Political History

Yuval Levin | Fall 2024

The Constitution is more than a legal code. It is also a framework for union and solidarity.

Editor’s Note: Yuval Levin is the founder and editor of National Affairs and director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Art Buchwald’s Funny Business

Michael Hill | May 2023

His political satire made Buchwald one of America’s most widely read columnists.

Politics And Poker

Steven Lubet | November/December 2006

What one game of cards tells us about two famous statesmen

Poker (or its equivalent) has been popular among the political classes right from the beginning of American history.

Filibuster: A Look at the Record

Allan L. Damon | December 1975

The filibuster has played a key role in the enactment of federal law since 1789, but is rarely used outside the U.S. Senate.

Earl Browder: Marx’s Disenchanted Salesman

Harry Stein | December 1971

As general secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S., Browder was routinely attacked by politicians and thought to be a genuine threat to the nation.

For fifteen years, from 1930 to 1945, the name Earl Russell Browder was synonymous in the public mind with American radicalism.

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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.