Why America Doesn't Love Soccer (Except When It Does)
10/06/2026 | 36 mins.
Is there anything more distinctively American than its sports culture? In a previous episode of this podcast, we discussed the tragic decline and partial revival of American cricket. As the 2026 World Cup kicks off in the US Adam asks why a sport that took over the world has been so marginal for so long in America – and wonders if that’s finally changing. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a form of football that had begun in English public schools became a global phenomenon, played almost everywhere except in the United States. There, a strange alternative form of football was played instead, one in which men in helmets stand around for long periods, interrupted by occasional violent bursts of energy. This is a story about culture, gender politics, race, class and migration – and, as with the story of cricket’s demise -- about nationhood. Guests on this episode: Frank Guridy, Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Professor of History at Columbia. His most recent book is The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play (Basic Books, 2024) which tells the story of the American stadium as an institution that has played a central role in American civic and political life and in the struggles for social justice over the last 150 years. And by Uta Balbier, Professor of US History at Oxford, a transnational historian of the modern United States with a particular interest in sport history.
The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.uk If you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/giving Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
1776 and the break up of the United States
27/05/2026 | 38 mins.
The rebels who tried to break up the United States in the 1860s thought of themselves as the rightful heirs to the spirit of 1776. The South Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession took the Declaration of Independence as its template. Washington’s face appeared on Confederate banknotes and the Confederacy’s Great Seal. Many of the leaders of the Revolution of the 1860s were the literal grandsons of the men who had made the Revolution of the 1770s.
In this episode, Adam explores an alternative legacy of 1776. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence launched the United States. It also licensed the greatest-ever effort to break it up. In conversation with Caroline E. Janney of the University of Virginia and Robert Hancock, Senior Curator at the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Adam discusses how the Confederacy built a national identity in four short years out of the material the Founding had left lying around: the flags, the seals, the songs, the textbooks, the sermons, the fast days and the inaugurations.
A century and a half later, as the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Confederates remain among that document’s most committed readers.
The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.uk
If you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/giving
Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The idea of America in British politics
13/05/2026 | 50 mins.
For 250 years, the idea of America and the fact of American power have unsettled British politics. Is America of us, or apart from us? Rival or special friend? In the British political imagination, America has provoked envy, resentment, condescension, and neediness. It has also divided us, because America has so often illuminated or distorted our understanding of ourselves. Since the radical Whigs of the 1770s, one strand of the British left has looked to the United States for democratic inspiration. Another has seen America as a plutocratic, imperialist hegemon. Conservatives, meanwhile, have alternately recoiled from America in horror and embraced its go-getting freedom.
In this episode of The Last Best Hope?, Adam discusses the place of the US in the British political imagination with the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland. He reported from Washington early in his career and now presents the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast. The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui.
For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.uk
If you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/giving Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The idea of America in British politics
13/05/2026 | 46 mins.
For 250 years, the idea of America and the fact of American power have unsettled British politics. Is America of us, or apart from us? Rival or special friend? In the British political imagination, America has provoked envy, resentment, condescension, and neediness. It has also divided us, because America has so often illuminated or distorted our understanding of ourselves. Since the radical Whigs of the 1770s, one strand of the British left has looked to the United States for democratic inspiration. Another has seen America as a plutocratic, imperialist hegemon. Conservatives, meanwhile, have alternately recoiled from America in horror and embraced its go-getting freedom.
In this episode of The Last Best Hope?, Adam discusses the place of the US in the British political imagination with the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland. He reported from Washington early in his career and now presents the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast.
The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.uk
If you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/giving
Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
New Series Trailer
12/05/2026 | 1 mins.
As the US gears up for the 250th anniversary celebrations of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July, the RAI’s podcast, The Last Best Hope?, returns for our 16th series on 13 May. As always, each episode uses history to explore what makes America different
“The must-listen US podcast” Nick Bryant, former BBC Correspondent in New York
The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and is kindly supported by Tom Amraoui. For details of our programming, go to rai.ox.ac.uk
If you would like to support us by making a donation go to https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/giving
Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Abraham Lincoln called the United States “the last best hope of Earth.” In this podcast, we ask whether that claim still holds — and whether it ever did. Each episode takes a figure, idea, or moment in American political history and asks what it tells us about the country’s understanding of itself, always with an eye to how America looks from the outside in. The Last Best Hope? takes ideas seriously: America as a creed, the arguments of the people who built and remade it, and what America has meant to the rest of the world. We take our subjects from history, not the news — though the present is rarely far away.Hosted by Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of American Political History and Director of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford, The Last Best Hope? brings him into conversation with leading scholars and public figures, including Hillary Clinton, Annette Gordon-Reed, Eric Foner, David Frum, Heather Cox Richardson, Stacy Schiff, Jonathan Freedland, James Morone, Michael Kazin, Kevin Kruse, Julian Zelizer, Bruce Schulman, Ty Seidule, Liz Varon, Eric Rauchway, Phil Tinline, Emily Bazelon, Richard Carwardine, Rachel Shelden, Richard Blackett, Devin Fergus, and Dan Jackson.“Adam Smith is one of the UK’s foremost historians of America, and communicates his expertise with zest, wit and unforced passion. The Last Best Hope? brings him together with fellow scholars to provide a unique insight we can’t do without.” — Phil Tinline, BBC radio documentary-maker and author“The Last Best Hope is an absolutely brilliant podcast. Thoughtful, clever, engaging and accessible, Adam Smith always gets the best out of his guests, and I’ve learned an enormous amount from every episode. I love it.” — Dominic Sandbrook, historian and co-host of The Rest is History“The must-listen US podcast.” — Nick Bryant, former BBC Correspondent in New YorkProduced by the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. https://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/home Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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