What did the United States look like before canals, factories, and cash wages rewired everyday life? In this episode, John explores Chapter 1 of Charles G. Sellers’s The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846, reconstructing a largely cashless “subsistence” order where independence meant owning land, bartering with neighbors, and avoiding debt. We trace why profit was suspect, how reciprocity bound communities, and why patriarchal households sat uneasily beside republican talk of equality.

This episode is something different. After a year of tracing U.S. history from the pre-Columbian period through the War of 1812, I wanted to step back and talk about why I’m doing this — and what I think history can actually teach us about the world we’re living in now.

In this manifesto, I lay out the purpose behind How the Hell Did We Get Here?: to cut through the noise of hot takes and partisan shouting, and use history to make sense of the present. From Vietnam to Iraq, from Reconstruction to the Gilded Age, I explore how the pendulum of American politics keeps swinging — and what those patterns might tell us about where we’re headed next.

If you’re tired of volume over substance and want a deeper conversation about how we got here — and what “here” even means — this one’s for you.

🎧 New to the show? Start here. It’s the heart of what this project is all about.

In this episode, John discusses the social, political and economic evolution of the United States from the late 1700s to the end of the War of 1812. John talks about the evolution of the U.S. from a limited democracy with a decidedly agricultural bent toward a bustling trade hub and nascent manufacturing sector with a huge middle class that starts to flex its political muscle. This episode serves as an explanatory bridge between how the high-minded and elite-controlled economic and political institutions of the late 18th century gave way to a much more democratized and practical ethos that would drive how the United States developed in the early to mid 19th century.

John explains the expansion of infrastructure, education, trade and industry in the early 1800s and how almost all of it was driven by commerce in a way that many of the founders would have found trivial or even distasteful. He breaks down how a new generation of leaders, like John Calhoun, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, worked to knit the country together and forge a new identity for the young republic as a rising economic powerhouse. John contrasts the new society emerging in the U.S., contrasts it with what existed in Europe and explains just how revolutionary what Americans were building was--decades after the revolutionary war had ended.