Open Source is the world’s longest-running podcast. Christopher Lydon circles the big ideas in culture, the arts and politics with the smartest people in the world. It’s the kind of curious, critical, high-energy conversation we’re all missing nowadays. Be part of the action: leave a voice message to be played on the air; get in touch over Facebook or Twitter; or email us – info@radioopensource.org with show ideas, advice, requests and high-quality criticism.
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A Radical American Life
Lydia Moland is reminding us that when present company in American public life comes up short, the ancestors of American democracy and spirit are lurking out there, in abundance and power to reset our judgment of who we are and what is possible, for a society, for each of us.
Lydia Moland.
Lydia Moland, our sometime radio colleague, is now a philosophy professor at Colby College in Maine. For her the shock of recognition came at the chance sight of a nineteenth-century letter from a battling idealist, Lydia Maria Child, whom she’d never heard of. (It reminds me of the Pulitzer Prize biographer Stacy Schiff feeling much the same rapture at the same moment in 2016, rediscovering the sturdy giant of the American Revolution, Samuel Adams.) Lydia Moland’s big book became a story not just of a central figure in the abolition of slavery, but of her own passion as a contemporary scholar finding a model of moral courage for our own times. We spoke together at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge on the publication of Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life.