Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

And this is our series we call Some Sunday Context. On Sundays, we try and bring you new conversations

and stories from the archives that might provide a little context for the news of today.

The big news of today, as you no doubt know,

is that the U.S. government is in a shutdown. I guess I should say as of this recording, but I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. And we've done a few episodes about shutdowns on this show,

so it might be instructive to listen back to some of them. We're going to run a

couple of them over the coming week. Today, we go all the way back to the very first shutdown

in the wake of the Civil War. Like a lot of people, I've been thinking about this most recent

shutdown and what it is really about. Of course, there's the pain it will inflict on people

who need government services or want to visit a national park, say, and of course the many government employees who aren't going to be getting paychecks.

But this is a lot more than just a funding fight. In many ways, Democrats these days are seeing this as their most tangible chance to take a stand against the efforts of the Trump administration to

dismantle government. So it is budgetary, it is political, and frankly, it is moral. And it turns

out the very first government shutdown included a lot of those elements as well. It wasn't just

about items on a spending bill. It wrapped in the huge questions and divisions of the Reconstruction era

and political realignment of that moment. So we have had shutdowns with this kind of larger

battle swirling around them before. Now, I don't know how reassuring it is to point that out,

given that the parallels I'm seeing are to the era after the Civil War and the rolling back of Reconstruction.

But anyway, it is a fascinating story and it does offer a little bit of context.

So here it is now. We recorded this a couple years ago. Take a listen.

Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, March 1879, it's America's first government shutdown.

...