The Past, the Promise, the Presidency

On October 30th, 2024, CPH Director Dr. Jeffrey Engel presented a lecture as part of the SMU Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute Godbey Lecture Series, described below. A few weeks later, we sat down with Dr. Engel for a Q&A about his talk -- that conversation follows a recording of the lecture itself.Fifty Years Since Watergate: Presidential Power in the Age of Rampant Immunity and Feckless ImpeachmentsIt has been fifty years since Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. Congressional power rode high in Watergate's wake, followed by a rejuvenated judiciary and invigorated national press corps. Reports of the imperial presidency's death proved premature. The past three presidential impeachments, the first since the 1860s, resulted in zero convictions. Zero was also the conviction left among the American people that anything more than partisan politics explains those verdicts, which recent Supreme Court rulings on presidential immunity appear to vindicate. This evening will trace that history since 1974, and outline the likely future of our nation's highest office.

Lindsay Chervinsky and Matthew Costello, presidential historians and co-editors of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture, explore the deaths and legacies of presidents. They discuss the constancy of mourning, the role of the president beyond the Oval Office, and how their deaths reveal divisions in American society. They also explore the evolution of presidential mourning, the impact of past presidents on race, and the importance of reading, history, and memory in a time of political polarization.

Political analyst and global security expert, William Inboden, discusses Ronald Reagan's presidency and the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War. They explore Reagan's enduring legacy, his ability to challenge existing thought on the Cold War, and his significant accomplishments despite his flaws and missteps.

Many Americans, if they know about Reconstruction at all, likely think of it as a failed venture. What had begun in 1865 as an opportunity to guarantee equal citizenship and rights for African Americans, fizzled out as citizens and elected officials became apathetic, or even hostile to the struggle for equality. Our guests today survey the four presidencies that touched Reconstruction—Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, and Haynes—and offer a broad-sweeping, and perhaps disappointing framing of the era. The picture they paint is one in which the ultimate fate of Reconstruction was not only understandable given the context, but regrettably predictable. This episode, we featured Dr. Joan Waugh of UCLA and Dr. Gary Gallagher of UVA, two acclaimed historians with unique insights into the nuances of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Joan Waugh is a historian of nineteenth-century America, specializing in the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age eras. Dr. Waugh is a frequent contributor to op-eds in publications like the Los Angeles Times and has been interviewed for many documentaries, such as the PBS series, “American Experience.” She has been honored with four teaching prizes, including UCLA’s most prestigious teaching honor, the Distinguished Teaching Award. Currently, Dr. Waugh teaches history at UCLA, where she serves as Professor Emeritus.She is the author of Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell, The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture, U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth, and The American War: A History of the Civil War Era. Visit her page on the University of California Los Angeles website.Gary Gallagher is a historian and specialist on the 19th-Century U.S. who has published widely on the history and memory of the Civil War. Dr. Gallagher has served as President of Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites and currently teaches history as a Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. Along with his teaching, he has edited many books and won countless awards, which are listed on his biography page linked below. He is the author of The Confederate War, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War, The American War : A History of the Civil War Era, and Reflections on the Great American Crisis.Visit his page on the University of Virginia’s website.

Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang are some of the most recognizable characters in American pop culture. From Snoopy’s doghouse to Linus’s blanket to Lucy’s perpetual football prank, the scenes from this iconic comic strip are imprinted in the memories of many Americans even today, more than 70 years after the strip’s debut. However, behind the lemonade stand, amateur psychiatric help, and baseball shenanigans, Charles Schultz placed underlying social commentary on the state of American politics and society. While many people praised Peanuts for its supposedly apolitical nature, Schulz used Peanuts to guide American households through critical issues, including the Cold War, integration, church-state relations, and more. Our conversation partner this week Dr. Blake Ball, author of Charlie Brown's America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts.  Blake Ball is a historian of American politics, society, and popular culture in the 20th century. After receiving his doctorate in history from the University of Alabama, he taught at Miles College, the University of North Alabama, and the University of Alabama. Currently, Dr. Ball teaches history at Huntingdon College, where he also chairs the History and Political Science departments.Follow him on Twitter @bsb1945.  

Oil runs the world. From our cars to our houses, most of us can’t live without it. From the 1940s to the 1960s, though, oil played another specific role as a central part of conflict and diplomacy during the Cold War. It was during this era that Iran developed into the world’s first “petro-state”: a nation whose state revenue, industrializing economy, military, and growing middle class all depended on the growth of the oil industry. This all occurred alongside major Cold War developments, including the regime of the Iranian shah, the coup d’etat of 1953, and more. Centering our analyses of these Cold War moments around the role of petroleum casts the histories of the Iranian and US governments in an entirely new light.   Joining our conversation this week is Dr. Gregory Brew, a leading expert on the relationship between Iran, the US, and oil during the Cold War.Gregory Brew is a historian and author specializing in U.S. foreign relations, oil, Iran, and the modern Middle East. He has authored two books on the Iranian “petro-state” and contributed to numerous peer reviewed publications. His work explores the connections between the formation of a global oil economy, the geopolitics of the Cold War, and the contemporary energy transition. After receiving his doctorate from Georgetown University in June 2018, he served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Jackson School for Global Affairs at Yale University from 2021-2023. Currently, Dr. Brew is an Analyst at Eurasia Group, covering energy and Iran.He is the author of The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954 and Petroleum and Progress in Iran: Oil, Development, and the Cold War.Follow him on Twitter @gbrew24 and visit his website gregorybrew.com.  

Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, stands out as a major affront to the promise of American liberty. In 1942, this executive order forced approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans out of their homes on the western coast, and incarcerated them in makeshift prisons all around the nation. Our guest today explains today that this was not only a case of civil rights being stripped from Americans, but labor rights as well. In these glorified concentration and work camps, agents of the U.S. government coerced Japanese Americans into doing hard and dangerous labor, for little-to-no compensation, sometimes even for the benefit of private, for-profit companies. This coerced labor was justified by the rhetoric of the U.S. government, even as the imprisoned resisted and persevered.  Leading this week’s conversation on coerced labor during WW2 is Dr. Stephanie Hinnershitz, award winning author and historian of Japanese American incarceration, civil-military relations, and race on the American wartime homefront. Stephanie Hinnershitz is a historian and author specializing in the American home front during World War II. She has written 3 books and became a Senior Historian with the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans in 2021.  Stephanie Hinnershitz is an author and historian with the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans. She has previously taught at Valdosta State University and Cleveland State University. In addition to her professorships, her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, the Office of Diversity at the United States Military Academy at West Point, the Library of Congress, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is the author of Race, Religion, and Civil Rights: Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900-1968, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South, and Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor during World War II, which won the 2022 Philip Taft Labor History Award from the Labor and Working Class History Association and Cornell University Industrial Labor Relations School.Follow her on Twitter @sdhinnershitz and visit her website stephaniehinnershitz.com. 

When we think about the history of westward expansion and the growth of state power in the United States, the postal system probably isn’t the first institution that comes to mind. But this week, that’s exactly what we’ll be exploring: the unsung power and reach of the U.S. Postal Service in the late-19th century America.It took Anglo-Americans nearly two hundred years to occupy the eastern half of what became the United States, but just one generation in the late-19th century to occupy the rest of the continent. This exponential increase in settlement speed and occupation can be attributed in large part to the sprawling geography and localized operations of the American postal system. During this era of settlement, Americans relied on letters and newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, petitions and money orders to stay connected to the world, and the post office enabled them all. It did this at such a high volume that by 1899, there were five times as many post offices in the U.S. as there are McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. in 2023. This week’s conversation on the role of the postal system in developing the American West features Dr. Cameron Blevins of the University of Colorado Denver, author of Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West.

A conversation with Dr. Peniel Joseph (University of Texas at Austin) about his new book, The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century.

We welcome Dr. Spencer McBride for a conversation about his book Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom (Oxford UP, 2021). Dr. McBride tells us about Joseph Smith's story from his days as the founder & leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, to his presidential campaign in 1844. Along the way, he explains what Smith's quixotic campaign reveals about the limits of freedom in 1844, and about our political parties today.