Hello friends. I'm Jeffrey Rosen, President and CEO of the National Constitution Center,

and welcome to Wheat of People, a weekly show of constitutional debate. The National Constitution

Center is a nonpartisan nonprofit, chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the

Constitution among the American people. In this episode, the great historian Eric Foner discusses his new book, Our Fragile Freedoms.

It's a collection of essays exploring topics, including the debate over slavery,

the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement,

and modern debates about how to teach American history.

This conversation was originally streamed live as part of the NCC's America's Town Hall program

on September 24, 2025.

Eric Foner, it is wonderful to welcome you back to the National Constitution Center.

Well, thank you very much, and I'm delighted to be here.

There are so many places we could begin, but let's begin with free speech.

We're in the middle of a national debate about the limits of the government's power to jawbone broadcasters,

not to run speakers whom the government dislikes. And there are charges from the left and the

right that free speech is under grave threat. In your essays, you write about past histories and threats

to free speech dating back to the Alien and Sedition Act. What can the debate over the alien and

sedition acts teach us about our current battles over free speech? Well, yes, you're right, of course,

that we haven't heard a lot about the

Alien and Sedition Acts in our politics until the last couple of years now of President

Trump. And I think what the Alien and Sedition Acts tell us is that devotion to freedom of speech is and should be a central theme of our political system.

The Alien and Sedition Acts were enacted in 1798. They were repealed or lapsed a couple of years later.

But they aroused enormous, enormous opposition,

...