On July 20, it will be 50 years since we first stepped on the moon — well, since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped on the moon; but everyone watching felt the vicarious thrill. The anniversary brings with it a raft of new books about the Apollo 11 mission, and the historian Jill Lepore has reviewed seven of those books.

“At no point before the actual moon landing did any majority of Americans support the mission to land on the moon,” Lepore says on this week’s podcast. “People were really ambivalent about it. It was a roilingly complicated decade, in any event, and big government spending programs were controversial and becoming increasingly so.”

Click the link below to listen to the full podcast!