Historians are fond of saying that the past doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes.
To understand the present, we have to understand how we got here.
That’s where this newsletter comes in.
I’m a professor of American history. This is a chronicle of today’s political landscape, but because you can’t get a grip on today’s politics without an outline of America’s Constitution, and laws, and the economy, and social customs, this newsletter explores what it means, and what it has meant, to be an American.
These were the same questions a famous observer asked in a book of letters he published in 1782, the year before the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War.
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur called his book “Letters from an American Farmer.”
Like I say, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure rhymes.
Latest Posts
- Yesterday U.S.
- As the nation gears up for the 2026 midterm elections, we are drawing a line beneath the first phase of the 250 to 250 project.
- Seven years ago, on September 15, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started:
- Retired judge J.
- This morning, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica broke the news that Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the wedding of Donald Trump Jr.
- On Saturday, September 12, Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay calling for AI companies to slow down their improvement of AI models.
- On Thursday, in The New Republic, conservative judge J.
- Last night was the second night of the Republican midterm convention Trump staged to fire up his base.