Barack Obama Archives - Public Seminar

North America

Judging Presidents

The hidden logic of C-SPAN’s expert survey

June 18, 2026 • by Larry Schwartz

C-SPAN’s Presidential Historians Survey has become one of the most widely cited efforts to evaluate presidential performance—shaping how figures such as Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush are understood alongside their predecessors. Its rankings circulate in classrooms, media coverage, and public debate, offering what appears to be a ...

Economy

Trump vs. the Fed

Or how history is forcing the question of a democratic politics of central banking

August 27, 2025 • by Adam Tooze

Donald Trump’s move to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook “for cause,” escalates his long-running battle with America’s central bank. The news has triggered outrage. In the pages of the FT, David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center for Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, warned: “President Trump seems determined to ...

Democracy

Leaving Honduras

The legacy of US military and economic interference that continues to drive migration

October 31, 2024 • by Jeremy Robson and Leah Zamore

As US border policy grows ever more restrictive, the Biden-Harris administration’s “Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America” strategy is commendable for aiming to tackle the inhumane conditions in Central America that are causing so many people in the region to uproot in the first place. The strategy ...

Middle East & North Africa

Wars of De-Civilization

Anti-democratic regimes and the politics of annihilation

February 5, 2024 • by Hamit Bozarslan

Syria, Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh and now Gaza: connecting all recent wars is disregard for national sovereignty as recognised by international law....

Habitats

Market Failures

How do we protect consumers from their own mistakes?

November 27, 2023 • by Cass R. Sunstein

Most motor vehicles emit pollution, including greenhouse gases, and use gasoline that increases national dependence on foreign oil. On standard economic grounds, the result is a market failure in the form of excessive pollution, for which some kind of cap-and-trade system or corrective tax is the best response, designed to ...

Migration

The Violence of American Border Policies Continues

Both political parties say they care about families—so why would the Biden administration return to a family separation regime?

April 19, 2023 • by Rachel Ida Buff

And yet, in the absence of new legislation that makes it easier to cross the border legally for work, the Biden administration has defaulted to a hard line on immigration that continues to separate families and promote border security. ...

The Violence of American Border Policies Continues

Europe & Central Asia

Robert Jay Lifton on Psychic Numbing and the Warning from Ukraine

The renewed threat of nuclear war—and the importance of distinguishing between fear and anxiety

October 25, 2022 • by James Carroll and Robert Jay Lifton

Nuclear complacency is multifaceted. A certain amount of nuclear fear is appropriate to our situation. When we give in to what you’re calling nuclear complacency, it’s because we have insufficient fear of what is actually dangerous....

Robert Jay Lifton on Psychic Numbing and the Warning from Ukraine

Europe & Central Asia

Part 3: Nuclear Dread Redux

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

September 19, 2022 • by James Carroll

Putin’s aggression was destroying cities, but it was also destroying what was left of the nascent impulse to move away from the absurdly named “Balance of Terror.”...

Education

Leading While Black

An introduction to the special issue, “Teaching While Black”

April 28, 2022 • by Dwight A. McBride

Indeed, the sad truth is that many of the slights, insults, and aggressions experienced by the dedicated teachers collected here (I don’t think of the casual ugliness which many of us navigate as “micro-aggressions”) are duplicated within higher education’s administrative spaces....

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

Authority as Freedom: Aretha Franklin at the Kennedy Center, 2015

A young woman’s love song finds its Platonic form

March 1, 2022 • by Ingrid Rowland

When the curtains opened in the Kennedy Center forty-eight years later to reveal Aretha Franklin in a floor-length mink with a glittering clutch purse in her hand, they didn’t herald a performance: they announced an epiphany....

Authority as Freedom: Aretha Franklin at the Kennedy Center, 2015

Activism

We Are a Reckoning

Deva Woodly introduces her new book, Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements

January 17, 2022 • by Deva Woodly

This nation is mine. Mine to claim. Mine to hold to account. Mine to participate in reshaping. So I tell an American story because it is my story to tell....

Democracy

Navigating the World of Grand Strategy with Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston

The two historians talk to Public Seminar about Rethinking American Grand Strategy

December 8, 2021 • by Gregory Coleman, Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston

Award-winning historians Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston spoke (virtually) with Public Seminar editorial intern Gregory Coleman to discuss their new book Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2021). Edited by Nichols and Preston with fellow historian Elizabeth Borgwardt, the collection of curated essays discusses what American grand strategy ...

Barack Obama

Judging Presidents

The hidden logic of C-SPAN’s expert survey

Trump vs. the Fed

Or how history is forcing the question of a democratic politics of central banking

Leaving Honduras

The legacy of US military and economic interference that continues to drive migration

Wars of De-Civilization

Anti-democratic regimes and the politics of annihilation

Market Failures

How do we protect consumers from their own mistakes?

The Violence of American Border Policies Continues

Both political parties say they care about families—so why would the Biden administration return to a family separation regime?

Robert Jay Lifton on Psychic Numbing and the Warning from Ukraine

The renewed threat of nuclear war—and the importance of distinguishing between fear and anxiety

Part 3: Nuclear Dread Redux

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

Leading While Black

An introduction to the special issue, “Teaching While Black”

Authority as Freedom: Aretha Franklin at the Kennedy Center, 2015

A young woman’s love song finds its Platonic form

Navigating the World of Grand Strategy with Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston

The two historians talk to Public Seminar about Rethinking American Grand Strategy

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