How did the United States become so divided? Fault Lines offers a richly told, wide-angle history view toward an answer. If you were asked when America became polarized, your answer would likely depend on your age: you might say during Barack Obama’s presidency, or with the post-9/11 war on terror, or the culture wars of […]
Jesse Wegman believes the Electoral College is “antiquated and anti-democratic,” while Tara Ross calls it “indispensable.” On March 30, presidential historian Jeffrey Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at SMU, will moderate a discussion with Ross and Wegman about this 216-year-old institution created by the Twelfth Amendment. Tara Ross is the author […]
Amidst troubling times, it is always helpful to look to history for precedent, context, and even guidance. As our society navigates […]
In the years after the Civil War, the banks, railroads, and industrial corporations of Gilded-Age America, abetted by a corrupt political system, concentrated vast wealth in the hands […]
The story of how Newt Gingrich and his allies tainted American politics, launching an enduring era of brutal partisan warfare. When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, President Obama […]
A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian takes us as close as we have ever been to the real John F. Kennedy in this revelatory biography of the iconic, yet still elusive, thirty-fifth president. By the time of his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen, […]
.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; } From two of America's most revered political journalists comes the definitive biography of legendary White House chief of staff and secretary of state James […]
The presidential election of 1884, in which Grover Cleveland ended the Democrats' twenty-four-year presidential drought by defeating Republican challenger James G. Blaine, was one of the gaudiest in American history, remembered today less for its political significance than for the mudslinging and slander that characterized the campaign. But a closer look at the infamous […]
Americans’ ideas of their differences from others have shaped the modern world—and how Americans have viewed foreigners is deeply revealing of their assumptions about themselves. Just Like Us is a pathbreaking exploration of what foreignness has meant across American history. Thomas Borstelmann traces American ambivalence about non-Americans, identifying a paradoxical perception of foreigners as […]
We face the most critical election of our lifetimes. That is often said. This year it seems as true as ever. Political historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer, both of Princeton University, join CPH’s Jeffrey Engel for a roundtable discussion of how 2020 looks to historians. Julian E. Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of […]
