#1681 Joseph Ellis Returns with a New Book

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

One of Clay's favorite historians, Joe Ellis, has just published his 14th book, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding. His latest volume attempts to make sense of the twin failures of the revolutionary era: the failure to end slavery in the United States and the founders' inability to respect and protect the homelands and sovereignty of Native Americans. How could the founders have been so dedicated to the principles of liberty, equality, and the rights of humankind and permitted themselves to be hypocrites on these fundamental issues? Joe's book is an attempt to chasten some of the wilder claims of the 1619 Project, which argues that America has been a racist and even white supremacist nation from the beginning, and all that talk about the "rights of man" is just self-serving rhetoric. This is not the view of Joe Ellis. This episode was recorded on October 28, 2025.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to this introduction to this week's podcast, the great Joseph Ellis, my friend Joe Ellis, Mount Holyoke,
0:10.6	went to William and Mary, has written a slew of books.
0:13.0	You know some of the books you've heard me interview him many times and rave about his greatness.
0:19.4	He's somebody that I so deeply admire passionate sage in 1993, the character and legacy
0:24.3	of John Adams, American Sphinx, 1996, the book that brought us together, the character
0:29.1	of Thomas Jefferson, 2000 founding brothers, a revolutionary generation, that one was a bestseller.
0:35.4	2004, my second favorite of his books, His Excellency, George Washington.
0:39.4	Then there's 2010 First Family, Abigail and John Adams, and so on and so forth.
0:43.5	This is one of the great historians of our time, and it is possible for me to be able to know him
0:49.2	and bring him to you because of the pandemic.
0:53.2	It used to be when I would want someone like Joe Ellis to be on this program,
0:56.6	he would have to find his way to a radio station, an NPR stationer.
1:00.3	We'd have to pay for a studio.
1:02.9	That's complicated, and it's easy to say no,
1:05.9	because you have to get in your car and drive somewhere,
1:08.1	and there's a fee for the audio engineering there,
1:12.1	and it's just, you know, it's just one hassle too many. But once the pandemic came and Zoom technology
1:18.3	suddenly burst upon the scene, I've been able to get people that would otherwise never be
1:23.7	available to us. And so if you can help get others, if there are people you want us to
1:27.7	interview, if there are people that you'd like to encounter and listening to America, just let
1:32.8	us know, they almost always say yes now. And it's so important. So I've probably had 20, maybe even
1:40.9	more podcast conversations with the great Joe Ellis over the past 10 years or so,
	...

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