Historians are fond of saying that the past doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes.
To understand the present, we have to understand how we got here.
That’s where this newsletter comes in.
I’m a professor of American history. This is a chronicle of today’s political landscape, but because you can’t get a grip on today’s politics without an outline of America’s Constitution, and laws, and the economy, and social customs, this newsletter explores what it means, and what it has meant, to be an American.
These were the same questions a famous observer asked in a book of letters he published in 1782, the year before the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War.
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur called his book “Letters from an American Farmer.”
Like I say, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure rhymes.
Latest Posts
- On February 13 and 14, President Donald J.
- The Trump administration’s white nationalist project was on full display this weekend at the 62nd Munich Security Conference that took place from February 13 to 15, 2026.
- This one was personal: I had people in Patton’s Third Army and heard stories about the Battle of the Bulge and Bastogne as a kid, but it’s only with this series the pieces are falling into place.
- On Valentine’s Day in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother.
- Liza Donnelly and I take on Valentine’s Day from a different perspective this year.
- At midnight tonight, most of the agencies and services in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will run out of funding, as popular fury over the violence and lawlessness of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S.
- In a ceremony at the White House yesterday, surrounded by coal industry leaders, lawmakers, and miners, President Donald J.
- On February 12, 1809, Nancy Hanks Lincoln gave birth to her second child, a son: Abraham.
