Jefferson Cowie’s powerful and sobering new history, Freedom’s Dominion, traces the close association between the rhetoric of liberty in an Alabama county and the politics of white supremacy.
Humans, not just our inventions, should roam the heavens.
No one has been more insistent than Justice Breyer that politics do not shape the decisions of justices — that whoever put them on the court and how, justices are noncombatants in partisan wars.
In Campaign of the Century, Irwin Gellman seeks to upend our understanding of the 1960 race, not least the matter of which man won it.
“Ted’s time at center stage, so much longer than Bobby’s, was more varied, consisting of numerous acts, twists, turns and apparent endings.” Jeff Shesol reviews Neal Gabler’s book Catching the Wind.
A costly fight over the number of Supreme Court justices could put a stop to any real hope for reform under Joe Biden.
Mercury Rising
John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War
Supreme Power
Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
Mutual Contempt
Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade
“The nastiness of the GOP — and therefore of much of our national life,” Jeff writes in his review of Burning Down the House, “can be seen as Gingrich’s most lasting achievement: Nastiness as a virtue, a governing principle, an end in itself.”
It was John F. Kennedy, of course, who issued the call, but no one did more than L.B.J. to commit the U.S. to landing men on the moon and returning them safely to earth.
In American Dialogue, Jeff Shesol writes, the historian Joseph J. Ellis “draws connections between our history and our present reality with an authority that few other authors can muster.”
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