Each red dot represents a New Deal project. Learn more at Cal-Berkeley’s “The Living New Deal” website....
FDR
Don’t Forget to Acknowledge the 150th Anniversary of Thanksgiving
Many Americans think the first Thanksgiving holiday took place in 1621 and we have been celebrating it ever since. Actually, Thanksgiving became a national holiday on November 26, 1863 when Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War, proclaimed a national day...
Michael Kazin on Inauguration Speeches
FDR’s 1st Inaugural Address (1933) Georgetown historian Michael Kazin reminds us that “inaugural addresses rarely foretell what a president will accomplish in office.” Here are a few great lines from inaugural addresses that did not really pan out in real...
Alison Greene: “When Religious Institutions Welcomed Government Support”
Alison Greene, a professor of history at Mississippi State University, reminds us that there was once a time when Christians welcomed government funding. In her piece at “Religion and Politics,” which challenges some historically inaccurate remarks made recently by Franklin...
Was FDR the Antichrist?
Ed Linenthal, the editor of The Journal of American History, talks with Matt Sutton, author of the forthcoming essay “Was FDR the Antichrist? The Birth of Fundamentalist Antiliberalism in a Global Age.” The article stems from Sutton’s forthcoming book American...
Kevin Kruse on the History of Christian Libertarianism
Kevin Kruse, an American historian at Princeton, is writing a book entitled, “One Nation Under God: Corporations, Christianity, and the Rise of the Religious Right.” We get a taste of his project in today’s New York Times. Kruse examines the...
There is Nothing New About the Tea Party?
It supports with worshipful intensity the Constitution of the United States; it places itself on the side of the individual and of liberty in opposition to an encroaching government bureaucracy; it respects the judgment of the founding fathers who had...
FDR was a Jew and Lincoln was a Catholic
OK, not really. But these rumors swirled during the FDR and Lincoln presidencies. Bruce Feiler wonders “Why Americans Don’t Like their President’s God.” He concludes: But as reliably as Americans have adopted these views, they’ve also moved past them. In...
Obama Needs To Initiate a New Kind of Politics
Georgetown historian Michael Kazin has a great piece up at the New Republic on what Barack Obama must do to be effective as president. Like FDR and Reagan before him, he needs to articulate a “new kind of politics.” Kazin...
The Obama Inaugural: The FDR Comparison
As many historians have argued, the presidential inaugural address is a sort of national sermon. I think most would agree that early this afternoon Obama inspired the faithful. I will spend the next few blog posts this afternoon and evening...