Senator Grassley’s claim about the New Deal is stark and definitive. Quite simply, in his mind, it did not work. The historians who responded to our request for input disagreed strongly.
Senator Chuck Schumer says corporations used to care; here’s how historians responded
Historians say… Bottom Line: Most historians who responded agree that Senator Schumer is on solid ground, but their caveats and the statements of the historians […]
“We were involved in some coups”: How to avoid an inconvenient reckoning and more on the Cold War
The project is still getting caught up while simultaneously working on visualizations for the data; these will be posted soon and updated regularly. For now, […]
Catching up: A grab-bag of political uses of the past from the shutdown Senate
The Political Uses of the Past Project is sorting through the avalanche of statements that the new Congress has brought. This post includes two dozen […]
#WWLD? Evoking Lincoln for Some Shutdown Shaming
Based on some lines from the Gettysburg Address, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) has concluded that there is no way “President Lincoln, the founder of the […]
Sen. Marco Rubio: “Democracies very rarely start wars”
We look at the history of our hemisphere, here in the Western Hemisphere, and we see that up until about 25 years ago, most of […]
Sen. Mike Lee: We’ve lost sight of founder’s vision of federalism
Senator Lee made the comments below while discussing his new book, Written out of History. Historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg reviewed Lee’s book here. […]
Sen. Ben Sasse: Kids today are more “insulated from work” than any time in history
How do we raise our kids better in an era of perpetual adolescence? Because that’s the new thing, right? Adolescence is a gift, the idea […]
Sen. Patrick Leahy: Cold War Cuba restrictions treated people “as pawns in a political game”
How well did restricting travel by Americans to Cuba work from 1961 until 2014, when President Obama relaxed those Cold War restrictions, decades after the […]
Sen. Patrick Leahy: Shelby County v. Holder “has taken this country back to an era before the Civil Rights movement”
But the Supreme Court’s decision [Shelby County v. Holder] has taken this country back to an era before the Civil Rights movement–a bad time in […]