, Americans fought the British Empire and have always thought of themselves as different from European colonialists. They ar

Whiteness
August 03, 2021

Whiteness in America isn’t just the neutral norm against which racial minorities, particularly Black people, are measured. Whiteness in America means having the privilege and power that go along with

The Half-Life of Democracy
August 03, 2021

The issue of police violence and racism is a familiar one. It’s been present in the United States since the Republics beginnings. And the stories of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice and others

Trailer
July 19, 2021

How We Got Here is a podcast for journalists about how history and identity shape narrative. As journalists, we like to say we’re writing the first draft of history. But if we don’t know our own hist