Take notes, progressives. As documented in the new book A Just and Generous Nation, the Great Emancipator’s vision of America’s exceptionalism rested on its civil equality and economic democracy.
Harvey J. Kaye is Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He is the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) and The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (Simon & Schuster, 2014). Follow him on Twitter.
A new book takes on American history in the style of Steinbeck and Benet.
Ari Berman’s new book on voting rights—and how precarious they remain in modern elections—is a must-read before November 2016.
Who would Jefferson have liked best: FDR, Reagan—or the Tea Party? Three new books look at Americans’ never-ending fixation with what our formative figures would want us to do.
When FDR died just a few months into his fourth term he had transformed American life in nearly every way. His achievements, and the obstacles he overcame, should not be forgotten.
In the first Gilded Age, Americans fought back against inequality and the oligarchs who threatened democracy. Over the past few decades, it seems like we’ve given up.
A new book from conservative intellectual Shelby Steele claims to offer new answers to the old problems of polarization, but offers the same critique—blame liberals.
A new history say a lot of what we think we know about Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society is wrong. For starters it was a group effort with a huge assist from the Greatest Generation.
George Washington entered the Revolution as a member of Virginia’s planter aristocracy who still toasted the king. He emerged at its end thinking of himself as American.
A rush to judgment is not inevitable when a historian weighs in on a sitting president, but how did Morton Keller get so many things wrong in his study of Obama?