In the fall of 1949, a young evangelist named Billy Graham pitched a tent in Los Angeles for what he hoped would be a modest three-week revival. Attendance was sparse, and Graham was discouraged. Then, seemingly overnight, everything changed. William Randolph Hearst, the powerful newspaper magnate, sent a two-word telegram to his editors: “Puff Graham.” The next morning, headlines blazed with his name. The tent filled. The revival stretched for weeks and Billy Graham became a national figure.

That moment wasn’t just about media savvy. It was about the convergence of faith, family values, and political ambition, a convergence that would shape the rise of the Religious Right. In We Gather Together, Neil J. Young traces how evangelical leaders like Graham helped build a movement that reached from the pulpit to the ballot box. In Partisans, Nicole Hemmer explores how those media, religion, and family fueled the conservative revolution of the 1990s. Today, Nicole and Neil join us to talk about how political movements are born not just in campaigns, but in living rooms, churches, and family trees and how the personal and the political have always been intertwined in the making of American conservatism.

In a quiet kitchen on the Diné (Navajo Nation) reservation, a grandmother begins to speak. There’s no script, no microphone, just her voice, steady and rich with memory. She tells of boarding schools, of ceremonies held in secret, of laughter shared under desert skies. Her story isn’t written in books or stored in archives. It lives in her words, passed from one generation to the next.

For Farina King, these stories are history. In her work as a historian and citizen of the Navajo Nation, she listens to voices often left out of official records. Oral histories, she shows us, are not just sources. They are relationships. They carry emotion, identity, and the power to connect past and present in deeply personal ways.

Today, Dr. King joins us to discuss how oral histories transform our understanding of families, communities, and the significance of history itself. We’ll explore how listening, truly listening, can be an act of scholarship, of care, and of cultural survival.

In eighteenth-century England, not every family story turned on courtship and heirs. Many households were held together by single adults who managed budgets, cared for nieces and nephews, and kept the letters and ledgers that became a family’s memory. Their lives were both social and practical. Music in the parlor. Trips on the Thames. Decisions made around a shared table rather than an altar. When we shift our view from marriage and descent to the bonds among siblings and cousins, we see a different map of kinship. It is lateral. It is durable. It shapes how families work.

In today’s episode of Reunion, we explore that world through Amy Harris’s Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried, a study of the Sharp family across three generations that shows how unmarried kin shaped household economies, caregiving, philanthropy, and abolitionist work; it asks us to see aunts and uncles and single siblings as central actors in family governance and legacy, suggests genealogy is about values as much as property, and invites us to read portraits, epitaphs, and paper trails for the stories singles preserved; and Amy Harris joins us to discuss single sociability, householding beyond marriage, and how re-centering lateral kin changes what family history can do.