This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

Our next story comes to us from Jeff Bloodworth,

who's a professor of American history at Gannon University. He's also a Jack Miller Center fellow. Let's take a listen.

Change. Historians obsess over it. We haggle, debate, and argue over who and what causes social transformation.

In lectures and books, historians most always focus upon elite actors.

But we also understand that change comes from average folks.

America's civil rights narrative exemplifies this.

Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and Diane Nash are household names, and rightfully so.

But change also comes from below.

And in terms of civil rights, two 20-something kids, Bob Gibson and Tim McCarver, demonstrate that social transformations

are also made by those from below.

Today, Gibson and Macarver are well known.

Both played Major League Baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals.

But in October, the duo was anything but famous.

The celebrities were in the other duckout. They played for the New York Yankees.

Yogi Berra was the manager. The likes of Mickey Mantle and Roger Marish were

Yankees who were the greatest dynasty in American sports history. In the previous

18 years, they had won 15 American League pennants and 10 World Series. Beyond baseball,

1964 was a significant year. That year witnessed LBJ's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater,

the Americanization of the Vietnam

War, and of course, the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

...