The Historians brings together two leading historians for an informal, unscripted conversation about history's biggest and most enduring questions. Each episode pairs two voices from the same broad field of expertise, creating an intimate dialogue that goes beyond the standard interview format.

"I wanted to create something that felt like eavesdropping on a conversation between two brilliant people who don't often get to just talk to each other. No panels, no debate, no agenda — just historians talking shop about the questions they've spent their careers thinking about." - Peter Zablocki

EPISODE #1

Were the Founding Fathers Good Men?

Featuring Dr. Joseph J. Ellis and Dr. Carol Berkin

Available July 4, 2026

DESCRIPTION:

For the debut episode of The Historians, host Peter Zablocki sat down with a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and one of America's most celebrated historians of early America — two scholars who have spent their careers living with the same remarkable generation of Americans — and asked them one deceptively simple question:

Were the Founding Fathers good men?

What followed was nearly an hour of warm, honest, and occasionally surprising conversation — ranging from the dangers of presentism in how we understand the past, to the remarkable women of the founding era who history has largely forgotten, to the complicated, deeply human figures who somehow managed to produce the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence despite being, as Dr. Berkin puts it, mere mortals.

They didn't always agree. But when they disagreed, they did it the way great historians do — thoughtfully, generously, and with enormous respect for the complexity of the past.

This is The Historians. Pull up a chair.

GUEST BIOS

Dr. Joseph J. Ellis

Joseph J. Ellis is one of America's most celebrated historians of the founding era. A Pulitzer Prize winner and National Book Award recipient, he is the author of numerous landmark works including Founding Brothers, American Sphinx, His Excellency: George Washington, and The Cause. He taught for many years at Mount Holyoke College and has spent his career bringing the founders to life not as marble statues but as complex, flawed, and deeply human figures. His most recent work, The Great Contradiction, continues that tradition.

DR. CAROL BERKIN

Carol Berkin is one of America's foremost historians of early America and the founding era. A recipient of the prestigious Bancroft Award for Outstanding Dissertation, the Colonial Dames of America Book Prize for A Brilliant Solution, and an elected member of the Society of American Historians — which honors excellence in historical writing — she is the author of Revolutionary Mothers, A Brilliant Solution, The Bill of Rights, and many other celebrated works. She taught for decades at Baruch College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and has spent her career ensuring that the full story of the founding generation — including the women, the overlooked, and the forgotten — is finally told.