Civics In A Year
What do you really know about American government, the Constitution, and your rights as a citizen?
Civics in a Year is a fast-paced podcast series that delivers essential civic knowledge in just 10 minutes per episode. Over the course of a year, we’ll explore 250 key questions—from the founding documents and branches of government to civil liberties, elections, and public participation.
Rooted in the Civic Literacy Curriculum from the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University, this series is a collaborative project supported by the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. Each episode is designed to spark curiosity, strengthen constitutional understanding, and encourage active citizenship.
Whether you're a student, educator, or lifelong learner, Civics in a Year will guide you through the building blocks of American democracy—one question at a time.
Episodes
218 episodes
Barack Obama: A More Perfect Union
A campaign firestorm pushed Barack Obama to a crossroads in 2008: offer a quick political defense or step into the country’s oldest argument about who “We the People” really are. We choose the second path and unpack “A More Perfect Union,” his ...
Bill Clinton’s Oklahoma City Memorial Address
A truck bomb in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, including 19 children, and left the country grasping for words that wouldn’t make the wound worse. Four days later, President Bill Clinton delivered a memorial address that still feels like a blu...
From Timeline To Threads: How Civics Really Works
A timeline can tell you what happened. It can’t always tell you what it meant, or why the meaning keeps changing.We’ve spent months building a foundation in civics: the Declaration of Independence and its claims about equality, unaliena...
Keynes Vs Hayek
The Great Depression isn’t just history. It’s the moment we keep dragging into today’s fights about stimulus, deficits, inflation, and what government should do when millions can’t find work. We sit down with Dr. Nicholas O’Neill from Arizona S...
How 1964 And 1965 Remade Public Life And The Ballot
A “test” to vote that has nothing to do with reading, a restaurant that can legally turn you away, a ballot box protected on paper but blocked in real life. The early 1960s weren’t just tense, they were engineered, with Jim Crow rules that cont...
Eisenhower’s Farewell Address
Eisenhower doesn’t leave office with a sentimental goodbye. He leaves with a warning: a free country can win a global struggle and still lose itself at home. We sit down with Dr. Beienberg to unpack Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address,...
Executive Order 9066 and the Korematsu Case
One signature from a president turned suspicion into policy and forced about 120,000 people to leave their homes. We sit down with Dr. Stephen Knott, emeritus professor of national security affairs and a longtime scholar of presidential power, ...
How America Entered World War II
The United States doesn’t wake up one morning and “enter World War II.” It inches, argues, legislates, and then gets jolted into a decision that reshapes the modern world. We walk through 1941 as a chain of cause and effect, starting with a cou...
How Fireside Chats Built Trust During The Great Depression
The most powerful political tool FDR wielded wasn’t a bill or a bureaucratic agency, it was a voice coming through the radio at the right moment. We’re joined again by Professor Weinberg to unpack how Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats turn...
Huey Long, Every Man a King
He wasn’t a president, but he may be the most dangerous almost-president in modern American political history. We’re joined by Barbara Sean Beinberg to unravel Huey Long’s rise in Louisiana and the seductive promise behind “Every Man Is A King”...
FDR Before The New Deal
Franklin Roosevelt is usually introduced as the New Deal president, but we wanted to rewind the tape and look at the receipts. With Dr. Sean Beienberg joining us, we walk through FDR’s pre-1933 record and the political path that takes him from ...
Herbert Hoover, Rugged Individualism
“Rugged individualism” gets thrown around like a simple definition of Herbert Hoover, but the real story is far stranger and far more useful. We start with the parts of Hoover’s life that don’t fit the usual caricature: an Iowa orphan who makes...
Calvin Coolidge, Address on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)
A president in 1926 stands in Independence Hall and argues something that still feels like a dare: you can modernize policies, but you can’t “upgrade” the Declaration’s core truths. With Dr. Beienberg, we walk through Calvin Coolidge’s 150th an...
Coolidge And Limited Government
Calvin Coolidge is usually remembered as “Silent Cal,” a pro-business placeholder in the Roaring Twenties, or a punchline about doing nothing. We don’t buy that version. With Dr. Sean Beienberg, we unpack the Calvin Coolidge who shows up in his...
Wilson’s Fourteen Points
The peace after World War I was supposed to close the book on global conflict. Instead, it opened a fight that still shapes U.S. foreign policy today: do we try to organize the world to prevent war, or do we protect our independence by refusing...
The 19th Amendment
One vote. One state. A constitutional change that rewired American democracy.We tell the story of how the 19th Amendment finally became law in August 1920, when Tennessee turned into the last battleground for women’s suffrage and the ou...
Prohibition’s Unraveling and the 21st Amendment
Prohibition didn’t just give America speakeasies and gangsters it gave us one of the clearest stress tests of the U.S. Constitution. We dig into a paradox that surprises a lot of people: national alcohol consumption drops sharply under the 18th...
From Temperance To The 18th Amendment And The Politics Behind It
Prohibition didn’t rise because America suddenly forgot how to party. It rose because a lot of powerful groups saw alcohol as the key that unlocked the problem they cared about most, and they were willing to align long enough to win.We ...
The 17th Amendment Rewrote Who Senators Answer To
One line in the Constitution used to decide whether your U.S. senator answered first to party voters or to state lawmakers, and changing that line reshaped American politics. We’re joined by Dr. Sean Beienburg to dig into the 17th Amendment and...
The 16th Amendment and the Federal Reserve Act of 1913
Tax Day raises a question most of us never get a straight answer to: why did the United States need a constitutional amendment just to tax income? We walk through the 16th Amendment with Dr. Sean Beienberg and translate the legal knot it unties...
Election of 1912: The Republican Breakup
A former president comes home, looks at his handpicked successor, and decides the country needs a completely different Constitution in practice. That’s the spark behind the Election of 1912, and we walk through why Theodore Roosevelt’s break wi...
Roosevelt, Taft, And Wilson Debate The Presidency
The presidency didn’t become powerful by accident. We trace today’s executive-branch arguments back to an early-20th-century clash between three outsized figures and three competing theories of American constitutional government: Woodrow Wilson...
Political Thought: T Roosevelt vs Wilson
Two presidents. One Progressive Era dilemma that still won’t go away: do you fix a modern economy by breaking up power or by controlling it with an even stronger federal government? We dig into Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as political...
The Populist Moment
We trace what populism looks like in the 1890s and why it’s less a single doctrine than a coalition of anger, hope, and economic suspicion. We follow the money fight over gold and silver into the Panic of 1893, Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, a...