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Justin Clark

Public Historian & Digital Humanist
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Short Book Reviews: Presidential History

February 17, 2025

The following seven short book reviews cover a wide-range of topics related to the American presidency. Two works on Lincoln, from renowned historian David Herbert Donald and travel author Jan Morris, explore the multifaceted life and times of America’s greatest president. Doris Kearns Goodwin, an aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson and acclaimed presidential historian, gives us a penetrating portrait into LBJ and an insightful meditation on presidential leadership. Michael Dobbs’ day-by-day breakdown of the Watergate scandal and the downfall of President Richard Nixon is a gripping account of a presidency in crisis. The short presidency of Warren G. Harding has been much maligned by historians, but Ryan Walters’ revisionist history of the “Jazz Age President” will make you take a second look at Harding and his accomplishments. Finally, in master historian H.W. Brands’ book on FDR and Charles Lindbergh, we see the debate between internationalism and isolationism, a debate of growing importance in our era.

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In Book Reviews Tags History, American History, Presidential History, American President, Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Warren Harding, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR, LBJ, Theodore Roosevelt
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From left to right: Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Images from the Boston Globe, Smithsonian Institution, Reuters, and Unsplash.

Short Book Reviews: Rick Perlstein’s History of the American Right

June 17, 2024

Perlstein weaves together varying strands of historical knowledge, such as economics, foreign policy, cultural trends, and even religious transformations. And as a man of the liberal left, Perlstein pulls no punches with the political order that emerged in the era of his study. Goldwater was a political neophyte; Nixon a calculating bully; and finally Reagan, whose outsized presence in history stands as the culmination of the corporate class’s victory over social democracy in America.

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In Book Reviews Tags History, American History, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Rick Perlstein, Book Reviews
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