America from 2008-2016

What is American History B Online?

The 11th-grade level American History course podcast for BESD.

00:00 Introduction
Last time, we left the United States in the middle of two open-ended wars — Afghanistan and Iraq — with no clear exit in sight. Today we're staying home. Because while American soldiers were fighting overseas, life back in the United States was changing in ways that were quieter, but in some ways just as significant.
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00:30 Social Media and the Smartphone
In the mid-2000s, a handful of new websites launched that most people barely noticed at first. YouTube launched in 2005 with an upload about a visit to the zoo. Facebook went public in 2006, and Twitter started tweeting in 2006, too. These platforms did something genuinely new. They let ordinary people create and share content with anyone in the world. You didn't need a newspaper. You didn't need a television station. You just needed an internet connection.
Think about that for a minute. I know it’s the world you’ve grown up in, but in the vast history of humanity, it’s really, really unique. Information itself is now democratized, meaning it can be created and shared by anybody.
Then in 2007, Apple released the iPhone.
Before the smartphone, the internet was something you went to. You sat down at a computer, logged on, did what you needed to do, and walked away. The smartphone made the internet something you carried with you — always on, always accessible, always in your pocket.
The combination of social media and smartphones changed human behavior in ways we're still figuring out. Information — and misinformation — could now spread to millions of people within minutes. Anybody can organize a political movement. Anybody can be a journalist. Anybody can publish their own works, whether it’s videos of their cats or a treatise on Greek philosophy.
People could connect with anyone, anywhere — but they could also retreat into bubbles where they only encountered ideas they already agreed with. So in some ways learning became open to everyone. But in others ways, information itself became something to distrust. It’s a time of great learning and great falsehoods – at the same time.
So remember what we said about the World Wide Web democratizing information? Social media democratized communication itself. And just like the Web, it brought enormous benefits and enormous problems — both at the same time.
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02:43 The Great Recession
In 2008, the economy collapsed.
The roots of the Great Recession were in the housing market. For years, banks had been making risky mortgage loans to people who couldn't really afford them. That part alone was bad enough. But then banks bundled those shaky loans together into complex financial products and sold them to investors. They packaged them as if they were safe.
People began to feel like if they weren’t buying into the mortgage loan business, they were missing out. But it’s a truism of history that every market that booms will eventually bust. And this one busted big time.
When housing prices stopped rising and borrowers began defaulting on their loans, the whole system unraveled with terrifying speed. Major financial institutions failed. The stock market cratered. As a result, credit dried up. Businesses that had been booming just a few months before laid off workers by the millions.
It wasn’t as bad as the Great Depression – but it was really bad. The line between depression and recession isn’t set in stone. It’s just decided by economists and historians.
They called this economic crash “The Great Recession.”
For ordinary Americans, the Great Recession meant lost jobs, lost savings, and lost homes. Families who had done everything right — worked hard, bought a house, saved for retirement — watched it disappear. The economic fallout lasted for years. Some communities still haven’t fully recovered.
It was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And it set the stage for the next chapter.
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04:29 Barack Obama
Into this moment stepped Barack Obama, elected president in November 2008. He was the first African American president in the nation's history. He inherited two ongoing wars and the worst economy in eighty years.
From here, I want to be upfront about something. We're close enough to the present that the political debates around these events are still very much alive. Reasonable people genuinely disagree about what follows. I'm going to describe what happened and why. I’m going to tell you both sides of many issues. My hope is this: That you’ll be forming your own opinions. In a republic like ours, ultimate power lies with the people. And so you need to know enough to elect the people who agree with you – at least as much as such a thing is possible.
Back to Obama’s presidency.
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The Affordable Care Act
Obama's signature domestic achievement was the Affordable Care Act — passed in 2010 and immediately controversial.
The goals were clear. Millions of Americans had no health insurance — either because they couldn't afford it, or because insurance companies refused to cover them due to pre-existing conditions. A pre-existing condition is a health problem you already have before you apply for insurance. Under the old system, insurers could refuse to cover you for it, or charge you so much it was effectively the same thing. The Affordable Care Act made that illegal.
To achieve Obama’s goals, the law used a specific mechanism: it required almost everyone to have health insurance. If you didn't get it through your employer, you had to buy it yourself. The penalty for those who wouldn’t was to pay a penalty on your taxes. The idea was that if healthy people joined the insurance pool alongside sick people, it would bring overall costs down.
Supporters said it was long overdue — that no one in the wealthiest country on Earth should go bankrupt because they got sick. Critics said the government had no business forcing people to buy a product. States also played a role, since states provide health insurance to the poorest and oldest among us (it’s called Medicare and Medicaid). States argued that they shouldn’t have to expand those covered by Medicare and Medicaid – that the Tenth Amendment gave them the right to make their own decisions.
So notice what's underneath that argument — federalism. How much should the federal government reach into states and into people's personal lives? The legal fights went all the way to the Supreme Court. More than once.
The debate about American healthcare — who pays, who's covered, who decides — is very much ongoing.
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07:19 DACA and the Dreamers
Healthcare wasn’t Obama’s only controversial move. In 2012, President Obama issued an executive order called DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
Here's the situation it was addressing. Over the years, many parents had brought their children into the United States illegally. Those children — sometimes just infants or toddlers at the time — grew up in America. They went to American schools, made American friends, and pledged allegiance to the American flag. They considered themselves Americans. Many of them didn't even speak the language of the country they were technically from. The United States was the only home they had ever known. In a lot of cases, they didn’t even discover they were here illegally until they applied for college.
They called them the “Dreamers.”
But under existing law, they were undocumented. And so they could be deported.
DACA said: not these kids. The program protected young dreamers from deportation. It also allowed them to work legally and apply for driver's licenses.
Now notice what Obama used to do this: an executive order. Not a law passed by Congress. That distinction matters enormously — because executive orders can be undone by the next president, while laws passed by Congress require Congress to repeal them.
This is one of the core problems with executive orders. One president issues one, and the next reverses it. The Founders envisioned the government functioning with compromise and debate – not with sweeping changes.
DACA has been challenged in courts and targeted by subsequent administrations ever since. Its future has never been fully settled. You’re going to see the dreamers pop up again in the next lesson.
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09:14 The Iran Nuclear Deal
In 2015, the Obama administration helped broker a major international agreement with Iran — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.
The concern was Iran's nuclear program. Remember Iran? The theocracy that took American hostages in 1979? That same government had been steadily enriching uranium, and many feared it was working toward building a nuclear weapon. Why is that scary? Because Iran is a major funder of terrorist groups. And so a nuclear-armed Iran was a frightening prospect — for the United States, for Israel, and for much of the world.
The JCPOA was a multinational agreement. And by multinational, I mean countries that usually don’t agree on things: The United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China all signed on. Under the deal, Iran agreed to dramatically limit its nuclear program and allow international inspectors in to verify compliance. How could they get Iran to go along with it?
For years, Iran had been under economic sanction. Many other countries, including the U.S., refused to trade with them. In exchange for stopping their nuclear program, crippling economic sanctions on Iran were lifted.
Supporters said the JCPOA was the best available tool for keeping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon without going to war. Critics said it didn't go far enough — that Iran couldn't be trusted, and that lifting sanctions gave them money and resources they'd use to cause trouble in the region anyway.
We'll come back to the JCPOA. It’s one of those things that we’d skip – if it didn’t matter for what comes later.
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11:02 Obergefell v. Hodges
In the same year (2015, if you’ve forgotten), the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.
The question before the Court: do same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry? The Court ruled yes, 5 to 4. Same-sex marriage became legal in all fifty states — regardless of what any individual state's laws said.
Notice what that ruling illustrates: the Supremacy Clause in action. Some states had already legalized same-sex marriage on their own. Others had specifically banned it. The Supreme Court's decision overrode them all. When the Constitution speaks — or when the Supreme Court says it does — state law steps aside. It’s that issue of federalism again.
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11:52 Conclusion
And through all of it, those two questions we introduced last lesson kept coming back. How much power should the federal government have? And how much power should the president have?
Next time, we get to examine Presidents Trump and Biden. And those questions get louder than ever.