The Last Best Hope?

history, arts · EN

Abraham Lincoln called the United States “the last best hope of Earth.” In this podcast, we ask whether that claim still holds — and whether it ever did. Each episode takes a figure, idea, or moment in American political history and asks what it tells us about the country’s understanding of itself, always with an eye to how America looks from the outside in. The Last Best Hope? takes ideas seriously: America as a creed, the arguments of the people who built and remade it, and what America has meant to the rest of the world. We take our subjects from history, not the news — though the present is rarely far away. Hosted by Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of American Political History and Director of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford, The Last Best Hope? brings him into conversation with leading scholars and public figures, including Hillary Clinton, Annette Gordon-Reed, Eric Foner, David Frum, Heather Cox Richardson, Stacy Schiff, Jona