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I am delighted to announce that my latest book has just been published by Oxford University Press. You can buy a copy here. Here are the opening pages: As soon as the guns had fallen silent on July 3, 1863, Gettysburg became a place of the imagination. The three-day battle fought across the gentle ridges
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This piece appeared in The Sunday Times on 14 December 2024 This is not the way it was supposed to end. Joe Biden has faced more than his fair share of setbacks. “When you get knocked down, get up!” his father, Joseph Biden Sr, would say. And Biden will get up this time, too, after
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This piece appeared in The Sunday Times 4 August 2024 Kamala Harris is expected to name a Democratic running-mate in the coming days. Does it matter who presidential candidates pick? Or are the “veepstakes”, the parlour game beloved of Washington politicos, no more than an entertaining sideshow? Campaigns like to think that a running-mate from
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A version of the following piece appeared in The Sunday Times on December 31, 2023 Presidential election years have often struck Americans as deeply portentous. To Walt Whitman, the self-described “poet of democracy”, 1860 was “the year of meteors” in which “the comet that came unannounced out of the North flaring in heaven” augured a
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A version of the following piece appeared in The Sunday Times, December 23, 2023. It is one minute to midnight for American liberals. For them, the stakes in the 2024 presidential election are no less than the survival of democracy. The Colorado Supreme Court’s bold decision that Donald Trump is ineligible for the presidency because
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This article appeared in The Sunday Times July 3, 2023 The US Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday that race-based affirmative action in university admissions is unconstitutional marks the end of an era. For half a century, the court has upheld the right of educational institutions — and by implication also employers — to factor race
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This article appeared in The Sunday Times August 26, 2023 Freedom was in the air at the Republican presidential candidates’ debate last week. The former vice-president Mike Pence said that “America needs to stand for freedom”; the governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, said that “we need to get back to freedom”; and the businessman
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A version of this piece appeared in The Sunday Times on 2 April, 2023 There is nothing especially unusual about an elected politician being a criminal, even – or perhaps, especially — in the United States. So far in the twenty-first century, more than twenty members of Congress have been convicted by the courts, including
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A version of this article was published in The Sunday Times on 29 April, 2023 Even bearing in mind the tendency of people on the left to political doom-mongering, it is striking how many Democrats are uneasy about the wisdom of Biden’s decision to seek a second term. Polls show that more than half do
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A version of this piece appeared in The Sunday Times on July 2, 2022 None of us have seen the United States as divided and distressed as it is now. In 1968, Richard Nixon spoke darkly about cities in flames, but there were far fewer violent deaths on American streets than today. In 1974, Gerald
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This is my inaugural lecture as the Edward Orsborn Professor of US Politics and Political History, delivered in the Exam Schools in Oxford on April 25, 2022. The American Civil War as a Conservative Revolution Vice Chancellor, Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you all so much for taking the trouble to be here this afternoon. As
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This is a piece I wrote for BBC History Magazine on January 15, 2021 Before Trump, no US President has incited a mob in the hope of disrupting the legislature from ratifying his election loss. Yet when a chorus of commentators repeated “this is not who we are” as they watched footage of Trump supporters
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I wrote the following piece for the January 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine. On the fourth of March, 1801, in the city of Washington — then just a half-built, muddy encampment on the banks of the Potomac – a living Head of State peacefully gave up power and a new one took over. The
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This is a review I wrote for the Journal of the Early Republic of “There is a North”: Fugitive Slaves, Political Crisis, and Cultural Transformation in the Coming of the Civil War. By John L. Brooke The premise of this important book is that to understand the coming of the civil war we need to
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This is a piece I wrote for The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association which was published in their Summer 2020 issue. They slightly edited it. This is the full version. Review of Greg Weiner, Old Whigs: Burke, Lincoln & the Politics of Prudence Greg Weiner thinks that Lincoln was a Burkean. There are good
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This is a lightly edited text of a talk I gave at St. Anne’s College Oxford on 21 September 2019 We live in an age of anxiety – which may well be the default setting for all human societies, but which feels to many of us to be something new. The reasons for the anxiety
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This is a piece I wrote on January 22, 2019, for BBC History Magazine about the history of US Federal government ‘shutdowns’. The context was the longest shutdown (to that point) in history that had resulted from President Trump’s demand that Congress give him Like so much else, it’s all the fault of the Founding
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This is a review I published in History Today of Jill Lepore’s fabulous book, These Truths One of the ways in which the current President of the United States differs from all his predecessors, from Washington to Obama, is that unlike them he doesn’t speak of the special mission of his country. When he talks
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This is the text of a piece I’ve just written for BBC History Extra A few questioned its necessity, but for most of the delegates to the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787 giving Congress the right to impeach the President was an obvious move. It was not to be used lightly. It was an
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Civil War historians are more rancorous now than for a generation. The reason for this, I think, is that historians who see the war as the inexorable consequence of divisions over slavery are alarmed at the apparent revival of “revisionism” and they want to stamp it out. “Revisionism”, in this context, is a historiographical term
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Adam Smith: Historian 