No Country for Old Men? Wilson, Reagan, Biden, and Trump. A Historian’s Take

Historian H.W. Brands on Substack: "Any president or potential president is a package deal, comprising strengths and weaknesses. Age can weaken memory but it can enhance wisdom. On balance, wisdom matters more. Presidents don’t have to think on their feet; they don’t need facts at their fingertips. They make their decisions sitting down—or at least …

Optimistic, Pessimistic About 2024? Whatever Happens, It’s Not Inevitable

Happy New Year! I’ve spent a lot of time pondering whether 2024 will be an extraordinarily good year or an extraordinarily bad year. Whatever happens, I tend to believe it will be a historic turning point for the United States and possibly the world. “The future is never inevitable,” historian Heather Cox Richardson observed in an interview …

Ronald Reagan Biographer H.W. Brands Says He’s Most Significant President of 2nd Half of 20th Century

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFuK7Gy-yag&t=10s Ronald Reagan's reputation has changed dramatically since he departed office in 1989. He was the most important and successful president of the second half of the 20th century, says Historian H.W. Brands, author of Reagan: The Life (2019). Franklin Roosevelt was, of course, the most important president of the first half of the 20th …

FDR: Most Powerful Man in the History of the World in the 1940s

Historians almost always rank three presidents as the very best: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. H.W. (Bill) Brands of the University of Texas initially found FDR's top ranking hard to understand. As a child of the 1950s and 1960s routinely facing nuclear war and with Lyndon Johnson launching massive government programs to …

FDR and the End of WWII, 1944-45

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFOZX5cQOl8 In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was 62 years old and sick. He knew there was a good chance that he would not live out a fourth term as president (1945-49), but persuaded his physician to perjure himself and declare he was in good health. FDR considered himself an indispensable president in 1944 because …

‘We’re All Wilsonians, Whether We Like It Or Not’

Through the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, there was a majority strain of isolationism in American politics. The U.S. was a vast, self-sufficient, almost island nation surrounded by a "weak" and friendly neighbor to the north, Canada, and a "weak" and friendly neighbor to the South, Mexico. The US stayed neutral in WWI -- a power …

General Douglas MacArthur and President Truman On the Brink of Nuclear War in Korea With China and Russia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNiDJQ097L8 Hauenstein Center, 2017: "At the dawn of a new era in American history, President Harry S. Truman struggled with unfavorable public opinion in response to growing concerns about the Soviet Union and a challenging economic transition following World War II. For our embattled 33rd president, the future appeared complicated and uncertain. In stark contrast …

1945-1965: Modern Economic Golden Age for the U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNOa6CK9ogs&t=15s In this four-minute clip, Historian H.W. Brands, born in 1953, called the period from 1945 to 1965 the modern golden age of the United States, when Americans had a strongly expansionist economy at home and dominated the global economy as well. The main reason for this was that the rest of the world was …

Historian H.W. Brands on the Roosevelts: Teddy, the Last Romantic; and His 4th Cousin Franklin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynkhvC0Jcr8 Historian H.R. Brands wrote two books on the Roosevelts. "Teddy Roosevelt, the Last Romantic," and "Franklin Roosevelt: Traitor to His Class." In these lectures, he tells stories from the books. Rancho Mirage Writers Festival "Our favorite historian, H.W. Brands, will talk about the two President Roosevelts as only he can—bringing them to life with …

H.W. Brands on Capitalism’s Triumph in the U.S. 1860-1900

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0pMNqlHO2c In American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, a grand-scale narrative history, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands brilliantly portrays the emergence, in a remarkably short time, of a recognizably modern America. "American Colossus captures the decades between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century, when a few breathtakingly wealthy businessmen …