Melissa Blair is Associate Professor and Department Chair of History at Auburn University. This interview is based on her new book, Bringing Home the White House: The Hidden History of Women who Shaped the Presidency in the Twentieth Century (University...
Robert Mann holds the Manship Endowed Chair in Journalism at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication. This interview is based on his new book, Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU (LSU Press, 2023). JF: What led you to...
Cornell historian Lawrence Glickman explains in a piece at Slate: So, what is the history of this strange locution? Tracking the origins of the missing “ic” provides an instructive window into the evolution of modern conservatism. For although “Democrat party” has been...
Yes. Here is Josh Kraushaar at Axios: Shifts in the demographics of the two parties’ supporters — taking place before our eyes — are arguably the biggest political story of our time. The big picture: Republicans are becoming more working class...
David Sehat is Professor of History at Georgia State University. This interview is based on his new book, This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism (Yale University Press, 2022). JF: What led you to write This Earthly Frame? DS:...
Sean P. Cunningham is Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech University. This interview is based on his new book, Bootstrap Liberalism: Texas Political Culture in the Age of FDR (University Press of Kansas, 2022). JF: What led you to...
Jesse Tarbert is an independent historian. This interview is based on his new book, When Good Government Meant Big Government: The Quest to Expand Federal Power, 1913–1933 (Columbia University Press, 2022). JF: What led you to write When Good Government Meant Big...
C-SPAN asked scholars to rank the presidents in terms of public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, relations with Congress, vision, the pursuit of justice, and “performance within the context of the times.” The list...
CNN legal scholar Carrie Cordero and historian Ed Larson at USA Today: We are all familiar with the first American Revolution: an actual war, a rebellion for self-governance. But it was not long after that Thomas Jefferson called the election of 1800...
Here is Rick Perlstein in Reaganland on the rise of the New Right in the 1970s: That notion–conservatism as an ideology for working people–was another New Right theme. [Richard] Viguerie’s father had been a construction worker; his mother toiled in...
As historian Joshua Tait reminds us, the meaning of the term “conservatism” has been a contested one in the United States. In his recent piece at The Bulwark he compares a circle of writers in the 1940s and early 1950s...
Here is Gillian Brockell at The Washington Post: At his first White House news conference Thursday, President Biden said he agreed with former president Barack Obama that the filibuster is “a relic of the Jim Crow era.” This follows a Tuesday statement...
Here is Zack Beauchamp at VOX: The question of what to do about the filibuster — the once-arcane Senate rule that creates a de facto 60-vote threshold for major legislation — is arguably the most important topic in Washington, DC,...
I’ll bet you didn’t know that in 1809 Josiah Quincy (MA), the only Federalist in Congress, tried to impeach Thomas Jefferson. His attempt failed by a vote of 117 to 1. Andrew Fagal, associate editor of the Papers of Thomas...
Some are suggesting that the Republican Party could split into principled conservatives and Trump populists. The next four years will also reveal the depth of the divisions within the Democratic Party. How hard will the progressives in the party challenge...
The Panorama, the online site of The Journal of the Early Republic, is running an informative roundtable on the United States under the Articles of Confederation. Here is a taste of Rosemarie Zagarri‘s introduction to the roundtable: In March 2020,...
Historian J.L. Tomlin writes, “the historiography of the conspiratorial style in American politics is well-known but tends to start at the American Revolution and move forward.” Here is a taste of his Age of Revolutions piece, “‘They Chase Specters’: The...
Political pollsters are under the gun again. Some of them did not anticipate Donald Trump’s ability to win votes in the 2020 presidential election. The debate over the usefulness of polling continues to rage in the wake of November 3....
As Jill Lepore writes in her recent piece at The Washington Post, several politicians, pundits, and commentators are calling for a truth and reconciliation commission to deal with Trump and his supporters after the president leaves office. Here is Lepore:...
Over at the blog of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, Liz Covart offers a nice bibliography of books on early American election and political history. Here is a taste: Richard R. Beeman, The Varieties of Political Experience...
