Podcast · History

The Last Best Hope?

by Adam Smith · English · History

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 itse

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 44 min
Latest: 8 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

8 Oct 2026 · 52 min

American Political Parties Explained

What is an American political party? Unlike in parliamentary systems, they're not private organisations but quasi-public bodies, with no membership dues and with their candidate selection regulated by public law. And how do we explain the paradox that in an era of intense 'partisan' division, the parties themselves -- as organisations -- are by some measures weaker than ever before? Adam is joined by Sam Rosenfeld Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University, the author of The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era, and, with Daniel Schlozman, The Hollow…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

7 Oct 2026 · 1 min
New Series
As the United States gears up to mid-term elections, which may once again shift the political trajectory of the country, the Last Best Hope? returns for a brand-new season on the 8th of October. “Adam Smith is one of the UK’s foremost historians of America, and communicates his expertise with zest, wit and unforced passion. The Last Best Hope? brings him together with fellow scholars to provide a unique insight we can’t do without.” — Phil Tinline, BBC radio documentary-maker and author “The Last Best Hope is an absolutely brilliant podcast. Thoughtful, clever, engaging and accessible, Adam…
E77 · 24 Jun 2026 · 56 min
The Battle over the 250th Anniversary
In the bicentennial summer of 1976, the United States staged what was, by some measures, the largest single celebration in the country’s history. Tall ships in New York harbor. Fireworks over the Mall. Specially-minted bicentennial quarters. A made-for-TV reconciliation after Vietnam and Watergate, after the assassinations and the riots and the burnings of the long sixties. The country told itself, for a few weeks at least, that it was still the country it remembered being. Fifty years on, the United States is preparing to mark a quarter-millennium since the Declaration of Independence, and…
E76 · 10 Jun 2026 · 37 min
Why America Doesn't Love Soccer (Except When It Does)
Is there anything more distinctively American than its sports culture? In a previous episode of this podcast, we discussed the tragic decline and partial revival of American cricket. As the 2026 World Cup kicks off in the US Adam asks why a sport that took over the world has been so marginal for so long in America – and wonders if that’s finally changing. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a form of football that had begun in English public schools became a global phenomenon, played almost everywhere except in the United States. There, a strange alternative form of football was…
E75 · 27 May 2026 · 39 min
1776 and the break up of the United States
The rebels who tried to break up the United States in the 1860s thought of themselves as the rightful heirs to the spirit of 1776. The South Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession took the Declaration of Independence as its template. Washington’s face appeared on Confederate banknotes and the Confederacy’s Great Seal. Many of the leaders of the Revolution of the 1860s were the literal grandsons of the men who had made the Revolution of the 1770s. In this episode, Adam explores an alternative legacy of 1776. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence launched the United States. It also…
E74 · 13 May 2026 · 50 min
The idea of America in British politics
For 250 years, the idea of America and the fact of American power have unsettled British politics. Is America of us, or apart from us? Rival or special friend? In the British political imagination, America has provoked envy, resentment, condescension, and neediness. It has also divided us, because America has so often illuminated or distorted our understanding of ourselves. Since the radical Whigs of the 1770s, one strand of the British left has looked to the United States for democratic inspiration. Another has seen America as a plutocratic, imperialist hegemon. Conservatives, meanwhile,…
E73 · 4 Mar 2026 · 42 min
Why the Declaration of Independence said what it did, Episode 2
To its principal author, Thomas Jefferson, it was “an expression of the American mind”; to the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, it was "absurd and visionary". The Declaration of Independence, written 250 years ago, is so layered in myth, so foundational to the idea of America as the last best hope of earth, that it is a challenge, now, to put it into its gritty historical context -- a document that served to justify an act of rebellion, to garner support for it by listing grievances, but which also embedded, perhaps inintentionally, some powerful emancipatory claims. In this two-part…
E72 · 26 Feb 2026 · 46 min
Why the Declaration of Independence said what it did, Episode 1
To its principal author, Thomas Jefferson, it was “an expression of the American mind”; to the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, it was "absurd and visionary". The Declaration of Independence, written 250 years ago, is so layered in myth, so foundational to the idea of America as the last best hope of earth, that it is a challenge, now, to put it into its gritty historical context -- a document that served to justify an act of rebellion, to garner support for it by listing grievances, but which also embedded, perhaps inintentionally, some powerful emancipatory claims. In this two-part…
E71 · 18 Feb 2026 · 40 min
Can federalism save American liberalism?
For much of the twentieth century, progressives in America wanted to expand the Federal Government. They created regulation, bureaucracy, and agencies capable of managing a complex industrial society. And often state governments were the obstacles they had to flatten – that was most obviously true of the movement for racial equality: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 empowered the Federal government to step in and override the racist laws and practices that state governments implemented or failed to prevent. The working assumption of liberal politicians was that…
E70 · 11 Feb 2026 · 33 min
Hillary Rodham Clinton on how America can save itself
Hillary Rodham Clinton has been at the centre of American public life for thirty years. She has exercised more power from more senior positions than any other woman in American history. Clinton has just co-edited a new book Inside the Situation Room: The Theory and Practice of Crisis Decision-making . and in this special episode, she discusses with Adam a key case study in that book -- the raid in which Bin Laden was killed -- and in doing so, reflects on her idea of what America is and can be. The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford…
E69 · 19 Nov 2025 · 42 min
Why the Gettysburg Address Matters, Part 2
It is one of the most famous speeches in the English language and one of the most consequential. In this special two-part documentary, we explore Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – why he gave it, what it meant, and its impact at the time and ever since. From the rolling fields of Pennsylvania to Parliament Square in London and the dust of Havana, Cuba, Adam Smith follows the path of the Gettysburg Address and asks why it is has mattered. Contributors: Steve Scafidi, a poet and the author of To the Bramble and the Briar (University of Arkansas Press, 2014); Richard Carwardine, Rhodes…
E68 · 12 Nov 2025 · 44 min
Why the Gettysburg Address Matters, Part 1
It is one of the most famous speeches in the English language and one of the most consequential. In this special two-part documentary, we explore Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – why he gave it, what it meant, and its impact at the time and ever since. From the rolling fields of Pennsylvania to Parliament Square in London and the dust of Havana, Cuba, Adam Smith follows the path of the Gettysburg Address and asks why it is has mattered. Contributors: Steve Scafidi, a poet and the author of To the Bramble and the Briar (University of Arkansas Press, 2014); Richard Carwardine, Rhodes…
E67 · 5 Nov 2025 · 50 min
How Will History Judge Joe Biden?
A year on, what does Trump’s comeback say about Biden’s understanding of the country he led? Was his vision of America already obsolete — a relic of the bipartisan consensus forged in the 1950s when young Joe was coming of age? In this episode, we trace Biden’s life through the long arc of American politics over the last 80 years, examining the forces that shaped him and the decisions that defined his time in office, his personal story—tragedy, perseverance, and decades of political ambition—and his commitment to a particular vision of America, as the last best hope of earth. In the end,…
E66 · 29 Oct 2025 · 39 min
The Myth of the Frontier
If America is the last, best hope of earth, one reason is the frontier. The frontier has been imagined as the place—or perhaps the process—through which the American character is forged—rugged individualism, the possibility of acquiring land and wealth, where happiness is pursued. For the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in the 1890s, the frontier was what made Americans different. Democracy was not born of a theorists dream, Turner said, nor was freedom something transplanted by Puritans from England, it was forged every time Americans found new frontiers. The frontier gave Americans a…
E65 · 22 Oct 2025 · 41 min
Trump’s Second Term Foreign Policy in Historical Context
Beneath the chaos of Donald Trump’s second term foreign policy—the bluster, bravado, back-handers and backdowns—is there something else going on? Has the United States reached a turning point in its relationship to the rest of the world? The era in which the United States constructed multilateral alliances to defend western Europe and advance a global free trade agenda appears to be over. Listen to the people around Trump and you will hear them talking in quite different ways – contempt for Western Europe, admiration for the audacity of Putin in reasserting Russia’s regional sphere of…
E64 · 15 Oct 2025 · 40 min
Journalism and Democracy: Lessons from Walter Lippmann
A hundred years ago, Walter Lippmann, one of the great analysts of democratic life, wrote that the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism. Press barons, Lippmann feared, were so powerful that government based on the consent of the governed was under threat if unregulated media owners could manufacture consent. If the facts were not being made available to the public, how could the public make proper democratic choices? Today, those words ring as true as they ever did. In place of press barons like William Randolph Hearst are corporations that curry favour with an…
E63 · 8 Nov 2024 · 1 hr 7 min
Election 2024: What just happened?
In this special episode of The Last Best Hope, we bring you a recording of a live event at the Rothermere American Institute in Oxford on Thursday, November 7. Adam Smith and guests discussed why the election turned out the way it did. The panellists are: Jason Casellas ABC News election decision desk. Jason Casellas is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston. He is an expert in Latino politics and has published widely on state and local politics. Clare Malone New Yorker staff writer. Clare Malone reports on politics, media, and journalism for the New Yorker.…
E62 · 31 Oct 2024 · 42 min
The Age of Polarization Election Special Part 4: 2016
The US is in an Age of Polarization. From the 1930s to the 1980s, voter allegiances were more fluid, and presidents sometimes won massive landslides (think Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972). But for the last thirty years, a huge gulf between the parties -- at least rhetorically -- has opened up, and elections have been persistently nail-bitingly close. How did this happen? In this special series, we examine the campaigns and characters of the last 30 years and trace the emergence of the partisan alignment and bitter polarisation we see today. In this episode, the election of 2016. The…
E61 · 30 Oct 2024 · 56 min
God and Trump: Evangelicals and Politics in today's America
When the media talks about the evangelical vote today, what or to whom are they referring? Who are the people who self-identify in this way? Should we understand them as a group defined by their faith, their style of worship, by distinctive theological positions – or has the term evangelical itself become so politicised that in practice it is now most meaningfully understood as shorthand for a group of mainly white voters characterised by their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights? Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford and Director of the Rothermere…
E60 · 29 Oct 2024 · 44 min
The Age of Polarization Election Special Part 3: 2008
AGE OF POLARIZATION ELECTION SPECIAL PART 3: 2008 The US is in an Age of Polarization. From the 1930s to the 1980s, voter allegiances were more fluid, and presidents sometimes won massive landslides (think Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972). But for the last thirty years, a huge gulf between the parties -- at least rhetorically -- has opened up, and elections have been persistently nail-bitingly close. How did this happen? In this special series, we examine the campaigns and characters of the last 30 years and trace the emergence of the partisan alignment and bitter polarisation we see today.…
E59 · 25 Oct 2024 · 37 min
The Age of Polarization Election Special Part 2: 2000
AGE OF POLARIZATION ELECTION SPECIAL (PART 2) The US is in an Age of Polarization. From the 1930s to the 1980s, voter allegiances were more fluid and presidents sometimes won huge landslides (think Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972). But for the last thirty years, a huge gulf between the parties -- at least rhetorically -- has opened up, and elections have been persistently nail-bitingly close. How did this happen? In this special series, we’ll be examining the campaigns and characters of the last 30 years and tracing the emergence of the partisan alignment and bitter polarisation we see…
E58 · 23 Oct 2024 · 40 min
Eugene V. Debs and America as the last, best hope for socialism?
Eugene V. Debs is a reminder of the possibility of a different kind of American politics. Five times the Socialist Party's candidate for president in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Debs argued that the promise of America -- the last best hope of earth -- could be fulfilled only through socialism. Debs lived in an era that, like our own, was characterised by dramatic economic dislocation, extremes of wealth and poverty, and high rates of immigration. So what is his legacy, and why does he still matter? Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford…
E57 · 18 Oct 2024 · 45 min
The Age of Polarization Election Special Part 1: 1992
ELECTION SPECIAL (PART 1) The US is in an Age of Polarization. From the 1930s to the 1980s, voter allegiances were more fluid and presidents sometimes won huge landslides (think Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972). But for the last thirty years, a huge gulf between the parties -- at least rhetorically -- has opened up, and elections have been persistently nail-bitingly close. How did this happen? In this special series, we’ll be examining the campaigns and characters of the last 30 years and tracing the emergence of the partisan alignment and bitter polarisation we see today. We begin in this…
E56 · 16 Oct 2024 · 44 min
Dark Money: Can billionaires buy elections in America?
Wealthy Americans have always found ways of spending money on political campaigns in the presumed expectation of a return on their investment. But in 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision ruled that legislation that restricted how much money could be spent on influencing elections was unconstitutional, opening up vast new possibilities for wealthy individuals and corporations to support candidates. The Court's argument was that to stop someone spending as much as they liked to push an agenda or a candidate was a violation of the first amendment right to free speech. The official…
E55 · 19 Jun 2024 · 50 min
Rigged! Anxiety about election integrity in America
For as long as there have been elections, there have been those who’ve refused to trust them. But anxiety about elections has peaked at particular moments in American history – in the run-up the Civil War, in the late nineteenth century, in the Civil Rights era, and again today. All periods when sections of the population became convinced that the rules were being bent in ways that robbed ordinary Americans of their political power – by new immigrants, African Americans, or liberal elites. At each moment of anxiety, attempts have been made to purify the electoral process, and all have had…
E54 · 5 Jun 2024 · 47 min
Presidents and the Press
In 1787, the year of the Constitutional Convention, Thomas Jefferson wrote that if he had to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”. Easy for him to say – but in reality, US presidents and the press have always been locked in an embrace fusing mutual respect and mistrust, cosiness and outright conflict. Both feed off each other, but who’s in charge? But who has the power in that relationship? How does it work and how has it changed? From Woodrow Wilson, the first president to hold proper press…
E53 · 22 May 2024 · 53 min
The Black Founders, America and the Claim of Equality
At the heart of the "promise" of the American Revolution and the new republic's claim to be the last, best hope of earth, is the assertion in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal". How did Black Americans react to the Declaration? How did they seek to shape the character of the new Republic? And what was the relationship between the Black struggle for freedom and equality and the American Revolution? To examine this once-hidden history of Black Americans in the founding era, Adam is joined by Professor James Basker, the President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of…
E52 · 8 May 2024 · 56 min
Morning Again in America: The 1984 Election forty years on.
Forty years ago, a twinkly-eyed incumbent president ran for re-election despite concerns about his age. He did so by running a campaign steeped in the idea that America was the last, best hope of earth. Ronald Reagan was no Joe Biden, and no one today expects a landslide victory. Yet there are echoes in today's divided politics in the 1984 election, especially within the Democratic Party, which, back then, just as now, was struggling to keep together its warring constituencies. And might there be lessons for today's fractious politics from Reagan's famous campaign ad, "It’s morning again in…
E51 · 6 Mar 2024 · 50 min
The strange death and curious rebirth of American cricket
Cricket was once the most popular summer game in the United States – the first ever international match was played not, as you might expect between England and one of its colonies, but between Canada and the United States, in 1844. The first overseas England tour was to the US in 1859. The professional players earned the unheard-of sum of 90 pounds – America then, just as now, was an El Dorado of sporting riches. Yet just ten years later, after four years of civil war and the rebirth of a newly consolidated United States, the new sport of baseball had all but erased cricket from the New York…
E50 · 21 Feb 2024 · 58 min
How have presidential primaries shaped modern US politics?
Presidential primaries – the circus that has traditionally wended its way from Iowa to New Hampshire and beyond every four years -- is one of the most distinctive features of American political life. From the insurgent campaigns of Jimmy Carter in 1976 to Barack Obama in 2008 and even Donald Trump in 2016, primaries have enabled the rise of politicians who could never have succeeded under the old boss-controlled system. US political parties are private organisations albeit without the formal membership of parties in other countries, yet their candidate nomination process is regulated by…

About The Last Best Hope?

The Last Best Hope? is a English history podcast from Adam Smith. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Adam Smith
Language: English
Category: History
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 44 min
Latest episode: 8 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1511930470

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