Episode 996: America 250 – Abraham Lincoln with Dr. Allen Guelzo
Newt's World
Gingrich 360
4.6 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2026
⏱️ 47 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
Newt welcomes back historian Dr. Allen Guelzo to discuss Abraham Lincoln's enduring legacy as America approaches its 250th anniversary. Dr. Guelzo, a leading Lincoln scholar, explores what makes the 16th president endlessly fascinating: his resilience, humor, and remarkable ability to learn the presidency on the job despite having no prior executive experience. They examine underexplored areas of Lincoln scholarship, including his pre-1854 political career, his complicated relationships with his generals, and his dealings with Congress. The conversation turns to how the Civil War reshaped federal power and dispels myths about Northern industrialization versus Southern agriculture. Dr. Guelzo speculates on how Reconstruction might have unfolded had Lincoln survived. Their discussion closes with reflections on America's persistent political polarization throughout history versus today's deeper cultural divisions, and Dr. Guelzo shares how he'll spend the Fourth of July at Gettysburg.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:09.1 | Welcome to News World Podcast on the IHeart Podcast Network. |
| 0:13.7 | The Greatest American Inventions. |
| 0:16.7 | Today's invention is the one that more than any other made the digital age possible. |
| 0:22.7 | Without it, no computers, no smartphones, no internet, no GPS. |
| 0:29.8 | It is the fundamental building block of every electronic device made in the last 75 years. |
| 0:37.1 | And most people have never thought about it for a |
| 0:39.1 | single second, even though they're surrounded by billions of them at every moment of every day. |
| 0:45.5 | That is, the transistor. Before the transistor, electronic circuits ran on vacuum tubes, |
| 0:53.5 | glass bulbs with metal electrodes that could amplify or switch |
| 0:58.3 | electrical signals. They worked. Eniac, the first general-purpose electronic computer, built in 1945, |
| 1:07.2 | contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes. It weighed 30 tons, occupied 1,800 square feet, |
| 1:15.3 | and consumed 150 kilowatts of power. |
| 1:19.8 | And vacuum tubes burned out constantly. |
| 1:22.5 | They were fragile, expensive, hot, and large. |
| 1:28.0 | At Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, then one of the greatest |
| 1:33.5 | scientific institutions in the world, a team assembled to work on solaceate physics. |
| 1:40.0 | The team was led by William Shockley, with key collaborators John Bardeen, one of the most |
| 1:46.8 | exceptional theoretical physicists of the century, and Walter Bratton, a gifted experimental |
| 1:53.4 | physicist with a talent for making things actually work. |
| 1:58.4 | On December 16, 1947, Bardeen and Bratton demonstrated the first working transistor, |
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