Blog Posts

Few families in the history of China have exercised such wide-ranging influence as the Soong dynasty in the 20th century. The three famous Soong sisters married well.  According to one saying, one loved money (Ai-Ling), one loved power (Mei-Ling), a…

There have been some questions involving the arrest of Fred Trump at the Klu Klux Klan rally in 1927 (see Episode 102). Could he have been there to protest the Klan?  Did his presence really imply an acceptance of the Klan's doctrine of white racial…

Theodore R. Johnson's Washington Post column of January 14, 2026, discusses the "fragility" of U.S. citizenship in which he describes the injustice and danger of allowing the United States Government to decide capriciously who does and does not belo…

MARSHALL's SOURCES: Hyatt, Irwin. Our Ordered Lives Confess: Three Nineteenth-Century American Missionaries in East Shantung. 2014. A spirited case study of American missionaries operating in Northeast China and the challenges they faced. Essentia…

In our Tea, Drugs, and Jesus series on the persistent American misunderstanding of China, we discuss the First Opium War of 1839–1842 and briefly mention the Second Opium War of 1856–1860 (Episode 202: Conflict Follows Trade). The History Matters ch…

Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor's December 30, 2025, column from the newspaper's Today's WorldView newsletter discusses how right-wing politicians in the United States and globally are embracing an ethos based on the militaristic myth of th…

This gallery of photos, maps, and other images add to our Tea, Drugs, and Jesus audio series about how the United States has always misunderstood China. We expand the gallery as the series continues – and sometimes after it has concluded – and add l…

Our new series, "Tea, Drugs, and Jesus," has premiered! Ben Franklin got China wrong, and America still does today! Marshall again leads our discussion in this new series, looking at how the United States keeps misunderstanding China — in no small p…

Columnist Fareed Zakaria assesses the Trump administration's 2025 National Security Strategy and draws parallels between it and American opposition to immigration in the 1920s and American isolationism in the 1930s in his Washington Post column of D…

Columnist Karen Tumulty compares U.S. nativism of the 1920s with that of today in her Washington Post column of December 7, 2025, discussing themes we also covered in our "America First" series. If you have access to The Washington Post's content, y…

The sequel to our debut episode is here! Episode 102: America First- Part 2 picks up where we left off and dives into the birth of the “America First” ideology, including its roots in post–World War I paranoia, the Red Scare, and the cultural backla…

This gallery of photos, maps, and other images add to our America First audio series about the rise and evolution of the "America First" movement in the United States from the 1880s through World War II. The gallery includes links to episodes for ea…