Your Weekly Constitutional

Jason Silverman has done something rare: he's actually found something new to say about Abraham Lincoln.
Jason is the Ellison Capers Palmer, Jr. Professor of History, Emeritus, at Winthrop University. His new book, "Lincoln and the Immigrant," explores Lincoln's attitudes and actions toward those who made their way to our shores in the mid-Nineteenth Century.
This is history, of course, but Jason thinks that perhaps Lincoln has something to say to us about immigration today.

Among the best aspects of our relationship with Montpelier is that it gives us frequent contact with brilliant minds. Among the most brilliant is Jack Rakove, a Madison scholar at Stanford University and a member of Montpelier's Board.
Jack has published a new book, "A Politician Thinking: The Creative Mind of James Madison." Recently, he and Stewart sat down at the Potter Family Studios at Montpelier and talked about it.
Join us for a fascinating discussion.

Well, it’s happened. We didn’t think it would happen, but it has.
No, we’re not talking about the nomination of Donald Trump. We’re talking about Brexit, which represents, in the United Kingdom, a constitutional change of historic proportions and uncertain consequences.
Fortunately, we have William Walton of Northumbria University to explain it all to us.

You’ve heard of Confederates. But have you heard of “Confederados?” The terms are related, but as the variation in spelling suggests, there’s a linguistic and geographical difference.
It seems that a number of unhappy Confederates left the United States after our Civil War and emigrated to places where they could continue to own slaves. Among those places was Brazil, where such people were called “Confederados,” and where their descendants live to this day.
Two Brazilian historians, Luciana da Cruz Brito and Helena Maria Machado, will tell us the tale. It's a story that is not only compelling, but which also brings home an important point: African slavery was not just a problem in the United States, but throughout the Americas, and indeed, throughout much of the world.

Nope. Not Andrew Johnson. It's a guy named William Blount, who was kicked out of the United States Senate more than two hundred years ago.
But, like Johnson, Blount was an East Tennessean. Perhaps there's something in the water here.
University of Tennessee historian Chris Magra tells the tale.