William Novak is Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. This interview is based on his new book, New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State (Harvard University Press, 2022)....
New Deal
The Author’s Corner with Sean P. Cunningham
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...
The Author’s Corner with Jesse Tarbert
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...
“The greatest literary project in history”
Over at Book Riot, Clare Barnett tells the story of the Depression Era’s Federal Writers Project. Do we need another such project? Here is a taste of her piece: While the FWP was the work of thousands, some of its...
Why we need a new Federal Writers Project
Scott Borchert is the author of Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America. Here is a taste of his recent piece at The New York Times: Opponents will complain about excessive spending or subversive...
Why is “President Biden making such a sharp break with Joe Biden?”
Here is Ezra Klein at The New York Times: Joe Biden didn’t wake up one day and realize he’d been wrong for 30 years. I covered him in the Senate, in the Obama White House, in the Democratic Party’s post-Trump...
What did Joe Biden learn from FDR?
He learned that in a time of crisis Americans need direct relief from their national government. Here is historian Suzanne Kahn at The Washington Post: The United States has surpassed an ignominious milestone: 500,000 deaths from covid-19. President Biden has...