Richard Nixon Archives - Public Seminar

History

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

The success of an immigration or refugee resettlement can never be fully evaluated in the first decades

September 16, 2025 • by Catherine Simpson Bueker

Catherine Simpson Bueker explores the legacy of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act and how Vietnamese refugees in America reshaped US society....

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

Colonization

Beyond Colonialism in a Sentimental Mood

Éric Vuillard’s new book punctures the curious French nostalgia for Indochina

December 4, 2023 • by Albert Nguyen

Empires tend to create a rosy picture of the past, conveniently ignoring the atrocities they inflicted. Vuillard avoids this trap, in a witty manner. ...

Beyond Colonialism in a Sentimental Mood

Podcast

Why Now? With Claire Potter, Episode 8

January 4, 2023 • by Claire Potter

A conversation with historian Robin Morris, author of "From Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right" about how women activists transformed the GOP ...

History

In 1973, Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer’s determination to broadcast a Congressional investigation mattered to our democracy, and revolutionized television news

June 10, 2022 • by Claire Potter

In other words, alternative television showed government as it was, mainlining the excitement of democracy to a dedicated and growing group of political junkies. At the same time, seeing the investigation play out live provided reassurance that Watergate was a constitutional crisis but not, as Nixon characterized it, a plot ...

Activism

Remembering and Resisting the Age of Reagan

An activist historian advises his students that the choices they make now will shape their future

September 24, 2020 • by James Goodman

______ It was November 1980, two months after my girlfriend and I moved to New York City from Boston, where we had met a year before. I had just started in the M.F.A. program at Columbia and she had just started a job at a small press, managing the production of ...

Remembering and Resisting the Age of Reagan

Politics

What Roger Stone’s Commuted Sentence Tells Us About Trump’s Commitment to Conspiracy

The president is covering up the cover-up of a crime

July 14, 2020 • by John Stoehr

It’s hard to know where to begin discussing the president’s commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence. So let’s start with what it means. It’s not a pardon. Donald Trump’s goombah is still a felon convicted of witness tampering and lying to the U.S. Congress. He plans to appeal the guilty verdict. “Commutation” ...

What Roger Stone’s Commuted Sentence Tells Us About Trump’s Commitment to Conspiracy

Activism

Enough Is Enough

The power of violence and the power of non-violence

June 4, 2020 • by Jeremy Varon

Now everywhere quoted, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 declaration that “a riot is the language of the unheard” serves as a thoughtful shorthand for understanding the jagged edge of today’s unrest. But even in Dr. King’s time, it was not particularly radical wisdom. In 1967, the Kerner Commission was tasked by ...

Activism

How Long Is a Football Field? The Kent State Shootings Reconsidered

It was a story told in photographs, but what we saw wasn’t what happened. It was worse.

May 4, 2020 • by Carol Wilder

The author would like to extend deep thanks to Thomas Grace, Alan Canfora, and Dean Kahler; and to NYU history Professor Robert Cohen for his clarifying remarks. Fifty years is a big part of a human life. How unsettling that the meticulously planned 50th commemoration of the tragic May 4th, 1970 killings at ...

How Long Is a Football Field? The Kent State Shootings Reconsidered

North America

The Specter of George McGovern’s Defeat in 1972

Similarities — and Key Differences — with the Prospects for Sanders in 2020

February 25, 2020 • by Bruce Miroff

Now that Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, has emerged as the clear frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 2020, the old warnings echo even louder. Veteran media commentator Chris Matthews is typical of alarmists in prophesying that Sanders as nominee would match McGovern in losing 49 states (presumably Vermont ...

The Specter of George McGovern’s Defeat in 1972

North America

Democrats are Haunted by 1972

Re-examining McGovern’s devastating loss — and the collapse of party unity that changed everything

February 13, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Worse, the pundit class, which should be challenging the electorate with ideas and analysis and instead seems to be taking a cultural studies approach to covering the candidates, is engaged in endless handwringing, triggered by the emergence of a viable left in the Democratic party. Because if this, they predicted a Biden boom that ...

Democracy

Civil Disobedience in the Age of Trump

Hannah Arendt on why civil disobedience is not just justifiable but politically imperative

October 24, 2018 • by William E. Scheuerman

This symposium contains essays by Mary Dietz, William E. Scheuerman, Christian Volk, Seyla Benhabib, and Jeffrey C. Isaac that engage with the obvious and meaningful resonances between Crises of the Republic and the present. They were originally presented in August at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting in Boston, in a ...

Feature

Lying as Politics in the Age of Trump

What Hannah Arendt does, and does not, anticipate under a deeply vicious presidency

October 23, 2018 • by Mary G. Dietz

Reading Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic in the Age of Trump: A Symposium Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic is not so much a book as a collection, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972, of three essays and an interview that first appeared, individually, in the years between 1969 and 1971. Three of ...

Richard Nixon

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

The success of an immigration or refugee resettlement can never be fully evaluated in the first decades

Beyond Colonialism in a Sentimental Mood

Éric Vuillard’s new book punctures the curious French nostalgia for Indochina

First, Pick the Right Wife

Why Now? With Claire Potter, Episode 8

Watergate Summer

In 1973, Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer’s determination to broadcast a Congressional investigation mattered to our democracy, and revolutionized television news

What Roger Stone’s Commuted Sentence Tells Us About Trump’s Commitment to Conspiracy

The president is covering up the cover-up of a crime

Enough Is Enough

The power of violence and the power of non-violence

How Long Is a Football Field? The Kent State Shootings Reconsidered

It was a story told in photographs, but what we saw wasn’t what happened. It was worse.

The Specter of George McGovern’s Defeat in 1972

Similarities — and Key Differences — with the Prospects for Sanders in 2020

Democrats are Haunted by 1972

Re-examining McGovern’s devastating loss — and the collapse of party unity that changed everything

Civil Disobedience in the Age of Trump

Hannah Arendt on why civil disobedience is not just justifiable but politically imperative

Lying as Politics in the Age of Trump

What Hannah Arendt does, and does not, anticipate under a deeply vicious presidency

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