So we are 250 years into this American experiment, and I'd say it's going okay.

I'd give us like a C plus, the Declaration of Independence, the Women's Rights Movement,

the invention of basketball or the iPhone, all good.

Slavery, colonialism, income inequality, unequivocally bad.

But what's going to determine the next 250 years of America?

And how do we write a new social contract

that can give us the democracy we deserve?

That's this week on America Actually.

Let's begin.

Burn your five pound weights. I'm not better son. I'm an athlete and fitness instructor,

and I am telling you, unless you have been limited to lighter weights by a medical professional,

they're honestly inexcusable. You need to be lifting heavy, and I'm talking especially to the women out there. Fibb-toned arms. What can your body do? This week on Project Swagger, what heavy means

and rules to bring into your routine? Listen now. Joining me now is Heather Cox Richardson.

She's a historian and professor at Boston College, but you probably know her from her very popular substack letters from an American and her YouTube channel. I am excited that Heather is joining us because she's going to help us think about not only the future, but how the past connects to it. Thank you for coming. It's such a pleasure to be here. I appreciate that. I mean, I wanted to kind of start by looking at your work.

As I was preparing for this, I was reading about how you've argued that the country has basically

reinvented itself every 80 to 90 years, from the founding to the Civil War, to the New Deal.

I wondered how you thought about those reinventions.

What forces shape them? And are we in

the reinvention period right now? Oh, that's interesting. I'm not sure I've ever used the words

reinvention because the way I think about it is that any country has to deal with new challenges

all the time. And because we had set out at our foundation, a series of principles that at the time were

quite limited by who they covered but were expansive in terms of what they could cover,

...