Hello to everyone out there. I'm Nick Houselman, your co-host of the Muckrake podcast. I hope you're staying safe, wearing a mask if you have to go out, and maintaining proper social distancing. You might have noticed we didn't drop a pod yesterday, but have no fear. Jared and I will be back for our normal Tuesday show.

But this gave me a chance to sit down with a very smart historian and have an utterly

fascinating discussion of how our society has been profoundly impacted by the founding of the

country and its constitution to the civil war and all the way through

to the civil rights movement.

This is really an important topic that helps explain a lot of why we're wrestling with so

many issues pertaining to race.

So here's the interview.

Enjoy.

Hi, everybody.

I'm really pleased to have a friend of mine, Curtis Harris, on the show to discuss Civil

War and the Constitution and American History.

And Curtis is a PhD candidate in American history, and, you know, fingers crossed, you're going

to get that PhD sooner than later.

So, thanks for coming on the show and joining us. Yeah, good to be with you, coach Nick. And, yeah, glad to talk about history and not just basketball history. For sure, for sure. Well, your Twitter feed does have a lot of interesting basketball history, but it also does get into some really great threads about the Civil War and Reconstruction. And I thought,

let's start actually from the beginning with the Constitution because I do feel like there's

this notion of people out there, especially on the conservative side, who like to view the

Constitution as a dead document and want to interpret it exactly as it was written. And so I thought

we could kind of get your response

to why that method is either good or bad or indifferent. And what some of the fundamental issues

could very well be with how they wrote the Constitution itself. Yeah. So it's, it's not just a

constitution, but just the whole idea and concept of the founding fathers, I think is very flawed.

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