Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

And welcome to, well, we're calling it chilled speech week.

Not chill.

Definitely not chill, chilled speech week.

I guess that's what we're going to call it.

But look, here's the context.

As you know,

listeners, on this show, we tend to jump around from topic to topic era to era. And we generally just try and tell interesting stories from the past. Sometimes it's nice if they give us a little

perspective or parallel on the present moment. But that is not the number one goal here. But

over the last week, here in the United States,

we have seen a rise of the free speech wars in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk,

and we've seen everyone from professors to comedians, to businesses and politicians being

targeted and hounded for their comments, often losing their jobs, facing harassment,

otherwise being part of a growing and disturbing, to my mind, discourse.

And as it happens, we were going to do a couple episodes over the coming weeks on this show that sort of touched on this.

So here we are. We decided to round it up into a two-parter looking at some other moments in U.S. history

where we have seen a growing effort to suppress

or otherwise direct the public discourse. And before I continue, let me introduce, as always,

Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley, who are welcome to say

whatever the hell they want on this show, no fear or favor on this podcast. But hey there.

Hey, Jody. Hey there. How are you doing?

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