The Great American Story: The House Divides

The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast

Hillsdale College

Government, Society & Culture, Education, History, Courses

4.6 • 621 Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2026

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the Mexican War of 1846 before introducing Wilfred McClay.

Americans have overcome many challenges throughout our history, including the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the Cold War. Studying the great stories from our past inspires us to preserve the blessings of liberty in our day. Now you can study these stories with Hillsdale College.

Hillsdale’s free online course, “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” explores the history of America as a land of hope founded on high principles. In presenting the great triumphs and achievements of our nation’s past, as well as the shortcomings and failures, it offers a broad and unbiased study of the kind essential to the cultivation of intelligent patriotism.

The Mexican War of 1846 pushed the United States toward a civil war by reviving the national debate concerning slavery in U.S. territories—a debate that the Missouri Compromise had attempted to settle in 1820.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
0:13.2	And I'm Juan Davalos, and we are back with The Great American Story, A Land of Hope.
0:18.4	We're going to cover lectures 9 and 10 today. The House divides.
0:22.6	In the previous two lectures, we've seen the question of justice, particularly over slavery,
0:28.2	become an increasing division. And certain events in the 1840s, particularly the Mexican-American
0:34.2	war, which America's easy victory in as its Republican citizen soldier
0:39.0	troops defeated the professional army of the Mexicans, massively expanded American holdings,
0:44.4	and the American people needed to decide, would there be slavery in these new holdings or not?
0:50.3	And that's what I find very interesting about these two lectures.
0:53.8	Today, especially, we tend to focus on the issue of slavery as an important part of American history. And, you know, obviously that is the title of this lecture, the house divides, is brought from a theme in one of Lincoln's speeches about the house divided cannot stand. And obviously what
1:13.0	he's referring to is this issue of slavery and a different definition of justice. But there's a lot of
1:18.0	topics in this lecture that are covered that are very interesting. There were a lot of things
1:23.6	going on in American history, such as the Mexican War like Jeremiah is mentioning,
1:28.2	and you'll get to see those in this lecture and the importance of those cannot be understated.
1:35.1	Again, thinking of the growth of America, the westward expansion of America.
1:40.2	And in this particular instance, the idea that Americans are now standing against
1:46.7	settled armies and beating them and establishing themselves now a expanding country. Right. One of
1:53.7	the major problems that Americans faced in their infancy was the threat from European imperial
1:59.8	powers. We fought two wars with Great Britain. France was an ally
2:04.5	and then an adversary and was going through all sorts of turmoil, but was still an imperial power.
2:08.8	Spain was an imperial power. There were other imperial powers in Europe, and America was weak and
2:14.5	vulnerable. Unfortunately, had the Atlantic Ocean to make exploitation by the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Hillsdale College, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Hillsdale College and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.