What is the American experiment? Johann Neem explores this question in books and essays, beginning with his Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts, which showed how Americans created a civil society which fostered their independence. He explored how newly-independent Americans created a system of public education to sustain the republic, in Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America, and he continues to explore these questions of American identity and civic culture. A Professor of History at Western Washington University, Neem has also written of the role of colleges today, and on the state of k-12 education in preparing citizens for the next 250 years.

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Digging in his Jersey City backyard in 2007, Chris Bray uncovered a 12-pound iron sphere. This was a mystery. What was it? How did it get there? Doing more digging in archives, he found that his neighborhood was the site of the Paulus Hook fort the rebels held in the summer of 1776, and the iron ball had been fired from a British cannon as the Royal Navy stormed up the Hudson River. The cannonball now sits in the City Hall in Jersey City, next to Frank Hague's desk, a reminder that the Revolution is still all around us.

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John Lowe of the University of Louisville joins us to talk about his new book, “Benevolence & Bondage”: Jonathan Edwards, Slavery, Race, and the Paradox of Spiritual Equality. Jonathan Edwards is remembered as one of colonial America’s most influential theologians—a preacher who taught that all souls stood equally before God. Yet Edwards was also an enslaver who lived and preached within a society shaped by racial bondage. Lowe examines the profound tension between Edwards’s theology of Christian benevolence and spiritual equality and his participation in slavery, and Edwards' long influence on American religious thought.

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