Blog Posts

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…

We are proud to present the first episode of our podcast, The United States of Amnesia, now available on all major streaming services! A lot of work went into this episode, including researching and structuring, investing in supplies and equipment, …