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Andrew Jackson

Trump: “I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do.”

John Fea   |  March 18, 2025

Here is the Associated Press story on Trump’s call for the impeachment of a U.S. District Judge: President Donald Trump said Tuesday that a federal judge who tried to stop his deportation plans should be impeached, escalating his conflict with […]

Trump and the “spoils system”

John Fea   |  February 12, 2025

Over at CNN, Zachary Wolf interviews Andrew Jackson scholar Daniel Feller on comparisons on the “spoils system.” Here is a taste: WOLF: You’ve written extensively about the spoils system. How would you describe it to Americans today? FELLER: It is a system […]

What if Biden and Trump tied?

John Fea   |  May 18, 2024

Joshua Zeitz asks us to remember the Election of 1824: In the case of a tie, which hasn’t happened in exactly 200 years, the House decides the election, per the 12th Amendment, with each state delegation allotted one vote. Republicans […]

Scholars: Trump is the worst president in American history.

John Fea   |  February 19, 2024

Here is the top 20 from the “2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey.” Obama and Ulysses S. Grant are on the upswing. Andrew Jackson and Calvin Coolidge out of the top 20. The bottom three: Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, and […]

The Author’s Corner with Lindsay Schakenbach Regele

Rachel Petroziello   |  January 3, 2024

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele is Graduate Studies Director and Associate Professor of History at Miami University. This interview is based on her new book, Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism (University of Chicago Press, […]

The Author’s Corner with Adam Jortner

Rachel Petroziello   |  February 9, 2022

Adam Jortner is Goodwin-Philpott Eminent Professor of Religion in the Department of History at Auburn University. This interview is based on his new book, No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022). JF: […]

Episode 92: “Original Sin and the History of American Democracy”

John Fea   |  October 3, 2021

Our guest in this episode is historian Robert Tracy McKenzie, author of We the Fallen the People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy. In the spirit of the 20th-century theologian and ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr, McKenzie places the Christian doctrine of […]

Episode 89: The Heretical John C. Calhoun

John Fea   |  August 22, 2021

John C. Calhoun is among the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. In this episode we talk with Robert Elder, author of Calhoun: American Heretic. Elder shows that Calhoun’s story is crucial for understanding the political climate in […]