Trailblazing paths: iconic women through time [reading list]

In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating trailblazing paths taken by women whose courage and vision transformed societies. This reading list features five biographies that highlight women who resisted systemic barriers, confronted entrenched hierarchies, and fought for the dignity and safety of others. From activists and reformers to scientists and cultural leaders, these stories reveal how women—often overlooked or silenced—have pushed boundaries, protected the vulnerable, and inspired movements for justice. Together, they remind us that progress toward gender equality has always been driven by those who refused to accept the limits imposed on them.

1. A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing by Betty Boyd Caroli

In this biography, Mary K. Simkhovitch emerges as a pioneering force in the settlement house movement and a central architect of American public housing reform. Betty Boyd Caroli traces Simkhovitch’s founding of Greenwich House in 1902 and her influential role in shaping early 20th‑century urban policy, including her leadership in New Deal housing initiatives, the creation of the National Housing Conference, and co‑authoring the landmark 1937 National Housing Act. Balancing an unconventional marriage, family life, and a relentless public mission, Simkhovitch became widely admired—once even depicted as a “Wonder Woman of History”—for her ability to confront urban poverty while advocating fiercely for immigrant communities and affordable housing. This biography, rich with historical insight, positions her as an enduringly relevant figure whose work helped define the federal government’s responsibility to support low‑income families.

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2. American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism by Steven K. Green

American Infidelity traces the dramatic late‑19th‑century clash between a dominant evangelical culture and a rising coalition of freethinkers, feminists, and sexual reformers who sought greater personal liberty and challenged religious authority. Historian Steven K. Green follows this struggle through the activists who fought for birth control, divorce reform, and women’s autonomy, as well as the moral crusaders—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who worked to suppress them. Revealing how these “infidels” pushed for a more open, rational, and egalitarian society, Green shows how their movements were ultimately stifled but left a powerful legacy that continues to shape today’s debates over reproductive rights, censorship, and the role of religion in public life.

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3. COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War by Edda L. Fields-Black

Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History

This book recounts the often‑overlooked story of Harriet Tubman’s 1863 Combahee River Raid, a daring Civil War operation in which she led Union spies, scouts, and two Black regiments up South Carolina’s river to destroy major rice plantations and liberate 730 enslaved people. Drawing on newly examined documents—including Tubman’s pension file and plantation records—historian Edda L. Fields‑Black, a descendant of one of the raiders, brings to life the enslaved families and communities who escaped to freedom that night and later helped shape the Gullah Geechee culture. Through this vivid reconstruction, the book reveals one of Tubman’s most extraordinary military achievements and the enduring legacy of those who fought for liberation.

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4. The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America by Kathleen B. Casey

The Things She Carried reveals how purses, bags, and sacks have long been critical tools for women asserting privacy, autonomy, and political power in America. Kathleen Casey shows how these objects—from 19th‑century reticules to the handbags carried by immigrant workers, civil rights activists, and Rosa Parks herself—became symbolic extensions of women’s rights struggles, allowing them to navigate male‑dominated spaces, protect personal dignity, and challenge discriminatory systems. Drawing on sources ranging from vintage purses to photographs, advertisements, and legal archives, Casey uncovers how women of all backgrounds used the bags they carried to assert agency, cross restrictive social boundaries, and shape pivotal moments in the fight for gender and racial equality.

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5. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA, and the Battle against Thalidomide by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh

This biography tells the remarkable story of Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA medical officer who, in the early 1960s, prevented the dangerous drug thalidomide from being approved in the United States, sparing countless Americans from catastrophic birth defects. A pioneering scientist who earned advanced degrees in an era with few female researchers, Kelsey resisted intense pressure from Merrell Pharmaceutical and spent nineteen months demanding solid evidence of the drug’s safety. Her unwavering stance not only kept thalidomide off the U.S. market but also spurred sweeping reforms in drug regulation through the 1962 Drug Amendment, which established modern clinical trials, informed consent, and stronger FDA oversight. Drawing on archival records and family papers, the book reveals her lifelong commitment to ethical science, her battles against industry hostility and institutional barriers, and her enduring legacy as a vigilant protector of public health.

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Explore our extended list of titles on Bookshop (UK | US) and Amazon (UK | US).

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Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch’s fight for affordable housing [timeline] 

Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch—featured as a “Wonder Woman of History” in a series produced by DC Comics—was a key figure in America’s settlement house movement. Throughout the early twentieth century, she spearheaded efforts to improve living conditions for immigrants and the disadvantaged in American cities. Her lifelong advocacy for public housing and urban reform remains urgently relevant almost seventy-five years after her death.

Discover Mary K. Simkhovitch’s extraordinary legacy with our interactive timeline below.

^{Featured image provided by Betty Boyd Caroli.}

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Centuries strong: Black history told through 10 essential Oxford Reads

African American history does not begin with the founding of the United States—its roots stretch centuries deep. Black experiences, intellectual traditions, resistance, and cultural innovation have shaped the story of America. This timeline brings together Oxford works that illuminate pivotal moments across over two hundred transformative years—from a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harriet Tubman to long-overlooked accounts from the later Civil Rights era. Explore the essential role of historically Black colleges and universities, and encounter richly drawn portraits of trailblazers like Louis Armstrong and Althea Gibson. Taken together, these books reveal a legacy of resilience, creativity, and influence that has defined American life from the colonial era through the 20th century.

Explore the depth and breadth of African American history with this curated selection of Oxford University Press titles—stories that predate 1776 and continue to shape the nation we know today.

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Reintroducing Justice Robert Jackson

In 1952, Justice Robert Jackson issued a concurring opinion in the case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, in which a majority of the Supreme Court held that President Harry Truman could not invoke executive power to seize several of the major U.S. steel manufacturing companies in order to prevent a nation-wide steel strike that the Truman administration claimed would disrupt the participation of the United States in the Korean war.

Jackson’s opinion in Youngstown sketched a framework for executive power under the Constitution, identifying three examples of executive decisions against the backdrop of congressional authority. He set forth a continuum of executive power, ranging from instances in which executive decisions were “conclusive and preclusive” of the authority of other branches, to ones in which Congress and the executive shared powers and the branches operated in a “twilight zone” of concurrent authority, to ones in which an executive decision was in contradiction to a congressional effort to restrain it. When Jackson’s opinion appeared it garnered some appreciative commentary in academic circles but did not otherwise attract much attention.

Jackson’s Youngstown concurrence was revived, however, in two memorable opinions in American constitutional law and politics. The first was United States v. Nixon, in which Chief Justice Burger quoted a statement by Jackson that the dispersion of powers among the branches of government by the Constitution was designed to ensure a “workable government.” Burger concluded that allowing President Nixon to assert executive privilege against a subpoena in a criminal proceeding merely on the basis of a “general interest in confidentiality” would gravely interfere with the function of the courts and render the government “unworkable.” The second was Trump v. United States, in which Jackson’s statement in Youngstown that in some instances the president’s power to make executive decisions was “conclusive and preclusive” was used by Chief Justice Roberts to show that granting presidents absolute immunity for their official acts was necessary to enable them to execute their duties fearlessly and fairly.

More than seventy years after Jackson issued it, his Youngstown concurrence remains the most authoritative statement of the scope of executive power under the Constitution. But what of the justice who issued that opinion? Robert Jackson was arguably one of the most influential persons in the mid twentieth-century legal profession and a unique figure in American legal history. Yet today he is not widely known and has in some respects been misunderstood. Despite his having one of the largest collections of private papers in the Library of Congress, there has been comparatively little scholarship or popular writing devoted to Jackson. It is time to reintroduce him.

Jackson was the last Supreme Court justice to have entered the legal profession by “reading for the law,” a process where people apprenticed themselves to law offices prior to taking a bar examination. He would eventually study law for one year at Albany Law School and receive a degree, but he never attended college. His family were dairy farmers in western Pennsylvania and New York, and he was the first in his family to pursue a legal career. By 1934 he had become one of the more successful lawyers and wealthy residents in Jamestown, New York.

That year Jackson was approached by members of the Franklin Roosevelt administration and recruited to join the Bureau of Internal Revenue, even though his practice had not included tax law. From that position he progressed rapidly through New Deal agencies, becoming Solicitor General of the United States in 1938 and Attorney General in 1940. By that year he was on the short list for Supreme Court appointments, and was nominated to the Court by Roosevelt in 1941.

Jackson seemingly had every quality necessary to be an influential Supreme Court justice, possessing exceptional analytical and forensic skills and being a gifted writer. But he ended up somewhat unfulfilled on the Court, chafing about its isolation from foreign affairs during World War II and having fractious relationships with some of his fellow justices, notably Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. In the spring of 1945, he was offered the position of chief counsel at the forthcoming Nuremberg trials and took leave from the Court, uncertain about whether he would return. Jackson was largely responsible for the format of the trials, and although he had numerous difficulties with representatives of the other allied powers prosecuting Nazi war criminals, especially those from the Soviet Union, he said in his memoirs that he regarded his time at Nuremberg as the high point of his experience.

Jackson’s two years at Nuremberg were also a time in which he began an amorous relationship with his secretary, Elsie Douglas, to whom he would eventually leave his extensive private papers in his will. Douglas continued as his secretary when Jackson returned to the Court after Nuremberg, and when Jackson suddenly died of a heart attack in October 1954, it was in Elsie Douglas’ apartment. After Jackson’s return to the Court in 1946 his relations with colleagues improved, and his last major participation in a Court case came with Brown v. Board of Education in the 1952 and 1953 terms, in which Jackson, through writing successive memos to himself, eventually joined the Court’s unanimous opinion invalidating racial segregation in the public schools. Jackson had a heart attack in March 1954 and only returned to the Court on the day the Brown case was handed down. He then sought to recover over the summer of 1954, only to succumb that October.

All in all, a memorable life and career and a fascinating, complicated personality, whose remarkable talents somehow did not quite suit him for the role of a Supreme Court justice.

_{Featured image by Abdullah Guc via Unsplash.}

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Sabotage of the Normandie? [excerpt]

In the 1940s, the Normandie was the epitome of elegance and engineering—a French ocean liner renowned for its Art Deco splendor and unmatched luxury. When war loomed over Europe, the ship sought refuge in New York Harbor. In this excerpt from Gotham At War, Mike Wallace shows how its transformation from glamourous ocean liner to utilitarian troopship mirrored the world’s descent into conflict.

On February 9, 1942, the Normandie—the world’s most glamorous ocean liner—had been the site of feverish activity, as 1,750 workers from the Robins Dry Dock & Repair Company, and 675 other laborers from sixty assorted subcontractors, worked to convert the rakish, Art Deco, red-and-black vessel—whose elegant staterooms had hosted the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Cole Porter, and Ernest Hemingway—into a drabbed-down, bunk-laden troopship.

The Normandie had been tied up at Pier 88 (at the foot of West 48th Street) since arriving from Le Havre on August 28, 1939, four days before Germany invaded Poland. Rather than have its crown jewel brave torpedoes at sea, or bombs back in France, the French Line, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT), laid up its vessel indefinitely on September 6, leaving on board only a skeleton crew of 113 (out of 1,227) to keep it shipshape. There it stayed, through the fall of France, while other sea queens came and went (at one point, in March 1940, the gray-camouflaged sisters Elizabeth and Mary were berthed in adjacent piers).

On May 15, 1941, the US government took the Normandie into protective custody, leaving French ownership intact but housing a contingent of armed Coast Guardsmen on board to forestall possible sabotage by crew members loyal to the Vichy government. (The Pétain regime was getting increasingly cozy with Germany: Vice Premier Admiral François Darlan had just visited Hitler on May 11.) American thoughts turned to possible uses of the giant ship, in the event of an actual confiscation, and proposals were floated to use it as a dockside super- barracks, or to move it to Brooklyn, where it could serve as a backup power supply for the entire city, capable as it was of generating 150,000 kilowatts. When the Normandie was seized, on December 12, the day after war with Germany broke out, the troopship option won out. The vessel was transferred to the Navy, renamed the USS Lafayette, and turned over to contractors who began carting off the legendary artwork and sumptuous furniture to the Chelsea Warehouse and converting the staterooms, which had housed 1,972 First, Tourist, and Third-Class passengers, into bunkrooms that would carry 14,800 soldiers to war.

With nearly 2,500 workmen (plus Coast Guardsmen and crew) constantly coming and going, the noise, confusion and disorder on the ship attracted the attention of Ralph Ingersoll, editor of PM. Security seemed dangerously casual to him, so Ingersoll assigned reporter Edmund Scott to find out how easily a potential saboteur might penetrate the Normandie’s defenses. It proved to be a snap. Scott joined Local 284 of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and got a job lugging furniture aboard. Once on deck, it proved easy to wander about as he pleased, and he was struck by how simple it would be to set a fire. On January 3, 1942, he filed his story, which Ingersoll decided not to run—it being, in effect, a blueprint for sabotage—and instead got in touch with the authorities, who seemed uninterested.

When a fire broke out at 2:34 on the afternoon of February 9, crewmen discovered to their horror that the fire hoses could not connect to the standpipes, as the latter had been converted to American fittings, while the former still spoke French. Efforts to sound the fire alarm also failed—it had been disconnected a few days earlier, along with the ship’s link to the city’s fire department, by a subcontractor who had forgotten to tell anyone. In the meantime—it was a blustery winter day—the wind whipped through the corridors, spreading the blaze until it was beyond control, with great sheets of flame leaping skyward. Most of the nearly 3,000 on board dashed down the gangplanks and joined the thirty thousand New Yorkers who choked Twelfth Avenue. Fire trucks now combined forces with fire boats to inundate the upper decks: over the next four hours, they poured on 3,000 tons of water. The ship began to list. The French officers who had rushed to the pier realized the danger; their calls to refill the ballast tanks to ground the ship on the slip bottom were rejected, as were their urgings to close the portholes.

The inundation continued, as La Guardia, who had rushed to the pier, said it was out of the question to let a fire rage unchecked in midtown Manhattan. Even after the inferno seemed contained, around 8:00 p.m., the fireboats—ordered by Commissioner Walsh to stop pumping—didn’t get his radioed message; and having gotten dark, his semaphore signals went similarly unheeded. By the time a cutoff was accomplished, the Normandie had taken on 16,000 tons of water, most trapped on the port side, a burden no ship could have borne. At 12:30 a.m., Admiral Andrews gave the order to evacuate. At 2:32 a.m., it rolled over in the gray Hudson ice and came to rest, its funnels just barely above the waterline, slumped ignominiously in the mud.

Rumors of sabotage flew, starting at the top. FDR asked Navy Secretary Knox the next morning if any enemy aliens had been permitted to work at the site. The truth flew almost as quickly yet had difficulty catching up. The first press reports carried District Attorney Frank Hogan’s statement—“There is no evidence of sabotage”—and Admiral Andrews’s concurrence, along with the facts they had ferreted out. The fire, they said, had been an accident, caused by carelessness. One worker had been using an acetylene torch to cut down a metal stanchion in the Grand Salon, the resulting sparks contained by an asbestos board held up by another laborer. When the second man put down his board for a minute to help a colleague, a spark leapt toward a pile of 1,140 life jackets, each filled with flammable kapok, each wrapped in even more flammable burlap. Up they went, in turn igniting a nearby mass of bunk-bound mattresses. On February 12, the FBI staged a re- creation at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; followed up with a full-dress investigation in which they interviewed 760 people, and came to the same conclusion. So did two congressional committees. No sabotage.

Nonetheless, doubts continued. Many refused to buy the verdict, especially after PM published Scott’s original story. The notion that Nazi saboteurs had done the deed was further nurtured by Alfred Hitchcock, then shooting and editing Saboteur (1942). The director inserted a sequence that showed his weaselly Nazi villain (played by Norman Lloyd) being taxied down the West Side past the capsized Normandie (shown in actual newsreel footage). As he surveyed the wreckage, Lloyd gave a perfectly calibrated, wickedly knowing half smile, as if to say: “Ah, our handiwork.” The Navy tried hard to muscle Hitchcock into excising the bit; it failed, and the ranks of doubters grew.

There was one person who did more than doubt—he was utterly certain the Normandie was the victim of foul play, because he himself had ordered the hit. No Nazi, he was the nation’s most celebrated jailbird, languishing up in Dannemora Prison (known as “New York’s Siberia”), doing a thirty-to-fifty-year stretch.

_{Featured image: SS Normandie at sea, colorized by Vick the Viking. Derivative work of Altair78. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A cultural history of the purse [timeline]

In conducting research for The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America, Kathleen B. Casey discovered how one everyday object—the purse—could function as a portal to the past. She encountered purses in museum collections, photo albums, advertisements, trial transcripts, and much more.

Here are some highlights she discovered in the cultural history of the purse.

_{Featured image provided by Kathleen B. Casey.}

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Ten American road trips

In the spring of 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, accompanied by Jefferson’s enslaved chef James Hemings, took a road trip. In six weeks, they covered more than 900 miles, travelling through New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut before returning across Long Island. Suffering from various physical ailments and exhausted by the political travails of the day, they sought “health, recreation, and curiosity.” Madison said as long as they were together they could “never be out of their way.” Decades later, he recalled that the trip made them “immediate companions.”

Few rites of passage are as venerated in American culture as the road trip, the journey of discovery to places unfamiliar or unknown. Here are ten noteworthy ones in literature and film in chronological order:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Mark Twain knew about travel! In his famous novel, we follow Huck and Jim as they stream down the Mississippi in a biracial journey of discovery and escape. The trip gets a bit complicated in the novel’s third act, but, on the journey, they prove their manhood and confess their feelings for one another. Jim discovers he is free and Huck realizes the road is the only place for him. At the end, Huck continues his travels as he lights out for the Territory.

2. It Happened One Night (1934)

In this classic screwball comedy, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert find themselves together on a bus heading to New York from Florida. They hitchhike and encounter all kinds of difficulties as they fall in love, even though Colbert is married to a charlatan. Of course, they end up together. The film swept the key Academy Awards categories̶—and it did something else. In one scene, Clark Gable takes off his shirt to reveal he is wearing nothing beneath it. As a result, T-shirt sales in America plummeted.

3. The Grapes of Wrath (book 1939; film 1940)

In John Steinbeck’s stirring novel, the Joad family, victims of the dust bowl and ruthless bankers, are forced to flee their Oklahoma home and head to California. They travel along the legendary Route 66, where they experience cruelty and kindness as they make their way to what they think will be the promised land. Unfortunately, it isn’t paradise, and at the end Tom Joad commits himself to forever travelling the country and serving as an agent of justice. “I’ll be everywhere,” he states.

4. On The Road (1957)

Jack Kerouac’s novel is the one everyone thinks of when it comes to road trips. Much of the book focuses on the travels of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. It is a tale of friendship and discovery, written in a stream of consciousness that matches the improvisational genius of jazz, which is a current that runs through the book. The novel has influenced generations of creative artists. Paradise says it best: “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”

5. Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962)

John Steinbeck makes this list twice. In 1960, aging and feeling that he had lost the feel for America, he embarked on a 10,000-mile journey across the nation, accompanied by his French poodle Charley. Part travelogue, part fiction, he wrote about the people he met. He gloried in the gifts of nature at Yellowstone and agonized over scenes of racial violence in New Orleans. In the end, he was uncertain what he found, and he lamented the loss of an older America. “The more I inspected this American image, the less sure I became of what it is.”

6. Easy Rider (1969)

The film follows Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) as they travel by motorcycle from Los Angeles to New Orleans. The pair sold cocaine to finance their trip, and drugs, from marijuana to LSD, are part of their journey. In their travels, they experience life in a commune and befriend a lawyer (Jack Nicholson). But they face hostility (the lawyer is murdered) and, in the end, they are also killed. The movie defined an era where the rebellion of youth came to the forefront and the soundtrack forever linked rock ‘n’ roll to the journey on the road.

7. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

Robert Pirsig’s book became a surprise bestseller, despite being rejected initially by dozens of publishers. It tells the fictionalized autobiographical story of a motorcycle trip he took with his son from Minnesota to California. Along the way, the narrative contemplates various philosophical and psychological issues. What the travelers found was inward, not outward. “Sometimes,” Pirsig writes, “it’s a little better to travel than arrive.”

8. Rain Man (1988)

Awkward pairings are elemental in road narratives. Few are as different as the brothers Charlie and Ray, portrayed by Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. One is an upscale collectibles dealer and the other is an institutionalized autistic savant. On their car journey from Cincinnati to Los Angeles, Charlie copes with the regimented habits of his brother and comes to appreciate and understand him. In Las Vegas, Ray uses his mathematical abilities to count cards and win big at blackjack. In the end, Ray returns to the institution where he lives, and Charlie promises to see him again, having come to appreciate his brother and realize he wants him in his life.

9. Thelma and Louise (1991)

What starts as a girls’ weekend away becomes a one-way road trip to eternity. Geena Davis (Thelma) and Susan Sarandon (Louise), looking to escape from a domineering husband and deadening job, plan a weekend at a cabin. But after a stop at a roadhouse where Thelma is nearly raped and Louise kills her attacker, the women go on the lam. Along the way, their friendship and confidence grow, but they reach a point of no return as authorities bear down on them. They gas the engine and head toward a gorge. The film leaves the two of them in still frame, forever suspended in mid-air, pointed upward, out and away.

10. The Road (2006)

In this famous post-apocalyptic work, Cormac McCarthy tells the story of a loving father and his young son journeying across a forbidding landscape. There is danger and horror everywhere and the pair struggle to survive. They strive to reach water, and do. But the father dies and the son is left to carry on with another family, who discover him. Father and son had “set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.” If each is the other’s world entire, it matters not where you are on the road.

^{Feature image: Photo by Jaro Bielik on Unsplash.}

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The Naval Academy Class of 1940 [slideshow]

As shocking as the Pearl Harbor attack had been for the Naval Academy Class of 1940, the sudden arrival of peace was nearly as disorienting. Most of the Forties, as they were known, were still only 27 years old, and the great adventure of their lives was now behind them. The war had dominated virtually all of their adult lives, from Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 to Japan’s surrender in 1945. For nine years, they had been directed by circumstance, authority, and a shared feeling of responsibility. They had served in different theaters, in different jobs, on different ships—or planes, or battalions. Yet all of them had been forged, tempered, and tested. Every man in the class knew someone who had been killed in the war, and the sacrifice of their classmates was etched into their hearts.

They had learned to live in the moment; now they had to think of the future. For the next two decades and longer, they served in a wide variety of assignments throughout the world. For some of them, there was another war, in Korea. For a few, there was even a third war, in Vietnam. Throughout it all, they stayed in touch with one another, attended class reunions when they could, and caught the occasional Navy football game. Eventually, they retired. Some took up a new profession; several became teachers. But none of them ever forgot their trial by fire in the Second World War, nor did they forget one another. They were always Forties.

_{Feature image credit: Graduation day at Annapolis, Class of 1940. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Harris & Ewing, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-12345]. Public domain.}

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How to read like Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin left many anecdotes about his reading in his autobiography and other writings. Though he presents himself as an example of how reading can enrich a person’s life, he never really codified his personal reading as how-to advice, but that does not mean that I cannot do so. Therefore, in Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin, I discuss many aspects of Franklin’s reading life: what he read, where he read, how he read, and why he read. What follows is a set of practical tips derived from Franklin’s experience to get the most from your reading.

1. Take advantage of spare moments. 

Reading about vegetarianism in Thomas Tryon’s Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness when he was an apprentice in Boston under his brother James, Benjamin Franklin convinced himself that he could prepare cheaper and healthier meals than James and his other employees took at the local tavern. When they went to lunch, Franklin stayed behind in the printshop, enjoyed his solo lunch, and spent the spare hour reading. He used the money he saved on meals to buy more books: the mark of a true bookman. In a life jampacked with activity to benefit the community and the nation, Franklin would apply what he learned as an apprentice: he always took advantage of whatever spare moments he could to enjoy reading.

2. Keep an open mind about unusual ideas. 

One book he read as an apprentice was Philemon Holland’s English translation of Pliny’s Natural History, a landmark in Franklin’s reading life. He laughed at Pliny’s account of a practice among the seamen of his time to still the waves in a storm by pouring oil into the sea, which Franklin considered a silly superstition. When he learned decades later that oil could indeed calm bodies of water, Franklin felt embarrassed by how readily he had rejected this Plinyism without careful consideration. It took a long time to learn, but he eventually realized that readers must not dismiss ideas from different times, lands, or cultures.

3. Talk about books with others. 

Here is something nonreaders never realize: people’s conversation reflects their reading. Franklin learned this lesson after he had run away from Boston. Passing through New Jersey, he encountered a surgeon and poet named John Browne, who could tell by the way the teenaged Franklin talked that he was an avid reader. Their shared love of literature formed the basis for their lifelong friendship. Once Franklin settled in Philadelphia, he befriended other young men who loved to read. Eventually, he and his friends formed a mutual improvement club they called the Junto, and, as in a modern-day book club, book discussions became a prominent feature of their weekly meetings.

4. Assemble your own home library. 

The Junto members each had a personal library, but Franklin got the idea for them to combine their collections to form a library greater than any of them could assemble individually. The communal library did not work, but it would lead to the formation of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first subscription library in North America. Though the Library Company was a great resource for its subscribers, Franklin still recognized the importance for them to have home libraries of their own, which would provide ready references in the case of practical works and a never-ending source of entertainment, which a good collection of poetry, essays, and plays could provide.

5. Share your books with others. 

Sir Richard Steele’s Dramatic Works was one book of plays Franklin had in his personal library, at least until he loaned it to a friend, who never returned it. More than most possessions, books are notoriously difficult things to return. Franklin told his friend Benjamin Rush “that a man lost ten percent on the value, by lending his books, [and] that he once knew a man who never returned a borrowed book, because no one ever returned books borrowed from him.” Despite the unreturned books, Franklin continued to loan volumes from his library to friends throughout his life. He decided that the opportunity to share the ideas they contained was worth the risk.

_{Featured image by Aida Geraeva on Unsplash.}

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50 years after the fall of Saigon [reading list]

On 30 April 1975, the Vietnam War came to a historic end with the fall of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, to North Vietnam forces, marking a significant turning point in world history. This day is remembered for the profound impact it had on the lives of millions, the geopolitical landscape, and the course of modern history. As we commemorate the anniversary of this pivotal event, we reflect on the sacrifices made, the lessons learned, and the enduring hope for peace and reconciliation.

Access the featured books and chapters on this reading list via your institution’s library or recommend to your librarian to gain access.

Fire and Rain by Carolyn Woods Eisenberg

This gripping account interweaves Nixon and Kissinger’s pursuit of the war in Southeast Asia and their diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China with on-the-ground military events and US domestic reactions to the war conducted in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Drawing upon a vast collection of declassified documents, Eisenberg presents an important re-interpretation of the Nixon Administration’s relations with the Soviet Union and China vis-à-vis the war in Southeast Asia.

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Vietnam at War by Mark Philip Bradley

The Vietnam War tends to conjure up images of American soldiers battling an elusive enemy in thick jungle, the thudding of helicopters overhead. But there were in fact several wars in Vietnam, including an anticolonial war with France and a civil war between the North and South. Vietnam at War looks at how the Vietnamese themselves experienced all of these conflicts, showing how the wars for Vietnam were rooted in fundamentally conflicting visions of what an independent Vietnam should mean that in many ways remain unresolved to this day.

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Death of a Generation by Howard Jones

For many historians and political observers, what John F. Kennedy would and would not have done in Vietnam has been a source of enduring controversy. Based on new evidence—including a revelation about the Kennedy administration’s involvement in the assassination of Premier Diem—Howard Jones argues in his book that Kennedy intended to withdraw the great bulk of American soldiers and pursue a diplomatic solution to the crisis in Vietnam.

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Number One Realist by Nathaniel L. Moir

In a 1965 letter to Newsweek, French writer and academic Bernard Fall (1926-67) staked a claim as the “Number One Realist” on the Vietnam War. This is the first book to study the thought of this overlooked figure, one of the most important experts on counterinsurgency warfare in Indochina.

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“Hanoi’s National Liberation Strategy, 1954–1975” by Pierre Asselin

This chapter from The Oxford Handbook of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies considers the strategies and tactics used by Vietnamese communist leaders to defeat the United States and its allies in the Vietnam War. It demonstrates that the guerrilla warfare that has come to define the war in the West was in fact only one aspect of a highly sophisticated campaign to “liberate” the Southern half of the country and bring about national reunification under communist aegis.

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“The Literature of Peace: A War Refugee’s ‘Orphaned Voice’ in The Sympathizer”by Pamela J. Rader

This chapter from The Oxford Handbook of Peace History considers The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese American refugee’s perspective on the war waged on Vietnamese soil. In the tradition of novels as vehicles for social change, the fictional confessional chronicles the lasting devastation of war, cultural imperialism, and nationalism through its eponymous, biracial, double-agent narrator who subscribes to the loyalty of two brothers instead of the two countries he serves.Art, specifically fiction, becomes an act of resistance to assert the loss of individualism and freedom of thought in promoting a culture of peace.

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The Dragon in the Jungle by Xiaobing Li

Western historians have long speculated about Chinese military intervention in the Vietnam War. It was not until recently, however, that newly available international archival materials, as well as documents from China, have indicated the true extent and level of Chinese participation in the conflict of Vietnam. For the first time in the English language, this book offers an overview of the operations and combat experience of more than 430,000 Chinese troops in Indochina from 1968-73.

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_{Feature image by USMC Photo by GySgt Russ Thurman. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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12 key titles to read this Jazz Appreciation Month [reading list]

In honor of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), we celebrate the extraordinary history and heritage of jazz, exploring its music, culture, and people who made it thrive. Jazz, despite its distinctly American roots, resonates globally across cultures, languages, and musical traditions. Often described as a musical conversation between band members, with improvisation, rhythm, and swing, jazz is a powerful unifying force that builds bridges, connecting people from all walks of life. Whether it’s the soulful strains of a saxophone in New York or the lively rhythms of a jazz band in Paris, jazz brings us together and celebrates our shared humanity.

We hope that this reading list of 12 stimulating and inspiring books—like the number of keys in an octave—will spark your interest and encourage your participation in this truly original American art form—to read books about it, to study the music, to play and perform, and ultimately to listen to all things jazz.

1. Stomp Off, Let’s Go by Ricky Riccardi

Two-time GRAMMY award-winning author and Louis Armstrong expert Ricky Riccardi tells the enthralling story of the iconic trumpeter’s meteoric rise to fame. Beginning with Louis Armstrong’s youth in New Orleans, Riccardi transports readers through Armstrong’s musical and personal development, including his initial trip to Chicago to join Joe “King” Oliver’s band, his first trip to New York to meet Fletcher Henderson, and his eventual return to Chicago, where he changed the course of music with the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings.

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2. SamBop NYC by Marc Gidal

In New York City during the first decades of the new millennium, over two hundred professional musicians play music that combines jazz with Brazilian genres. Blending American and Brazilian music, these musicians continue the legacies of bossa nova, samba jazz, and other styles, while expanding their skills, cultural understandings, and identities.

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3. The Classroom Guide to Jazz Improvisation by John McNeil and Ryan Nielsen

This book provides what music educators have sought for decades: an easy, step-by-step guide to teaching jazz improvisation in the music classroom. Offering classroom-tested lesson plans, authors John McNeil and Ryan Nielsen draw on their combined 54 years of teaching experience and extensive work as professional jazz musicians to remove the guesswork and mystique from the teaching process.

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4. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” by Tom Jenks

Tom Jenks’s reading of James Baldwin’s short story follows a scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, discussion of the pattern by which Baldwin indelibly writes “Sonny’s Blues” into the consciousness of readers. It provides ongoing observations of the story’s aesthetics and musical progression, with references to Edward P. Jones, Charlie Parker’s music, Billie Holiday’s “Am I Blue?,” and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Jenks pays attention to Baldwin’s oratorical gifts, the biblical references in the story, its time structure, characterizations, dramatic action, and its total effect.

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5. Chasin’ the Sound by Brian Levy and Keith Waters

Written for all experience levels, Chasin’ the Sound encourages hands-on learning with activities that highlight the intangible yet key aesthetics of sound, groove, and feel. Studying jazz fundamentals alongside well-known examples of those fundamentals in practice, students and instructors will gain a broader and more meaningful understanding of the art of improvisation.

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6. Rhythm Man by Stephanie Stein Crease

In this first comprehensive biography of Chick Webb, author Stephanie Stein Crease traces his story in full, showing how his skills and innovations as a bandleader helped catalyze the music of the Swing Era and the growing big band industry, allowing Webb to become one of the most influential musicians in jazz history. Crease explores Webb’s personal and professional struggles as he rose to the top of the increasingly competitive world of big band jazz.

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7. Hearing Double by Brian Kane

When we talk about a jazz “standard” we usually mean one of the many songs that jazz musicians repeatedly play as part of their core repertoire. Unlike classical music, standards are transformed in performance, rearranged, improvised upon, and altered with new chords and melodies. These transformations can be minor or radical revisions. Brian Kane explores what gives a standard its identity by offering a new theory of musical works, addressing the unique challenges presented by standards.

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8. The Gerry Mulligan 1950s Quartets by Alyn Shipton

Founded in Los Angeles in 1952, The Gerry Mulligan Quartet was the first small jazz ensemble without a chordal instrument like a piano or guitar. Using original scores and detailed transcriptions of Mulligan’s work, Shipton offers an intimate look at Mulligan’s musical development from the initial quartet with Chet Baker to its successors with Bob Brookmeyer, Jon Eardley, and Art Farmer. Featuring original interviews, and presenting a fresh take on Mulligan’s harmonic creativity, this book traces the ups and downs of his heroin addiction, imprisonment, sobriety, and eventual musical triumph.

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9. Rabbit’s Blues by Con Chapman

Johhny Hodges’ celebrated technique and silky tone marked him then, and still today, as one of the most important and influential saxophone players in the history of jazz. In this first ever biography, Rabbit’s Blues details Hodges’ place as one of the premier artists of the alto sax and his role as co-composer with Duke Ellington.

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10. Sportin’ Life by Brian Harker

John W. Bubbles was the ultimate song-and-dance man. In this compelling and deeply researched biography, his dramatic story is told for the first time. Coming of age with the great jazz musicians like of Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Ella Fitzgerald, he influenced jazz with his rhythmic ideas. A groundbreaking tap dancer, he provided inspiration to Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, and the Nicholas Brothers. His vaudeville team “Buck and Bubbles” captivated theater audiences for more than thirty years. Most memorably, in the role of Sportin’ Life, he stole the show in the original production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

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11. Instrument of the State by Benjamin J. Harbert

Interweaving oral history and archival research, Benjamin J. Harbert expands on folkloric definitions of “prison music” to show how incarcerated musicians found small but essential freedoms by performing jazz, R&B, country, gospel, rock, and fusion throughout the twentieth century. This book considers the ways in which music manifests among the incarcerated and the prison administration as a lens to better understand state power and the fragments of hope and joy that exist in its wake.

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12. The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia

Universally hailed as the most comprehensive and accessible history of the genre of all time, and acclaimed by jazz critics and fans alike, this magnificent work covers the latest developments in the jazz world and revisits virtually every aspect of the music.

Read more.

Explore even more great jazz titles over on Bookshop:

• Bookshop US
• Bookshop UK

_{Featured image by Jon Tyson on Upsplash.}

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We the Men

Amidst the flurry of headlines about the Trump administration’s first weeks in power, who will notice that the federal government’s largest agency no longer celebrates Black History Month or Women’s History Month? The Department of Defense’s January 31 guidance declaring “Identity Months Dead at DoD” may have been lost in the news cycle.

But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took the time to make this change because commemorations are important. They shape how Americans understand the past, think about the present, and envision the future. That is why the Trump administration has already launched its plans for marking America’s semiquincentennial in 2026. President Donald Trump himself chairs the task force.

Although the Trump administration is unlikely to acknowledge it, America’s commemorative landscape remains starkly uneven. Almost 250 years after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed “that all men are created equal,” only three women made a recent list of the 50 most frequently commemorated people in America’s public monuments. In comparison, the list includes 44 white men, many of them slaveholders. Congress has never designated a legal public holiday—the kind that closes federal offices—to celebrate an important woman in American history.

Reformers have been fighting for generations to expand America’s commemorations. Decades after the creation of Black History Month and Women’s History Month, efforts to include all Americans in the nation’s commemorations have had limited success—largely because these efforts continue to face vehement opposition.

Trump joined that opposition long before his current presidential term, speaking out against placing Harriet Tubman’s image on the $20 bill.

Only two women have ever appeared on America’s paper currency. Martha Washington graced the front of a $1 silver certificate that the United States first issued in 1886. Pocahontas knelt for baptism on the back of a $20 bill first issued in 1863.

Many Americans have noticed women’s absence. After years of activism from women in and out of Congress, the Obama administration announced a plan in 2016 to redesign the $20 bill, with Tubman replacing President Andrew Jackson on the front.

At the time, Trump was pursuing the Republican nomination for President. He immediately denounced the decision to place Tubman on the twenty as “pure political correctness,” as if Tubman did not merit such prominent recognition. In contrast, Trump insisted that Jackson had “a great history.”

To put Trump’s claims in context: Jackson was a slaveholder who removed Native American tribes from their lands. Tubman was an abolitionist and suffragist who freed herself and hundreds of others from bondage before becoming a Union scout, spy, and nurse during the Civil War. Each historical figure foregrounds different aspects of America’s past. To my mind, Tubman’s record is far worthier of celebration.

Trump, however, declared in 2016 that “it would be more appropriate” to have Tubman’s image on “another denomination,” suggesting “maybe we do the two dollar bill or we do another bill.” If you have rarely seen a $2 bill, there is a reason for that. The two is the least-used bill.

After Trump became President in 2017, his Treasury Department delayed introduction of the new $20 bill and spent years repeatedly refusing to indicate whether the redesigned twenty would feature Tubman.

One of Trump’s former White House staffers published a tell-all memoir in 2018. She recounted Trump’s reaction when she gave him a memo in 2017 about placing Tubman on the twenty. Trump reportedly looked at a photograph of Tubman and asked: “You want to put that face on the twenty-dollar bill?” The question implied that Tubman did not look like someone who belonged in that place of honor, or did not look like someone Trump found physically attractive, or both.

After Trump’s defeat in 2020, the Biden administration reported that it was committed to placing Tubman’s portrait on the front of the twenty. However, Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election has made that commemoration uncertain again.

America’s Constitution purports to speak for “We the People.” But too many of our commemorations include only We the Men. That usually means white men. Amidst the many other struggles that will mark the Trump presidency, it is well worth fighting to include all of us in the stories America tells about itself. The celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the United States are just one year away.

_{Featured image by Ben Mater via Unsplash.}

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<em>Moby-Dick</em> and the United States of Aggrievement

Like the white whale itself, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) seems ubiquitous across time. For nearly a century, readers have turned to Captain Ahab’s search for the whale that took his leg to understand American crises. During the Cold War, commentators debated Ahab’s Stalin-like powers. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the question of vengeance took center stage. Was Ahab Mohammad Attah crashing an American Airlines jet into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, or was he George W. Bush searching for weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq?

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency offers a different question about Melville, domination, and US political life: How do Americans gain power by claiming that they have been wronged? Trump continues to shatter political norms, but complaining about mistreatment is part of the nation’s DNA. As erratic and self-indulgent as it may be, Trump’s sense of injury stretches back to the series of grievances that the Declaration of Independence itemized about King George III.

The first Trump administration cultivated comparisons to Andrew Jackson, the populist president whose election proclaimed the rise of the self-determined white man. Look behind the myths of Jacksonian democracy, however, and you will find a nation of teeming resentments. A nineteenth-century visitor observed that Americans had an unusual fondness for lawsuits and cheerfully took each other to court. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that while Americans were initially difficult to insult, their resentments, once ignited, took a long time to burn out. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously begrudged every dollar he gave to charity as an infringement on his “manhood” and individuality.

Against this backdrop Melville imagined Captain Ahab’s ruinous quest. The feeling of perpetual grievance animates the captain’s violent path through the world. “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me,” he tells Starbuck, warning the First Mate that power resides in collecting real and imagined wounds. Ahab seems so difficult to resist because the crew believe that in seeking retribution for his injuries, they will get justice for their own. Historian Timothy Snyder has used the phrase “anticipatory obedience” to describe the way populations capitulated to twentieth-century authoritarians without being asked or forced. Melville depicted this phenomenon a decade before the Civil War. Starbuck openly challenges Ahab’s desire for revenge, but with profound dread, he feels himself already succumbing to the captain’s “lurid woe.”

It is hardly surprising that the authoritarian-loving Trump employs the language of vengeance that Moby-Dick so brilliantly explores: “I am your justice,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2023. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” Trying to explain Trump’s appeal, pundits have identified multiple resentments among the white working class, but they should look deeper into his supporters’ belief that, long before the assassination attempts, he had been flagrantly wronged. Trump is a convicted felon, an accused sexual predator, a billionaire who ignores bills, accountability, and the most basic laws. For decades, he has ruined people’s lives with relish rather than remorse. And yet, from the oligarchs of Silicon Valley to the sycophants of Fox News, our politics seems addicted to the idea that Trump has been persecuted, cheated, and dispossessed.

Homer’s Iliad tells the story of Achilles, whose damaged pride leaves him sulking in his tent and refusing to join the Greek siege of Troy. For all his self-pity, though, Achilles does not convince his fellow warriors to withdraw their armies from the fight. His resentments remain his own. Melville recognized that in the turbulent world of American democracy, aggrievement was a powerful political tool. Seconds before he throws his final harpoon, Ahab exclaims what we might regard as a recipe for the “irresistible dictatorship” he exerts over the crew: “Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.” 

Let me be clear: Ahab is too elevated, expressive, and philosophically self-aware to be explained by the MAGA movement. And yet, amid all his heroic complexity, the seeds of American aggrievement appear throughout his quest. When he inspires the harpooners, humiliates Starbuck, or tricks his crew, he revels in his own autocratic powers. Think of Trump nursing his bruises as he denies protection to his critics, threatens journalists with lawsuits, and fires the government workers who once held him to account. And think of all those accomplices lining up behind him, shamelessly claiming that he has been victimized by a deep state hoax. 

The recent bans on DEI remind us that the grievances that count for this administration—and for too many administrations before it—primarily concern Christian nationalists and conservative white men. Moving further into the second Trump presidency, we need to interrogate the power the nation gives to their perceived injuries.

Ahab dies when he is strangled by the harpoon line attached to Moby Dick. The whale sinks his ship, and every crew member dies but one. I trust that Trump will come to a more peaceful, gilded end, but what happens to the rest of us? From Canada and Panama to Gaza, Greenland, and Ukraine (the list grows daily), the world seems stuck on an American ship bent on avenging the president’s wounded psyche. 

A wreck seems inevitable. Surviving that wreck does not.

_{Featured image by Matthew Gonzalez on Unsplash.}

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The end of the “American Century”?

“We Americans are unhappy,” is the opening line in a famous 1941 Life magazine article, in which Henry Luce called for Americans to harness the nation’s ingenuity as a benevolent force in the world. Partly aimed at the nation’s 1930s isolationism, his earnest exhortation to be imaginative and bold also spoke to a moment when decisive action might well turn the tide of the Second World War in Europe. The so-called American ideals that Luce identified include love of freedom, equality of opportunity, self-reliance, justice, truth and charity, among others. It is questionable whether Americans truly embodied all these values in 1941, but it mattered that they thought they did. That unshakeable confidence led to engagement with the wider world and a drive to create a better world.

It is hard to ignore the current dismantling of much of the moral rhetoric and internationalist sentiment that infuses Luce’s piece. American confidence is gone, and those ideals seem quaint and antiquated, begging the question: is the “American Century” at an end?

While our present government leadership may decry the ideals Luce identified, what is sometimes forgotten is the bipartisan agreement that led to this stance. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wartime leadership are common knowledge, but few realize that Herbert Hoover, Republican president from 1929-1933, at one time embodied the birth of the American Century and the nation’s ambition to be a power abroad.

Hoover certainly was not a charismatic orator, nor was he an intellectual or a military leader. Born in Iowa in 1874 and orphaned as a small boy, he moved to live with Quaker relatives in Oregon, where he began work at 14. After passing the entrance exam for the new Stanford University, Hoover graduated with a geology degree, working to pay his way through college. This early habit of hard work continued in his engineering career and eventually led him to a personal fortune by the time he turned 40. This is when Hoover turned to public service.

The United States remained officially neutral in 1914 when war broke out, but that did not mean it was inactive. Americans intervened aggressively in wartime trade disputes, supplied armaments, and under Hoover’s watchful eye, fed nine million Belgian and French civilians. By the time Hoover’s multiple agencies—public, private, mixed—wound down a century ago, the United States had provided food, material relief, and medical aid to two dozen European countries. Hoover oversaw the massive American Relief Administration and European Children’s Fund, making him a household name, and along with Wilson, the face of the US abroad.

While relief workers pursued a mission to save and improve the world, millions of Americans started learning the fundamentals of “Western Civilization” in newly created, uniquely American university classes. US intervention abroad supplemented a new interest in collecting and teaching the cultural heritage of other nations, helping to construct a historical narrative in which Americans had reached the pinnacle of progress.

This was new. The 1917 American Expeditionary Force marked the first large-scale US intervention in a global conflict. Nearly simultaneously, the nation funded massive relief programs, leading to a need to redefine American identity. Did they have moral authority, and if so, on what was it based? Were they uniquely placed to bring efficiency and technological knowhow to an ailing world? Why should Americans act to ameliorate suffering of strangers? American loans, agricultural surpluses, and transport capacity all supported US claims for supervision of a return to normalcy after conflict. Postwar loans bankrolled the world, in the process creating wealth for many in the United States.

Propaganda campaigns broadly publicized US generosity and humane leadership, creating a sense of what it meant to be an American in a globalizing world. Domestic efforts to improve society in the Progressive era now found new fields of operation abroad, creating a kind of international classroom for Americans to rescue those in need of help. Modern advertisements made it clear to Americans that not only did food provide sustenance but it was a principled imperative for a democratic nation—wealth begat responsibility. This rhetoric echoed Americans’ own sense of their mission to save the “Old World,” so it resonated with both volunteers and ordinary donors to the cause.

By the 1920s, Americans conceived of their own nation’s citizens as modern, progressive, rational, neutral, and efficient. They juxtaposed these qualities with a Europe in tatters, one that had squandered its modernity and for whom the war served as proof of its moral and political bankruptcy. By making explicit the connection between US governmental relief and American expertise, aid workers echoed the increasingly coherent rationale of US moral responsibility to model democracy for others. Rescuing a grateful world had become central to an American global mission and self-identity and thus began the American Century.

As the current Trump administration moves speedily to defund and discontinue various aspects of foreign aid, the United States is sending a message that it no longer sees itself as a global power for good. Hoover’s organizations created a model that saved lives and created a market for surplus food that American farmers had produced, helping to bolster prices and to reduce stocks of army rations and grain. This coalition brought together missionaries, reformers, financial institutions, diplomats, and farmers for the purpose of aid and development. Hoover fervently believed that food aid encouraged global stability and created a positive image of the United States abroad, and this idea, echoed by later presidents such as Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, was a central value of the “American Century.” In 2025, it appears the United States is ending that century-long commitment to foreign responsibility.

Featured image by Jakob Owens via Unsplash.

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Half a century with OUP: remembering Bill Leuchtenburg (1922-2025)

In 2003, historian William E. Leuchtenburg signed a contract with OUP for a trade book on the executive branch. It was to be 60 to 80,000 words, 200 printed pages, due September 2005. Because he had two other large book projects underway, Bill did not make that date. A few years later, I attended the annual dinner of the Society of American Historians, one of those classic rubber chicken banquets held at the Century Association. During the cocktail hour, I chatted with Bill, who immediately brought up his undelivered project.

Bill noted dolefully that he no longer had an editor at OUP; Nancy Lane and Sheldon Meyer had both retired; Tim Bartlett, who signed the book, and Peter Ginna, who inherited it, had both left the Press; he was orphaned. “Bill,” I said, “I’d be honored to be your editor.” Like so many generations of history students, I’d read The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932 and the visage of William E. Leuchtenburg was carved into the Mount Rushmore of American historians. Now I would have the privilege of editing him.

When the manuscript arrived, I knew immediately what an accomplishment it was, albeit a hefty one: 325,000 words, in draft; it came out at 886 pages. Yet it was a joy to edit—polished, expansive, an insightful illumination of the executive office and those who occupied it. It was masterful and majestic.

“It has been said that no one writes big-picture history anymore,” Niko Pfund, OUP USA’s own president, wrote in the jacket copy. “But in The American President—the capstone of a storied career—Bill Leuchtenburg serves up popular history at its best. An exemplar of narrative history, it will stand as the definitive account of the twentieth-century American presidency.”

Capstone, perhaps, but Bill still had another book in him. Though he was nearing the century mark—perhaps because of it—he wanted to work his way backward in history and write the history of the presidency from the beginning. He would start with the first six chief executives, in what became Patriot Presidents (2024). As with Bill’s other books, the research behind it was deep, the writing elegant and witty, yet Bill, learned as he was, never condescended. He was, his UNC history colleagues once wrote in a tribute, “a model of public engagement.”

He remained throughout his life the kid from Queens. Nowhere is this more evident than in the essay on the borough that he contributed to American Places, the volume of essays he edited in honor of Oxford editor Sheldon Meyer’s retirement. Here we learn that, as the son of immigrants, Bill grew up in Queens but always focused his attention on Manhattan. Only later did he look at Queens as a historical subject, which he did with grace, humor, and hometown pride. Above all, it is a paean to American immigration, noting that his Elmhurst neighborhood had become the most ethnically diverse ZIP Code in the country. When he mentions spending an afternoon with Governor Mario Cuomo chatting about their shared hometown, he is matter of fact; there is not an iota of boastfulness.       

After The American President came out in 2015, we invited Bill to talk to the OUP staff about his book. He chose to talk not about the Presidency but rather about his long association with OUP. (I should note that Bill, the avid baseball fan, pitched a double-header that day; he went across the street to deliver an evening lecture at the Morgan Library.)

The story began in Grand Central Station in 1973. Bill was standing in line to buy tickets for a family trip. Henry Steele Commager, his Columbia colleague, came running up. Commager was co-author, with Samuel Eliot Morison at Harvard, of the two-volume, 2,000-page The Growth of the American Republic (first edition, 1930), what Bill called “the most celebrated textbook ever written.” Commager and Morison, he said, had decided that the next edition would be their last. They needed a third historian to take it over, and they chose Bill. He had some apprehension about his working relationship with Morrison. In his words:

In fact, Admiral Morison was a thoroughgoing professional. He had read my writing and believed he could trust me. He was also extraordinarily conscientious. From his home in Northeast Harbor, he would send detailed comments on my revisions to my editor at Oxford, Nancy Lane, and I would receive an onion skin copy at my home in Westchester County the next day:

Page 876, line 14. Not “Therefore” but “Hence.”

One day Nancy phoned me and said Morison had raised an objection to a particular sentence. It alluded to one Madame Jumel “who used to boast that she was the only woman in the world who had been embraced by both Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte.” I understood why that might be too raunchy for Morison, a Boston patrician well on in years. And for the next twenty-four hours I awaited with some trepidation the arrival of the onion skin. When I opened the envelope the next day, I read his words: “Strike ‘embraced.’ Insert ‘slept with.’”

In addition to the work on the textbook, Bill became an advisor and then a “surrogate delegate” (as US delegates were known in those high-imperialist days). He credits OUP’s president at the time, Byron Hollinshead, with introducing him to the filmmaker Ken Burns. Bill served as consultant to Burns’s film on Huey Long and went on to work on The Roosevelts, Jackie Robinson, and several other films.

Another key figure in Bill’s relationship with OUP was the aforementioned Sheldon Meyer, with whom he published The Supreme Court Reborn. As he explained, “In these same years, I sent a stream of dissertations from students in my Columbia PhD seminar to Sheldon—and so Allan Brandt, Bill Chafe, Harvard Sitkoff, and a number more became Oxford authors. That was good for Oxford and very good for my students who started their careers with a first book under the imprint of a highly prestigious publisher.” Bill and Sheldon shared a love of baseball and jazz, and they partied well: “I remember especially Sheldon’s very keen eye for exceptional restaurants.”

When I inherited Bill, we were no longer in the fancy-dinner era, but we nevertheless became fast friends. He was both gracious and practical when it came to the nitty-gritty of the editorial process. He appreciated that second set of eyes (or in his case, third, since his wife, Jean Anne, had already taken her turn); he took advice gratefully, even when it meant cutting 30 pages from one chapter.

He considered his editors part of the family, and there were always long personal notes on Christmas cards and photos of his beloved Labradoodle Murphy, who accompanied the Leuchtenburgs as they delivered fresh vegetables to their neighbors during the pandemic. He observed that the children liked Murphy much more than the broccoli. When I called him to tell him I was retiring, he responded in character: He sang Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top”—all the verses, perfectly. He was then 102. Back at you, Bill!

_{Featured image by Nancy Toff.}

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the freedom jubilee

“Colonel Higginson was a man on fire,” read one obituary. “He had convictions and lived up to them in the fullest degree.” The obituary added that he had “led the first negro regiment, contributed to the literature of America, and left an imprint upon history too deep to be obliterated.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson would have been pleased to have been referred to as “colonel.” He was proud of his military service and happily used the title for many decades after the end of the Civil War and up to his death in May 1911 at the age of eighty-seven.

Nonetheless, his time in the army was just one of many things for which he hoped to be remembered. “I never shall have a biographer, I suppose,” he mused to his diary in 1881. Just in case somebody took up the challenge, however, he wished to provide a hint about his career. “If I do” find a chronicler, he wrote, “the key to my life is easily to be found in this, that what I longed for from childhood was not to be eminent in this or that way, but to lead a whole life, develop all my powers, & do well in whatever came in my way to do.”

Yet while it was a life marked by numerous struggles for social justice and progressive causes, from abolitionism to women’s rights, from religious tolerance to socialism, and from physical fitness for both genders to temperance, there was one moment from the days he served as colonel to the 1^st South Carolina Infantry that meant so much to him that he wrote about it with great clarity in later years.

Higginson’s regiment was comprised solely of contraband troops, enslaved Americans who had fled toward Beaufort, South Carolina, which had been captured by the United States in November 1861, from northern Florida and coastal Carolina. When Higginson first arrived in Beaufort in December 1862 to take charge of the troubled regiment, the recruits and their families remained under military protection, but news of the Union disaster at Fredericksburg led him to fret about their fate should the Confederacy ultimately prevail.

The first of January 1863 arrived, and with it the promise of President Abraham Lincoln’s final Emancipation Proclamation. To properly commemorate the day of jubilee, General Rufus Saxton, the military governor of the Department of the South, issued an order entitled “A Happy New Year’s Greeting to the Colored People” of South Carolina, together with an invitation to a celebration at the regiment’s camp. The steamers Flora and Boston ferried freedpeople from the liberated Sea Islands to Beaufort’s docks, and from there the band from the 8^th Maine led the procession to the 1^st’s drilling grounds in an oak grove behind an abandoned mansion. A low stage had been hastily erected. Saxton sat toward the rear with Dr. William Henry Brisbane, a federal tax commissioner, and Reverend Mansfield French, who had arrived on the coast as a teacher. Higginson stood on the edge of the stage, flanked by his two favorite Black officers, Sergeant Prince Rivers and Corporal Robert Sutton. Laura Towne, a Philadelphia teacher and abolitionist, found a seat amidst the “dense crowd.” Higginson, she thought, though “tall and large man as he is,” appeared “small” when standing between his two color bearers.

The ceremony began promptly at 11:30 with a prayer from Chaplain James Fowler. Brisbane next stepped forward to read the president’s proclamation. Higginson considered that especially appropriate, as the South Carolina-born Brisbane had converted to abolitionism and carried his slaves to freedom in the North. French then presented Higginson with a new regimental flag he had obtained in Manhattan, a fact he had “very conspicuously engraved on the standard.” Thinking the day should be for Black Carolinians, that act and French’s praise of white New Yorkers left “a bad taste” in Higginson’s mouth.

But then “followed an incident so simple, so touching, so utterly unexpected & startling” that he could scarcely believe it. Just as Higginson received the flag and began to speak, an “elderly male voice” from the front row began to sing, “into which two women’s voices immediately blended.” The first words of what Higginson thought almost hymnlike floated above the crowd: “My county ‘tis of thee, Sweet land of Liberty.” Those on the platform began to join in. Higginson turned, shushing: “Leave it to them.” The freedpeople in the audience finished the song, with Higginson gazing down at them. Dr. Seth Rogers remembered that Higginson was “so much inspired” that he “made one of his most effective speeches.” Higginson thought otherwise. The day marked the first moment “they had ever had a country, the first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people,” he marveled, and “here while others stood in silence, waiting for my stupid words, these simple souls burst out.” The “choked voice of a race [was] at last unloosed,” and nothing he might say could match that eloquence. But he thought both Rivers and Sutton spoke “very effectively,” and the entire regiment sang “Marching Along.” The day ended with a barbecue of twelve roasted oxen and, as the temperance-minded colonel approvingly noted, “numerous barrels of molasses and water.”

Higginson was mustered out in November 1864 after being badly wounded during an upriver raid designed to liberate Confederate lumber and enslaved Carolinians. “Emerson says no man can do anything well who did not feel that what he was doing was for the time the centre of the universe,” Higginson reflected as his days on the Carolina coast drew to a close. He devoutly believed that no “brigade or division in the army was so important a trust as [his] one regiment—at least until the problem of negro soldiers was conclusively solved before all men’s eyes.” And although he ever depreciated his courage in contrast with that of the Black men who risked everything to serve, Higginson did think himself forever united with his men, as he put it in “A Song From Camp”:

            “And the hands were black that held the gun,

                        And white that held the sword,

            But the difference was none and the color but one,

                        When the red, red blood was poured.”

_{Featured image by Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Frances Oldham Kelsey: fame, gender, and science

Frances Oldham Kelsey, pharmacologist, physician, and professor, found fame soon after she finally, well into her forties, landed a permanent position as medical reviewer for the Food and Drug Administration in 1961. One of the first files to cross her desk was for the sedative thalidomide (tradename Kevadon), which was very popular in Europe and other nations for treating morning sickness.

But Kelsey, along with the other pharmacologist and chemist on her team, found the New Drug Application (NDA) submitted by Merrill Pharmaceuticals to include incomplete, shoddy research, and she put off approving the drug until studies came out of Europe about thalidomide’s extreme toxicity to fetuses. Thousands of babies were born with no arms or legs, malformed hearts, and other defects.

By August 1962, Kelsey was feted in the national and international press for preventing the drug from general use in the United States, and added award dinners, interviews, speeches, and receptions to her already busy work schedule.

Yet behind the scenes, she had to gingerly negotiate around aggrieved colleagues who were overlooked for their efforts (as she was the first to admit). Worse yet, there were a series of FDA Commissioners and senior executives whose power and lofty titles didn’t translate to as much publicity as America’s Good Mother of Science. James (Go Go) Goddard, for instance, was highly miffed when the announcement of his nomination as FDA Commissioner was accompanied by a photo of Kelsey.

The fact that Kelsey was a woman certainly did not help. She had bumped her head on glass ceilings right through graduate school and beyond, when her fellow students attained university appointments and she did not. A career in science was a man’s game, as was the drug industry. A photograph of Kelsey and FDA colleagues explaining amended drug policies to pharmaceutical executives portrayed a sole woman facing down a sea of hostile men. But she persisted, confident in her training and knowledge, and true to her moral compass.

What was unique about Frances Kelsey in the 1960s was the seamless way she integrated all her roles. The stereotypical female physician or scientist of the time (and they were a minority) was unmarried, abrasive, and dispassionate. Dr. Kelsey was happily married to a fellow pharmacologist and was raising two teenaged girls.

She had lots of friends, entertained, played golf and tennis, gardened, and generally enjoyed life. Kelsey was also a resident physician at her daughters’ Girl Scout Camp in South Dakota. And she loved doing science—dissecting whale glands, studying rabbit embryos under the microscope, and reading up on all the latest research.

When she postponed approval of the Kevadon NDA, it was not based on her husband’s advice, or being too nitpicky, or even procrastination and the messiness of her desk, as some opponents and journalists charged, but due to her careful application of scientific methods.

Dr. Kelsey did not shy away from the Good Mother of Science label. She gave speeches to female students and interviews in women’s magazines about the potential dangers of using drugs in pregnancy, and also its necessity in some cases. She headed another FDA file relating to foetal health—the consequences of the administration of the estrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES) to pregnant women in clinical trials, which resulted in serious injuries for many mothers and their children.

The American public appreciated all of these efforts, as they made evident in the thousands of pieces of fan mail they sent to Dr. Kelsey’s home and office. One theme ran throughout these letters, post cards, poems, and songs. It was not how can a woman be a scientist? It was why aren’t there more women in science doing great things for the benefit of all?

_{Featured image by National Cancer Institute via Unsplash.}

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Fact and fiction behind <em>American Primeval</em>

A popular new Netflix series, American Primeval, is stirring up national interest in a long-forgotten but explosive episode in America’s past. Though the series is highly fictionalized, it is loosely based on events covered in my recent, nonfiction publication, Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath, co-written with Richard E. Turley Jr.

From 1857–58, Mormon settlers of Utah Territory waged a war of resistance against the federal government after the newly elected US president sent troops to occupy the Salt Lake Valley. Concerned about the Mormons’ expanding theocracy in the West—Brigham Young was not only the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but also Utah’s governor—President James Buchanan’s advisors urged him to replace Young with a new governor, accompanied by an army contingent. The occupation of Utah by federal troops, the advisors insisted, was necessary to ensure that Mormons accepted their federally appointed leader.

Though tensions ran extremely hot, remarkably, no pitched battles broke out between the two sides in what became known as the Utah War. But the conflict was anything but bloodless. In the heat of the hysteria, Mormon militiamen in southwest Utah committed a war atrocity, slaughtering a California-bound wagon train of more than a hundred men, women, and children.

Viewers have been asking what is fact and what is fiction in American Primeval’s depiction of the Utah War. Vengeance Is Mine answers those questions. Below are just a few of the answers:

Did the Mormons actually purchase and burn down Fort Bridger?

Yes, though their motivations for doing both were different than those portrayed in the series. They purchased Fort Bridger in 1855—two years before any of the events depicted in the series took place. They bought it to be a trailside way station to supply thousands of immigrant converts making their way to Utah. Mormon militiamen burned down the fort in October 1857, along with the army’s supply wagons and grasses their draft animals needed to survive, all to thwart the advance of the approaching US troops and stall them on the plains of what is now Wyoming.

Did Mormon militiamen really wipe out a contingent of the US Army and a band of Shoshone people?

No. The militiamen’s scorched-earth tactics successfully slowed the troops’ approach until winter snows set in, making trails into the Salt Lake Valley impassable and forcing the troops to spend a miserable winter in a tent city they created outside the burned-out remains of Fort Bridger. When Congress met in early 1858, it rejected President Buchanan’s proposal to raise additional troops to send to Utah and forced Buchanan to broker a peace settlement with Mormon leaders instead. A few years later, in 1863, a different US Army contingent stationed in Utah slaughtered a band of more than four hundred Shoshone people in the Bear River Massacre, in what is southern Idaho today.

Did the Mountain Meadows Massacre take place just outside of Fort Bridger, and did the Shoshone and Southern Paiute live nearby?

No. The Mountain Meadows is in the desert climate of southwestern Utah, several hundred miles south of Fort Bridger. In the series, a band of Shoshone murder a group of Paiute men who had supposedly participated in the massacre in order to kidnap and rape white women. None of this was true. The traditional homelands of the Northwestern Shoshone are in what is today northern Utah and southern Idaho, and the Southern Paiute live in today’s southwestern Utah and Nevada, hundreds of miles apart. The Shoshone and Paiute weren’t at war and rarely, if ever, came in contact with each other. The Southern Paiute did not kidnap and rape women. The massacre was orchestrated by a group of 50-60 Mormon militiamen to cover up their involvement in a cattle raid of the wagon company that went awry. In the war hysteria of 1857, they thought that violence—murdering all the witnesses besides 17 young children—was the answer to protect themselves and their community.

Tragically, the political wrangling and tensions over federal and local rule, separation of church and state, and religious zeal and bigotry, led to a deadly climax on 11 September 1857. Modern readers may recognize similar tensions today, not only in the West but throughout the United States.

_{Featured image by Олег Мороз on Unsplash.}

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The meteoric rise of Louis Armstrong [playlist]

In the five years between his first recording session as a sideman with King Oliver in April 1923 to his final date as a leader in Chicago in December 1928, Louis Armstrong changed the sound of American popular music, with both his trumpet and with his voice. He perfected the art of the improvised solo, expanded the range of the trumpet, popularized scat singing, rewrote the rules of pop singing, and perhaps most importantly, infused everything he did with the irresistible feeling of swing. In surveying the landscape on Spotify alone, one can find 269 sides with Armstrong from this period, totaling 13 hours and 30 minutes of music. Trying to boil that output down to 12 representative tracks is not an easy task, but hopefully this playlist conveys a taste of just what made Armstrong so special in this decade—and every decade.

1. “Tears” – King Oliver’s Jazz Band – Chicago, 5-15 October 1923

For Armstrong, the sun rose and set on cornetist Joe “King” Oliver, who served as a mentor/father figure during his formative years in New Orleans. Armstrong made his first records with Oliver but rarely got the opportunity to “tear out,” as he put it. He made the most of one such opportunity, taking a series of scintillating breaks on “Tears,” co-written by Louis and then-girlfriend Lillian Hardin. After Louis and Lil married in 1924, she convinced Louis that Oliver was holding him back and insisted that her husband quit the band. It was a difficult decision, but it ended up being Armstrong’s first major step towards stardom.

2. “Shanghai Shuffle” – Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra – New York City, 10-13 October 1924

Armstrong moved to New York City in the fall of 1924 to join one of the top Black dance bands in the nation, Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra. Though members of Henderson’s group initially looked down on Armstrong’s southern fried disposition, that all changed when they heard him play. “Shanghai Shuffle” is a perfect example of what Armstrong brought to New York, taking a short, explosive solo in the middle of a dated, quasi-exotic arrangement, much like a burst of sunshine emerging from the clouds. Henderson reedman Don Redman was paying attention and began transforming the orchestra into a pioneering swing band–using Armstrong’s improvisations as an inspiration.

3. “St. Louis Blues” – Bessie Smith – New York City, 14 January 1925

Armstrong became quite adept at blowing obligatos behind various blues singers during his time in New York, climaxing with this iconic meeting with “The Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith. Calling what Armstrong does on “St. Louis Blues” an “obligato” is rather limiting; it’s really a duet, as his responses to Smith’s powerful vocal are note perfect, establishing the rules of how to properly accompany a singer, rules that are still adhered to this day.

4. “Gut Bucket Blues” – Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five – Chicago, 12 November 1925

In the fall of 1925, Armstrong moved back to Chicago, where OKeh Records finally gave him the opportunity to make records under his own name. In addition to Lil on piano, Armstrong hired three of his elders from New Orleans and formed a studio group, the Hot Five. After feeling stifled by Oliver and Henderson, Armstrong unleashed his infectious personality on the very first Hot Five side to be released, “Gut Bucket Blues,” confidently introducing the members of the band and establishing the template for what would become one of the most influential series of recordings in the history of American popular music.

5. “Heebie Jeebies” – Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five – Chicago, 26 February 1926

OKeh’s E. A. Fearn encouraged Armstrong to sing on “Heebie Jeebies,” which was originally conceived as an instrumental by Boyd Atkins. Armstrong wrote down some rudimentary lines but during the actual recording of the tune, he claimed to have dropped the lyric sheet. Instead of spoiling the take, Armstrong began using his voice like an instrument, something he did back when he was a kid singing on the streets of New Orleans, singing nonsense syllables, but phrasing them like one of his swinging trumpet solos. This type of singing didn’t have a name but Fearn began marketing it as “skat” and the result was Armstrong’s first legitimate hit record.

6. “Cornet Chop Suey” – Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five – Chicago, 26 February 1926

After already impacting the course of pop singing with “Heebie Jeebies,” Armstrong next turned his attention towards writing the rules on how to take an effective solo with “Cornet Chop Suey,” recorded on the same day. This is Armstrong’s show from start to finish, opening with a dazzling unaccompanied intro before moving into the forward-looking melody, composed by Armstrong two years earlier. But it was the stop-time interlude in the middle of the record that made trumpeters, trombonists, pianists, and other instrumentalists around the country sit up and take notes on how to create a memorable solo.

7. “Stomp Off, Let’s Go” – Erskine Tate’s Vendome Orchestra – Chicago, 28 May 1926

The Hot Five, as important as they are, was only a studio group and rarely performed in public. During this period, Armstrong performed nightly with Erskine Tate’s Vendome Orchestra, where he accompanied silent movies, did comedy routines, and was featured on classical numbers like the “Intermezzo” from Cavalleria Rusticana. Armstrong’s only recording session with Tate resulted in one of the decade’s hottest records, “Stomp Off, Let’s Go,” which showcases the piano work of Teddy Weatherford, in addition to offering a taste of Armstrong’s flashy style of the time.

8. “Big Butter and Egg Man” – Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five – Chicago, 16 November 1926

Armstrong doubled for much of 1926, working with Erskine Tate at the Vendome Theater before heading to the Sunset Cafe, where he was featured trumpeter in Carroll Dickerson’s Orchestra. “Big Butter and Egg Man” was a Sunset Cafe specialty before being adapted by the Hot Five in what became known as a legendary recording. Armstrong’s solo is a marvel of storytelling, but he also gets to display his good humor and showmanship in his vocal spot, hallmarks of his later career that were already firmly in place in the 1920s.

9. “Hotter Than That” – Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five – Chicago, 13 December 1927

By the end 1927, Armstrong was beginning to outpace the original members of the Hot Five. The records began featuring more and more of his solos, which were of a higher caliber than the work of his New Orleans elders. Armstrong needed new musicians to inspire him, such as guitar pioneer Lonnie Johnson, who made his presence felt on “Hotter Than That.” Armstrong solos over the rhythm section for a full chorus at the start, eschewing the group’s usual New Orleans polyphonic style, and embarks on a scat episode that is positively thrilling, his mastery of rhythm on full display. Towards the end, he even uncorks a two-note riff that would become a staple during the big band era. As a farewell to the original Hot Five, it doesn’t get any hotter.

10. “West End Blues” – Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five – Chicago, 28 June 1928

In June 1928, Armstrong returned to the studio with a retooled Hot Five, made up of members of Carroll Dickerson’s Orchestra and the man known as the “Father of Modern Jazz Piano,” Earl “Fatha” Hines. On King Oliver’s composition “West End Blues,” Armstrong opened with an unaccompanied trumpet cadenza in which he utilized everything he had learned about the instrument since first picking it up 15 years earlier. The entire record, from the cadenza to Armstrong’s mournful scatting to Hines’s dazzling piano solo, is simply a masterpiece of twentieth century recorded music, one that is still being studied in the twenty-first (a #westendblueschallenge was all the rage on social media a few years ago).

11. “Beau Koo Jack” – Louis Armstrong and His Savoy Ballroom Five – Chicago, 5 December 1928

By December 1928, OKeh Records realized the old trumpet-trombone-clarinet-banjo-piano sound was a thing of the past and began pushing Armstrong to record with slightly larger ensembles. On “Beau Koo Jack,” the addition of Don Redman’s alto saxophone and an arrangement by the song’s composer, Alex Hill, completely modernized the sound of Armstrong’s “Savoy Ballroom Five,” paving the way towards the Swing Era of the next decade. Armstrong shines in his setting, showing off every tool in his toolbox in a solo that still has the ability to astound in 2025.

12. “Tight Like This” – Chicago, 12 December 1928

The final song recorded at Armstrong’s final Chicago session before relocating to New York, “Tight Like This” can be viewed as a summary of Armstrong’s entire life up to this point. There’s comedy in the discussion about whether or not “it” is “tight like that”; there’s a minor-key mood that allows Armstrong to tap into the music he learned from the Jewish Karnofsky family; and there’s hints of the “Spanish tinge” as Jelly Roll Morton called it, incorporating a different, but no less important, flavor from his hometown. But most importantly, Armstrong’s three-chorus solo tells a story, taking its time and building to a roof-shaking climax that would be the blueprint for future soloists ranging from B. B. King to Jimi Hendrix to Eddie Van Halen (and those are just the guitarists). Full pop star stardom awaited Armstrong in New York in 1929 but the records he made in the 1920s established him once and for all as one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century—and beyond.

_{Featured Image From “Stomp Off, Let’s Go” Figure 27.1  1926 publicity photo of the original Hot Five. From left to right: Johnny Dodds, Louis Armstrong, Johnny St. Cyr, Kid Ory, Lillian Hardin Armstrong. Credit: Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum. Photo restoration by Nick Dellow.}

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The unknown <i>A Complete Unknown</i>

Folk music is still and always with us. It is in the tap of the hammer to the music on the radio or, in older days, to the workers’ own singing. It is the rhythmic push of the cabinetmaker’s saw, the scan across the checkout station to the beat of songs inside the checker’s head. “Folk music is a river, always flowing, steady and heedless. It has always been the underground stream of American musical culture: the rhythms of daily life.”

In the Academy Award-nominated film A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan stalks off the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival as the crowd boos. The filmmakers present this as a momentous turn for American culture, when rock’n’roll (factually, folk-rock and blues) trounces the feel-good, all-together-now world of American folk music. The significance of this event, which climaxes the film, is far more subtle. And the private reactions from Pete Seeger, whom Dylan once revered, have yet to be told.

The folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s emerged from eighteenth-century religious revivals, emphasizing individual honesty and spirituality, such as the Great Awakening. In the twentieth century, the first folk music revival was led by researchers and collectors, as in Germany, inspired by nineteenth-century Romantics. Preservationists of stories, jokes, or tunes visited libraries; tromped out in the hills and hollers of Appalachia, down the damp and dusty byways to find a local storyteller or that “fiddler in the woods.”

Out of these efforts came a cultural preservation movement pioneered by John Lomax, a collector of cowboy ballads, and particularly by his son, Alan Lomax. When Alan met Pete Seeger, son of musicologist Charles Seeger (who was the first to teach a course in folk music at an American university), they shifted that movement from cultural antiquarianism to activism, to reflect their desire to use songs for social equality. This fusion of folk music and social justice is what the filmmakers characterize as dissolving in the chaos of “Dylan goes electric” in July 1965. At this point, many of what could be called his followers were disaffected by his apparent turn from liberal politics and from traditional songs in his compositions.

Though depiction of the scene in Greenwich Village is accurate, the film misreads both traditional music and its profound influence on all of Dylan’s tunes and lyrics. Anyone listening to his adaptation of “900 Miles,” or how he turned “The Twa Sisters” (tenth in the collection of traditional ballads of Francis J. Child) into a deeply personal tale, or the traditional ballads and songs on his first album, Bob Dylan, (dismissed here as “other people’s songs”) can only marvel at his genius of reworking tradition. This corresponded to the purpose of the Newport Folk Festival which, instead of a parade of “stars,” devoted most of its stages to songs originating hundreds of years prior.

Dylan, however, was far more than a folk purist. Many do not realize that his first single had a rock band playing behind a rockabilly cut (“Mixed Up Confusion” in 1962), or that soon after that, he released a country-rock tune, “Rocks and Gravel,” also with a band. Dylan didn’t “go electric.” He’d been there for years. The film also disregards the aegis of that festival, directly traceable to the Romantic belief in the music of down-home, everyday folks and its uncommercial roots. The Newport board included Pete Seeger (and his wife and de facto manager, Toshi Ohta), and it had long allowed electrified instruments, though this was usually reserved for traditional blues musicians who had always played that way.

The question at the heart of the film then becomes one of Dylan’s motivation at provoking the citadel of American folk music: was he interested only in headlines and establishing himself commercially? Was he serious about singing out for social justice? (No careful listener to “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” or “Masters of War” can dispute this.)

In the film, viewers watch Dylan develop his chops—learning to work a mic, provoking interviewers, handling and at times dismissing baby boomers who sought him out as an oracle, singing alongside Seeger and Phil Ochs against injustice. We see him develop his performative, rebellious persona: mercurial, sullen, snarly, confrontational. Alongside him, we see his mentor Pete Seeger, here presented as benign but authentic, a citybilly singing hillbilly songs to syncretize them for urban audiences. Seeger was the Pied Piper of the folk revival introducing folk music, in one concert, to Dave Guard (Kingston Trio) and Joan Baez (for years Dylan’s partner to folk music). Seeger’s goal diverged from the commercializing instincts of Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager, instead being rooted in the inherently democratic nature of folksong. And this is where A Complete Unknown stumbles. It captures the dress of folkies (Beat meets Hip) and their clubs: the Café Wha, Folk City, the Gaslight; but it fails to present folksongs as carriers of an important, centuries-long process. It presents Dylan as if he was unknowing and uncaring of folksong and the democratic, ground-up socialism implicit in them.

Finally, we arrive at the dramatic climax, with Dylan in leather jacket and boots (in contrast to Seeger’s flannel shirts) daring the folkies to accept him in his new coat of many colors. As usual, the search for truth through historical fiction requires fact separated from context and characters isolated from their motivation.

In this case, we must examine two issues with Dylan’s performance: a sound system unaccustomed to bands; and the distinctly non-folk, non-protest lyrics he sang. From the first booming chords of “Like a Rolling Stone,” conveniently released the week before this provocation, we hear the boos; objects tumble toward the stage. (Though the film presents audience reactions as mixed, in recordings derision clearly outnumbers cheers.) Seeger implores the sound mixers to turn down the volume; he wants the audience to hear Dylan clearly. “I just want to hear the words,” he kept repeating. Nevertheless, these were drowned out either because of the mix or because the sound system was never set up to handle instrumentation this loud. Add to this Dylan’s abandonment of civil rights and peace songs in favor of angry pop, and you have an audience and its leaders betrayed. That much is true. To many listening, Dylan should no more have a pop song on AM radio than Pete Seeger should replace Johnny Carson on late-night television.

There exist more published interpretations of this performance than of any other concert. (I’ve written mine in a biography of Seeger, How Can I Keep from Singing?) Some accused Dylan of prostituting himself for commercial success; or “I come to hear Dylan, not a pop group,” or, ineloquently: “Play folk music: You stink.” Dylan closed by returning to the stage with an acoustic guitar in place of his shiny Fender and played the prophetic, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” He charged off the stage with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, passing Toshi, who at this juncture is allowed one of her disgracefully few comments in the film: “Bob!”

In private, Seeger was far more upset by Dylan rejecting traditional song than he was about the sound system massacring the lyrics: “Last week at Newport, I ran to cover my ears and eyes because I could not bear either the screaming of the crowd nor some of the most destructive music this side of hell,” he wrote in a letter to himself.In this never-published critique, he referred to Dylan’s new career as a cancer eating away at the musician he had introduced to the world. Later, he would return to this moment repeatedly, trying to understand what had gone wrong.

The last word about his disassociation with folk music—though in later albums he repeatedly recorded traditional songs—comes from Dylan himself at the close of his autobiography, Chronicles: “The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden. It was just too perfect.”

_{Featured image by Dave Gahr, used with permission.}

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Voices of change for Black History Month [reading list]

In honor of Black History Month, we celebrate the powerful voices that have shaped history and continue to inspire change in America and around the world. This reading list features eight books that amplify the diverse experiences and contributions of Black individuals. Eight unique stories of resistance, perseverance, empowerment, and transformation that deserve their place in the American narrative. From the riveting biographies of iconic musicians to a radical exploration of Black Twitter, and the final untold story of the civil rights movement, these books offer deep insights and celebrate the enduring legacy of Black excellence and resilience. Let these voices of change inspire you.

1. We Tried to Tell Y’All by Meredith D. Clark

Black Twitter carved out a vital space for commentary on Black life in America, shaping over a decade of discourse and giving voice to hundreds of thousands of Americans who felt shut out and misrepresented by the mainstream press. We Tried to Tell Y’All by Meredith D. Clark—a former journalist NPR calls “the go-to person about Black Twitter”—explains how Black social media users subverted the digital divide to confront centuries of erasure, omission, and mischaracterization of Black life in the media. 

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2. The Power of Black Excellence by Deondra Rose

From their founding, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) educated as many as 90% of Black college students in the United States. Although many are aware of the significance of HBCUs in expanding Black Americans’ educational opportunities, much less attention has been paid to the vital role that they have played in enhancing American democracy. Deondra Rose provides a powerful and revealing history of how HBCUs have been essential for empowering Black citizens in the ongoing fight for democracy in the United States. 

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3. Soon & Very Soon by Robert F. Darden and Stephen M. Newby

There are few voices in twentieth century gospel that are more recognizable or influential than Andraé Crouch. In the very first biography of the legendary artist, authors Robert Darden and Stephen Newby celebrate the countless ways that Crouch changed the course of gospel and popular music; not least among them was Crouch’s progressive pursuit to address the sociopolitical issues of his time, including AIDS, prejudice, abuse, housing insecurity, and addiction. The book is brought to life through interviews with his collaborators, friends, and family.

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4. Bloody Tuesday by John M. Giggie

The people of Tuscaloosa have been searching for decades for someone to tell their story. On Tuesday, 9 June 1964, police attacked more than 600 Black men, women, and children inside First African Baptist Church, where Reverend Martin Luther King had launched the Tuscaloosa campaign for integration three months earlier. As the group gathered to march, they faced over seventy law enforcement officers and hundreds more deputized white citizens and Klansmen eager to end their protests for good. Police smashed the historic church’s stained-glass windows with water hoses and fired rounds of tear gas inside. As demonstrators streamed from the church, many choking and soaked, the white mob beat them with nightsticks, cattle prods, and axe handles, arrested nearly a hundred, and sent over thirty to the hospital. Drawing on over 150 unpublished interviews, Bloody Tuesday tells one of the last great untold stories of the civil rights movement.

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5. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” by Tom Jenks

Tom Jenks’s reading of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” follows a scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, discussion of the pattern by which Baldwin indelibly writes “Sonny’s Blues” into the consciousness of readers. Drawing on Baldwin’s book-length essay The Fire Next Time, which Baldwin published six years after “Sonny’s Blues,” Jenks offers insight on some of the sources in Baldwin’s life and the logic and passion by which life may be meaningfully transformed into art.

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6. Stomp Off, Let’s Go by Ricky Riccardi

Grammy winning historian Ricky Riccardi looks at the early years of Louis Armstrong’s life to tell the story of the iconic trumpeter’s meteoric rise to fame. While this period of Armstrong’s life is perhaps more familiar than others, Riccardi enriches the existing narratives with recently unearthed archival materials, including a rare draft of pianist, composer, and Armstrong’s second wife Lillian “Lil” Hardin Armstrong’s autobiography.

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7. COMBEE by Edda L. Fields-Black

Edda Fields-Black is a direct descendent of one of the hundreds of formerly enslaved men who liberated themselves and joined the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers to fight in the Combahee River Raid along with Harriet Tubman, and in COMBEE she tells the story of her own ancestors. COMBEE is the first detailed account of one of the most dramatic episodes of the Civil War and the role Harriet Tubman played in it. The New Yorker and Bloomberg named the book one of their highly recommended books for 2024.

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8. Mutiny on the Black Prince by James H. Sweet

In 1768, the British slave ship Black Prince, departed the port of Bristol, bound for West Africa. It never arrived. Before reaching Old Calabar, the crew mutinied, murdering the captain and his officers. The mutineers renamed the ship Liberty, elected new officers, and set out for Brazil. By the time the ship arrived there, the crew had disintegrated into a violent mob and fired into the port city. After the Black Prince wrecked off the coast of Hispaniola, the rebels fled to outposts around the Atlantic world. An eight-year manhunt ensued. Mutiny on the Black Prince tells the dramatic story of the events onboard the ship as well as the way that British slavery shaped the industrializing Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century. 

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_{Featured image created in Canva; photograph by Ryandeberardinsisphotos.}

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The massacre at Fort Mystic and the Puritan “Wars of the Lord”

The first light of dawn flickered through the trees as soldiers rushed to take position around the fort. Twenty soldiers from Massachusetts commanded by Captain John Underhill prepared to storm the south gate. Another sixty from Connecticut under Captain John Mason would move against the northeast gate. Behind them, some three hundred Natives—Mohegans, Eastern Niantics, and Narragansetts—formed a perimeter surrounding the fort to prevent anyone from escaping.

It was Friday, 26 May 1637. Inside the fort, known as Mystic, in modern day eastern Connecticut, between four hundred and seven hundred Pequots lay sleeping. As the soldiers crept forward, a dog started barking. The soldiers opened fire. Although the Pequots had been taken by surprise, they offered bitter resistance. Soldiers cut their way into the fort, which they found crammed full of wigwams. Soon as many as twenty soldiers were killed or wounded.

Captain Mason made a snap decision: “We must burn them.” The wigwams were covered with mats made from “rushes and hempen threads” that lit easily. The soldiers withdrew, and the densely packed wigwams quickly became an inferno. Mason ordered his soldiers and their Indian allies to prevent anyone from escaping. While some Pequots fought on, others, including groups of women and children, tried to flee the fort. Soldiers cut them down with swords. “Down fell men, women, and children,” Captain Underhill recalled. “Not above five of them escaped out of our hands.” Only seven were taken prisoner. The rest were killed.

A relieved Mason later proclaimed that the victory belonged to God. “God was above them, who laughed his enemies and the enemies of his people to scorn, making them as a fiery oven,” he crowed. Thus did the LORD judge among the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies.” Like his soldiers, Mason viewed the massacre as vengeance on the Pequots for their brutal raid on the Connecticut town of Wethersfield, back in April, in which nine unsuspecting settlers had been killed. Puritan pastors had assured the soldiers that their cause was just and that God was with them: the heathen were servants of Satan who threatened not only their families and communities, but Christ’s nascent kingdom in the American wilderness.

This was not why the Puritans had come to America. When their leaders recruited potential colonists in England and lobbied the crown for permission to migrate, they had emphasized that their efforts would result in the salvation of the Natives. Indeed, the Massachusetts Bay colony charter, issued in 1629, declared that the “principal” purpose of the colony was to “win and incite the natives of [the] country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of mankind, and the Christian faith.” The colony seal depicted a humble Indian petitioning the English to “come over and help us,” which was exactly what most Puritans thought they were doing. They viewed their efforts as a sort of spiritual warfare in which they were saving Native souls from Satan’s tyranny.

Their efforts had begun peacefully enough. Alliances and trade relations had been established with many Native communities. But many Puritans had imagined that the Natives would embrace Christianity with open arms, and this did not happen. When Indians aligned with the Pequots killed an English trader, the English felt they had to retaliate with a raid against the Pequots. When the Pequots retaliated in kind, the English decided to destroy them. A spiritual war for Native souls devolved into a military campaign to obliterate a Native nation.

The massacre at Mystic was a low point in English-Native relations, and the Pequot War was relatively brief. The support of the Mohegans, Eastern Niantics, and Narragansetts for colonial forces is a reminder that more Indians supported the English during the Pequot War than opposed them. If anything, English military dominance enhanced the credibility of Christianity among Indians. A renegade Pequot named Wequash, who had guided colonial forces to Fort Mystic, was so stunned by English power that he became convinced their God was real, converted to Christianity, and began to evangelize other Natives. During the 1640s, numerous Native communities began to submit to the English and accept Christianity. Thanks to the efforts of missionaries like John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew, over the next three largely peaceful decades, thousands of Natives would accept Christianity. Some twenty “praying towns” were organized where Indians were guaranteed their land in exchange for submitting to Christian teaching and administering their own Christian governments.

Nevertheless, the massacre at Mystic was a constant reminder of what the English could do if America’s First People resisted them. The Puritans wanted to conquer the Indians for Christianity through love and justice, but they were willing to conquer them by force if provoked, and they were fully convinced that this too was in accord with God’s will. Conscientious Christians would protest cases of injustice, but there was never a doubt whose side they would take if war broke out.

It all came to a head in King Philip’s War, perhaps the bloodiest war per capita in American history, fought in 1675-1676. Once again, the English and their Indian allies–some Christian, others not–squared off with their Indian enemies. This time the conflict would rage across New England and beyond. Puritan ministers reminded their people that they deserved God’s wrath, but they also insisted that God would not abandon them if they repented and faithfully defended Christ’s kingdom. Their Christian Indian allies did not disagree. Some Indians believed their own welfare required supporting the English. Others were convinced that the English had to be defeated. Religion, culture, trade, government, even simple survival–everything was at stake. All came down to the catastrophe of a war that would decide the fate of New England.

_{Featured image Engraver unknown. Author of folio was John Underhill (1597-1672). Photo-Facsimile by Edward Bierstadt (1824–1906), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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“My fellow Americans” [timeline]

Every four years, the incoming president of the United States delivers an inaugural address in a tradition that dates back to 1789, with the first inauguration of George Washington. The address reiterates to Americans—and peoples around the world—what the country has been and what it has the potential to become. In a speech freighted with importance, the presidents express their fears, their hopes, and their most personal aspirations for the nation and for democracy.

As we enter a new presidential term, explore the timeline below to revisit some past inaugural addresses that capture snapshots of America at unique points in time:

_{Featured image by acaben via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.}

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The father of the party system

Martin Van Buren became president on March 4, 1837, at a time of great optimism. After an acrimonious eight years in the White House, Andrew Jackson was leaving office on a high note. The economy was strong and vibrant. The nation had avoided a civil war. Washington politicians were confident that “the abolitionist scourge” was in retreat. When Van Buren delivered his inaugural address before 20,000 people—nearly all of them there to pay tribute to Jackson, not to welcome Van Buren—he pledged to rule with a light touch. The nation, Van Buren said, had reached a stage where its citizens could govern themselves. They did not need Washington. He called upon the American people “to make our beloved land for a thousand generations that chosen spot where happiness springs from a perfect equality of political rights.” He used the words “happy” or “happiness” seven times in his speech.

He went on to serve for four unhappy years as president.

Weeks into his administration, the economy collapsed. Banks had run out of specie and could not redeem paper money, leaving many Americans broke. The Army brutally carried out the expulsion of the Cherokees and Seminoles from their homelands. Indian removal was not only a humanitarian disaster but a political debacle for Van Buren, whose support among northerners suffered as a result. Further weakening northern support were his frequent capitulations to the slave power. He sided with Spanish kidnappers in the Amistad case and backed efforts to suppress abolitionist literature in the mails and in Congress.

Van Buren had some successes as president. He showed courage and foresight in subduing skirmishes along the northern border that could have led to war with Great Britain. He wisely resisted those within his party calling to annex Texas. And he passed a treasury plan that moved the government away from using unstable state banks to manage the nation’s resources. Yet these victories were not enough to keep him in the White House. In 1840, Americans, for the first time, voted with their pocketbooks. He lost in a landslide to William Henry Harrison, a veteran from the War of 1812 nearing seventy years of age, in one of the most frenzied elections in US history (“Tippecanoe and Tyler too!”). Eighty percent of those eligible voted, still the highest percentage of voter turnout in the nation’s history.

Van Buren was the first of several undistinguished one-term presidents who failed to halt America’s descent into civil war. Pierce, Buchanan, Tyler, Fillmore—their names usually land at the bottom of presidential rankings. Among the antebellum chief executives, only Polk, who led the nation during the Mexican War, has won praise from some historians, although that is changing too. Few today see the Mexican War as an honorable affair.

Ranking presidents, it must be said, is a mug’s game. The practice reduces the presidency to simplistic and outdated notions of “leadership” and “character.” As a result, key moments in history are downplayed, if not ignored altogether. Van Buren served during a transitional period in US politics, when a more militant and defensive South emerged to dominate politics for a quarter century. Devoid of Jackson’s charisma and popularity, Van Buren was flummoxed by this turn of events, and his bumbling balancing act satisfied few. His presidency, therefore, reminds us of the perils of surrendering principles to a party’s worst elements.

Because Van Buren was an unsuccessful president, his more significant contributions to the nation’s political life have also been obscured. His greatest legacy remains his role in building the nation’s party system (however destructive and dubious partisanship may seem today). Rejecting the Founders’ call for public officials to be “disinterested” (a favorite word of theirs), Van Buren saw parties as a positive good, a mechanism for resolving sectional disputes, keeping citizens engaged, and holding politicians accountable. Most important, a vibrant party system checked the forces of wealth and privilege seeking to manipulate government for private gain. In his unshakable view, strong parties led to sound government—and upheld the all-important principle of majority rule. His advocacy of a permanent party system led to the founding of the Democratic Party, the one still in existence today, albeit in a dramatically different form.

As Van Buren learned during his presidency and its aftermath, however, parties can serve sinister forces as well. In his time the Democratic Party became a vehicle for the expansion of slavery, the deracination of Native peoples, and imperial conquest of the West, better known as Manifest Destiny. Van Buren did not have the mettle to stand up to these forces when he was president. He found his voice in 1848, when he ran for president with the antislavery Free Soil Party, but the slaveocracy could not be stopped. Bitter and unhappy, he died in 1862, with the future of his nation very much in doubt.

The US has endured, though, and so has his party. Meanwhile, Americans are still quarreling over executive power, states’ rights, immigration, war, and economic inequality—issues dominating Van Buren’s time in politics as well. The history of our current discord is long and deep.

_{Featured image: Colorized portrait of Martin Van Buren from a Matthew Brady photograph. Daniel Hass, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0}

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The creation of the US presidency

At no time in our history has there been so illustrious a gathering as the corps of delegates who came together in the State House (Independence Hall) on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia late in the spring of 1787 to frame a constitution for the United States of America. Yet, distinguished though they were, they had only the foggiest notion of how an executive branch should be constructed. Not one of them anticipated the institution of the presidency as it emerged at the end of the summer.

One frightful goblin haunted their deliberations. The study of history—ancient to modern—instructed them that republics were always short-lived, and they feared that America might quickly adopt kingship. From Paris, commenting on his experience of three years abroad, Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Washington: “There is scarcely an evil known in these countries which may not be traced to their king as its source.” Decades of struggle against royal governors had taught Americans that the executive was their enemy, that legislative assemblies spoke for the people.

Despite the fulminations of the Framers of the Constitution against George III, the idea of a strong executive struck a responsive chord. The theorists they read—Blackstone, Locke, Montesquieu—all accepted executive authority. John Locke had written, “The good of the society requires that several things should be left to the discretion of him that has the executive power.” Monarchy was the form of government with which Americans were most familiar and hence an inescapable template. Every one of the delegates had been born under the British Crown.

The scaffolding of a presidential office first presented to the delegates for their consideration by James Madison fell far short of majestic. The president was to be chosen not by popular election but by the National Legislature, and for only a single term. Foreign policy and the appointment of officials such as a national treasurer would also be entrusted to the legislature.

Though Madison was on his way toward recognition as father of the Constitution, Scottish-born James Wilson was staking a claim to be regarded as father of the presidency. Wilson, speaking with a marked Scottish burr, rose to move that a national executive of a single person be established, for a single magistrate could be held accountable to the people. Steel-rimmed spectacles low on the bridge of his nose, Wilson urged broad authority for an executive who would be a tribune of the people and would give “energy, dispatch, and responsibility to the office.” This motion brought the delegates up short, for numbers of them saw in a single executive “the foetus of monarchy,” but they accepted Wilson’s recommendation. Wilson had considerably less success in urging popular election of the executive. The assembly rejected Wilson’s motion resoundingly and approved instead choice of the executive by the national legislature (not yet called “Congress”) for a single term of seven years. In the course of the convention, the delegates were to go through sixty ballots before resolving how to choose a president. No sooner did they come to a conclusion than they voted to undo it.

In the first week of September, the Framers revised many of their previous decisions, especially in order to adjust the imbalance between the chief executive and Congress. They authorized the president to appoint major officials, including ambassadors and Supreme Court justices, and they turned over to him the right to make treaties, though with the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate. By agreeing to a proposal that the president “shall, by Virtue of his Office, be Commander in Chief of the Land Forces of U.S. and Admiral of their Navy,” they gave him immense power to determine strategy in wartime and other national emergencies.

The convention made a critical move in taking choice of the president from Congress and vesting it in an “electoral college.” It refined a proposal that James Wilson had aired earlier by requiring that electors meet in their respective states. Thus “college” was a misnomer from the outset; it was never intended to be a deliberative body that debated the merits of candidates. The convention fixed a president’s term at four years, but, altering its previous arrangement, agreed that a president would be perpetually eligible for re-election.

Once these large matters had been disposed of, the delegates made a quick meal of the remaining details. The president was required to be “a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution,” at least thirty-five years of age, and a resident of the United States for fourteen years. He could be removed by impeachment for, and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

The delegates assigned the task of polishing the draft of the Constitution to a committee of style chaired by the redoubtable Gouverneur Morris. After a spat with the governor of New York, Gouverneur Morris had removed to Philadelphia. Despite a peg leg, “The Tall Boy,” stomping about on his wooden limb while brandishing a cane, cut an impressive figure. Commentators reported that he had numerous sexual conquests. (It was rumored falsely that he had lost his leg by leaping from a balcony to elude an irate husband. “I am almost tempted to wish,” commented John Jay, that the rake “had lost something else.”) No one doubted that he was bright. He had enrolled at King’s College (which would become Columbia University) at twelve and was graduated at sixteen. As the most important member of the Committee on Style and Arrangement, Morris did more than tidy up straggling sentences. He imparted his own ideas of proper government. In particular, Morris’s committee crafted the portentous opening sentence of Article II.

Article II begins, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The sentence seems innocuous, merely descriptive. But it contrasts starkly with a companion sentence in Article I: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” Is the absence of the restriction “herein granted” in Article II merely chance phrasing, or is it evidence of Gouverneur Morris’s cunning? No matter—for presidents have seized upon this phrasing to claim powers not enumerated in the Constitution. They have issued proclamations, acted in emergencies without seeking Congressional approval, and entered into executive agreements with foreign nations. Article II further provides that “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” another innocent-sounding clause pregnant with potential for amplifying the presidential realm.

When the document drafted by the Framers was submitted to the states for ratification, relatively few of the ensuing objections voiced were directed at provisions for the presidency—in large measure because of the universal assumption that the first incumbent would be George Washington. If hesitant delegates brooded about granting authority that might be abused, all they needed to do was look at the reticent figure who took his seat in the high-backed chair on the dais each morning at the convention and quietly presided, almost never intruding into the debates. The prospect that Washington would be the country’s first chief executive may well account for why, though sometimes by very narrow margins, the states ratified the Constitution, a consummation formally announced on July 2, 1788.

_{Featured image by Junius Brutus Stearns, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.}

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