To try to do it briefly is a challenge but we'll do our best.

Politics has never been more unpredictable, more alarming, or more interesting.

Hello, my name is David Ronsman, and I'm here to tell you about a special holiday series

of talking politics with the historians Sarah Churchill and Gary Gerstle.

Well, that's why I think it's so important to tell these historical stories because

whichever side of the battle, and it is a battle right now, that you see yourself as being on,

people's positions change, so the idea that this is some great moral crusade is just a nonsense

historically. I think one can see both congenuities and differences. I think we can think of the 1960s

as a period of emancipation, civil rights, feminism, gay rights, sexual liberation, similar to the 1860s

and 1870s, followed by a period of, oh my god, the country's lost its way, we must re-implant

morality on the American people, and that's a big part of the story of America.

Over the next few weeks, we are going deep into the history of America to make sense of what's

happening now. President Trump is only the third president to have been impeached, the fate of

President Johnson in the 1860s and President Clinton in the 1990s. So where we are now is that he

and many people are pointing this out is that they are claiming monarchical rights. They are claiming

divine right of king for Donald J. Trump, and so at some point the United States has to decide

whether this is what we're doing. In this series we uncover some of the major threads of U.S. history

from impeachment to enfranchisement, monopoly to pornography, deportation to abortion.

The Mexican story and the French Canadian story are different, the Mexican story is more

important because the numbers involved are so much greater. This is done by state and local

governments. It's done more under Herbert Hoover through 1933 than under Franklin Roosevelt.

It's a massive movement and to most Americans living outside this area, an invisible movement

...