Zach P. Messitte

Zachariah Paulo Messitte is the 13th president of Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, and a professor in the Politics and Government Department. He is the author of numerous articles that reflect his interests in politics, international relations, higher education, sports and Italy. His work has appeared in both peer reviewed journals and the national press, including The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and have covered topics pertaining to the cost of higher education, NCAA Division III student-athletes, Spiro Agnew, the CIA and promoting civil discourse. The author and editor of several books, he most recently co-authored Republican Populist: Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump’s America, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2019.

Prior to entering academia, Messitte worked for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the United Nations and the Cable News Network (CNN). He served as the dean of the College of International Studies at the University of Oklahoma, where he also held the William J. Crowe Chair in Geopolitics. From 2002 to 2007, he served as the Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and a member of the political science faculty at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the state’s honors liberal arts college. He currently serves as an officer on the Board of the Wisconsin Association of Colleges and Independent Universities (WAICU) and is the Chair of the Midwest Athletic Conference.

Messitte was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil while his parents were working in the Peace Corps, and grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He and his wife, Julia, have two sons: Sam and Jules.

Articles by this Author

Reassessing Spiro Agnew, June 2020 | Vol. 65, No. 3

Although he was forced to resign as Nixon’s Vice President, Agnew’s tough-guy persona set the precedent for subsequent anti-establishment figures, including Donald Trump.

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.