This Thursday is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's birthday, so we’re sharing a program that explores how FDR and other presidents have dealt with America’s biggest constitutional crises. Historians and presidential biographers Annette Gordon-Reed, Sidney Blumenthal, and Sean Wilentz joined NCC President Jeffrey Rosen for this program held at Congress Hall, the first meeting place of the U.S. Congress, in Philadelphia in 2017.
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Sidney Blumenthal is the author of A Self-Made Man and Wrestling with His Angel, the first two volumes in his five-volume biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton. He has been a national staff reporter for The Washington Post and Washington editor and writer for The New Yorker. His books include the bestselling The Clinton Wars, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, and The Permanent Campaign. Born and raised in Illinois, he lives in Washington, DC.
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and a Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and formerly the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2010-2016) and the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Queen's College, University of Oxford (2014-2015). She won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. She is also the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy; Andrew Johnson; and “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.
Sean Wilentz is George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University. He is the author of No Property in Man: Slavery and Anti-Slavery at the Nation’s Founding and The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He’s also the author of The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008. A contributing editor to The New Republic, Professor Wilentz is also a member of the editorial boards of Dissent and Democracy.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
This episode was engineered by Dave Stotz and produced by Jackie McDermott and Tanaya Tauber.
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