Please enjoy this re-release of a past episode of For the Ages. New episodes will return Fall 2025.

The women’s suffrage movement was a hard-fought, decades-long campaign to extend that most essential of democratic rights to all Americans regardless of sex. That protracted struggle would rapidly come to a head in August of 1920 in Tennessee, the final state needed to ratify the 19th Amendment. Author and journalist Elaine Weiss talks with David Rubenstein about the struggles of the suffragists against misogynistic politics, members of the church, and even other women in that fateful month when everything hung in the balance.

Recorded on September 25, 2020

Please enjoy this re-release of a past episode of For the Ages. New episodes will return Fall 2025.

While the Supreme Court is often presented in American history as a protector of civil liberties, its record across the centuries provides a more complex picture. While the short period of the 1930s to the 1970s saw the Court end segregation and safeguard both free speech and the vote, during the preceding period, the Court largely ignored or suppressed basic rights for many Americans. The succeeding period, too, saw a retreat and even regression on gains made toward racial justice. Prizewinning author and professor of history Orville Vernon Burton charts the Court’s racial jurisprudence, discussing the many cases involving America’s racial minorities and the impact of individual rulings.

Recorded on July 6, 2023

Please enjoy this re-release of a past episode of For the Ages. New episodes will return Fall 2025.

Bestselling author Walter Isaacson, in conversation with David M. Rubenstein, discusses the life and work of the Nobel Prize-winning Jennifer Doudna who, with her collaborators, created a DNA-editing tool with the power to revolutionize human health.

Recorded on February 19, 2021