University of Connecticut’s Manisha Sinha explains: Midterm elections are usually not history-making stuff. Few have been memorable. But in the 2022 midterms, as in the 1866 elections, the fate of American democracy hangs in the balance. If there is a moment...
Robert S. Levine is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Maryland. This interview is based on his new book, The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021). JF:...
It was a rough week for conservative evangelicals in the United States. The president of the largest Christian university in the country resigned after a sex scandal. A popular evangelical radio host and author was caught on tape punching an...
Over at Bloomberg News, University of Georgia historian Stephen Mihm argues that Andrew Johnson’s use of presidential pardons was “far more destructive to the nation” than Trump’s pardons. Here is a taste: Republican Senator Mitt Romney described President Donald Trump’s...
In case you missed it, Vice President Mike Pence wrote an op-ed at The Wall Street Journal calling for Democratic Senators to show “courage” in the form of a willingness to “stand up” and “reject” the “partisan impeachment” of Donald Trump....
On Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts began presiding over the Donald Trump impeachment trial. Over at The Washington Post, Michael Rosenwald writes about Salmon P. Chase, the Chief Justice who presided over Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial in 1868. Here is a...
This sounds familiar. Over at The Washington Post, Ronald Shafer describes Andrew Johnson’s attempt to rally supporters against his possible impeachment. Johnson took the road to make his case. Here is a taste: “Congress, factious, domineering, tyrannical Congress has undertaken to...
This morning I read chapter nine of Victor Howard’s book Religion and the Radical Republican Movement, 1860-1870. The chapter is titled “Impeachment and the Churches” and it focuses on how Protestant churches, denominations, and clergy responded to the impeachment of Andrew...
With two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump set to be released tomorrow (Tuesday), I thought I would offer some historical context by providing the articles of impeachment for Clinton, Nixon, and Johnson. (Only Clinton and Johnson were impeached. Nixon...
Historian Gregory Downs thinks that Trump should be impeached even if the Senate keeps him office. There is a good chance that the time between the impeachment in the House and the trial in the Senate might “curtail Trump’s worst...
Here is presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize-winner Jon Meacham on MSNBC: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPECWcLN9rg&w=560&h=315] I’m not sure how you measure this, but Trump would certainly be high on the list. Johnson was pretty racist. So was Andrew Jackson. (Meacham’s biography of...
Fillmore, Pierce, and Johnson were sitting presidents seeking reelection who failed to win the nomination of their political party. And it almost happened in 1980 as Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter for the Democratic Party nomination. Could it happen in...
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv_39LBMsYg&w=560&h=315] If you are a fan of The Way of Improvement Leads Home Podcast, you will remember our interview in Episode 3 with Yoni Appelbaum, historian and IDEAS editor at The Atlantic. In this piece, Appelbaum makes a case for...
On the day that the Philadelphia Eagles were supposed to visit the White House, Yoni Appelbaum of The Atlantic writes about the first time a championship sports team visited the White House. It happened in the Johnson Administration–that’s Andrew Johnson. Here is...
Abraham Lincoln and Civil War scholar Allen Guelzo reminds us what happened when Andrew Johnson was impeached. The subtitle of his recent Wall Street Journal piece is “Many members of Congress in 1868 hoped to remove a president they merely disliked. ...
So writes Jon Grinspan, curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. In his Atlantic piece “The High Price of Presidential Impeachment,” Grinspan argues that the impeaching of a POTUS “can dangerously inflame tensions in an already...
If you want to draw a historical analogy between Donald Trump and a previous POTUS, historian and writer Joshua Zeitz thinks that Andrew Johnson, not Andrew Jackson, “provides the best model for Trump’s collapsing presidency.” Johnson, of course, was the...
Michael David Cohen is the editor of the Correspondence of James K. Polk and Research Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is also writing for us this weekend from the annual meeting of the Organization of...
