Nullification Crisis

Andrew Jackson Reinvents American Democracy

David S. Reynolds | Winter 2020

Jackson had deep flaws, but he left a lasting legacy, strengthening the executive office and striving to represent as many Americans as possible.

David S.

Jackson Stares Down South Carolina

Jon Meacham | Winter 2010

When the Palmetto State threatened to nullify federal statutes at will, President Jackson met it with tough rhetoric and a threat of force -- and postponed the Civil War for three decades.

War was at hand. Upstairs in his White House study over the long winter of 1832-33, President Andrew Jackson stood strong against a distant state that posed, he believed, an all too imminent threat to the Union.

The Nullifiers

Bernard A. Weisberger | October 1995

Today’s states’-rights debate is in fact as old as the republic, and not yet as contentious as it got in the 1830s.

In these fading months of 1995, the political revolt against Washington is still in full cry, and in Washington itself.

There Was Another South

Carl N. Degler | August 1960

Was the old South solidly for slavery and secession? An eminent historian disputes a long-cherished view of that region’s history

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.