Allan J. Lichtman

Allan J. Lichtman is Distinguished Professor of History at American University, where he has taught since 1973. Holding a B.A .magna cum laude from Brandeis University, he received his PhD from Harvard University in 1973. The recipient of the university's Scholar/Teacher of the Year for 1992-93, he is the author of many books and has lectured widely in the United States and elsewhere.

His book, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (2008), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. With Richard Breitman, he is the author of FDR and the Jews (2014), which won the National Jewish Book Award Prize in American Jewish History and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize in history. His book, The Case for Impeachment (2017) was a national independent bookstore bestseller.

Lichtman's most recent book is Repeal the Second Amendment: The Case for a Safer America (2020). Lichtman has been an expert witness in some 100 civil and voting rights cases. His presidential election outcome prediction system, the Keys to the White House, has correctly predicted the outcomes of all US presidential elections since 1984.

Articles by this Author

Obama: Benghazi and Clinton's E-mails, February/March 2021 | Vol. 66, No. 2

Partisan political differences mushroomed into a battle over the conduct of Barack Obama and other administration officials.

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.