Framed

Ava Wallace, sports reporter at The Washington Post, is in France to report on the Summer Games — and eat a lot of croissants. Join her through the entire run of the games, for several episodes a week as she captures the highs, the lows and the Paris of it all, along with other P ... Show More

Grenada’s Black revolutionary leader, Maurice Bishop, was executed in a coup in 1983, along with seven others. The whereabouts of their remains are unknown. Now, The Washington Post’s Martine Powers uncovers new answers about how the U.S. fits into this 40-year-old Caribbean myst ... Show More

To hear the rest of the series, follow “Field Trip” wherever you listen.  California’s Sierra Nevada is home to a very special kind of tree, found nowhere else on Earth: the giant sequoia. For thousands of years, these towering trees withstood the trials of the world around them, ... Show More

“What even is the Virginia Plan but democracy checked by democracy, or pork with a little change of the sauce?”This is the story of 55 men from 12 of the 13 sovereign states gathered at the Pennsylvania State House during the miserably hot Philadelphian summer of 1787. They are h ... Show More

Long before we could decide and insist upon what they mean to us, a handful of powerful men had to put pen to paper. We're revisiting two episodes from our Foundational Documents series: The Constitution and The Bill of Rights. This is the story of how these now-indispensable doc ... Show More

The United States Constitution gets a lot of credit for being the first of its kind. The progenitor of democratic constitution making. The spark that started a global fire. Is that the long and short of it, or is there more to the story? Linda Colley, author of The Gun, The Ship ... Show More

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay's essays written in 1787/8 in support of the new US Constitution. They published these anonymously in New York as 'Publius' but, when it became known that Hamilton and Madison were the main authors, th ... Show More

The Constitution is like America's secular bible, our sacred founding document. In her play, What the Constitution Means to Me, Heidi Schreck goes through a process of discovering what the document is really about – who wrote it, who it was for, who it protected and who it didn't ... Show More

Drunken brawls, coercion, and lace curtains. Believe it or not, how regular people vote was not something the founding fathers thought much about, or planned for. Americans went from casting votes at drunken parties in the town square to private booths behind a drawn curtain. In ... Show More

On Alexander Hamilton/James Madison's Federalist Papers (1, 10-12, 14-17, 39, 47-51), published as newspaper editorials 1787-8, plus Letters III and IV from Brutus, an Anti-Federalist. What constitutes good government? These founding fathers argued that the proposed Constitution, ... Show More

Something like 60% of Americans have never fully read the US Constitution. How did such a short document become one of the most important pieces of writing in human history -- and why are some parts of it arguably ridiculous? Ben, Noel and Max welcome returning guest AJ Jacobs, a ... Show More

In this episode, A.J. Jacobs sets out on a journey of “living constitutionally” for a year! With a unique blend of humor and curiosity, A.J. and Eric dive into a discussion and exploration of the Constitution that offers many thought-provoking ideas to deepen the understanding of ... Show More

In June 1776, a little over a year after the start of the American Revolutionary War, the US Continental Congress huddled together in a hot room in Philadelphia to talk independence. Kenneth C. Davis dives into some of the lesser known facts about the process of writing the Decla ... Show More