Ronald Reagan Archives - Public Seminar

History

The Waning of the American Illusion

And the virtues of democratic idealism

May 19, 2026 • by Sylvia Taschka

Was Ronald Reagan’s famous image of America as a “shining city on a hill” truly just an illusion, a Fata Morgana of the United States as a beacon of democracy, freedom, and moral leadership, a trick played on the world’s collective mind? In a podcast aired on January 14, 2026, Tucker ...

Podcast

When We Lose, We Win

Episode 60: Talking with historian Brenda Wineapple about civil rights, culture wars, the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial and her new book, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted A Nation

October 10, 2024 • by Claire Potter

In 2016, white evangelical Christians showed up at the polls in force for Donald J. Trump, part of a diverse movement that defied expectations to sweep him into the White House. In the past decade, scholars and journalists have spilled a lot of ink on what seemed initially like a ...

Podcast

Hit Them in the Pocketbook

May 8, 2023 • by Claire Potter

This book describes a part of the African American civil rights movement that many people don’t know—perhaps because it was run, and the battles were fought, by Black women who saw their activism as an extension of their commitment as mothers....

Our Next Guantánamo

Immigrants might become the next target for state-sponsored terrors

May 2, 2023 • by Joseph Margulies

We create Guantánamos in those fevered moments when imagined needs enflame ancient hatreds and modern fears, telling ourselves they will keep us safe and forgetting that they never have before. ...

Higher Ed

Counting the Social Cost of What College Costs

The financial burden of higher education is not an unfortunate accident, nor is it a “fact of life” or a “natural consequence” of going to college

February 15, 2023 • by Lora Burnett

Now many of the students with the most motivation to work towards a more equitable and just society feel the least liberty to do so....

Counting the Social Cost of What College Costs

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

Might the U.S. Military Support Nuclear Disarmament?

Its senior leadership is uniquely positioned in the present moment to pursue a revolutionary possibility

October 24, 2022 • by Robert Edwards

It is often difficult in the moment to recognize when one is at a crossroads. In the 1991 Gulf War, I was a lowly tactical intelligence officer in a parachute infantry regiment of the 82nd Airborne, rolling through the Iraqi desert beneath an air campaign that left smoldering charcoal where ...

Might the U.S. Military Support Nuclear Disarmament?

Europe & Central Asia

Part 5: After Ukraine

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

October 3, 2022 • by James Carroll

The Ukraine war has revealed, that is, that the single stoutest pillar of the current strategic “balance” is off kilter—a dangerously leaning tower, as it were, of peace....

Europe & Central Asia

Part 4: Moments of Moral Reckoning after Wars End

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

September 26, 2022 • by James Carroll

Efforts to immediately erect guardrails around nuclear weapons, given the sorry history that followed upon their falling short, deserve to be lifted up and celebrated as examples of what can follow in the chastened aftermath of a disastrous war....

Part 4: Moments of Moral Reckoning after Wars End

Politics

The Elusive Latino Voter

History reconsidered

September 22, 2022 • by Claire Potter

One place to understand how Republicans have stumbled when it comes to Latino voters is the attempt by the Reagan administration to simultaneously declare an end to racism in 1980—mission accomplished!—and woo Latinos as a racial group because they presented as religious and more socially conservative. Yet, as White House ...

Education

The Politics of Student Loan Cancellation

The American Left needs to keep pressing for more ambitious solutions to the problem of student debt

September 15, 2022 • by Jackson Todd

Biden’s action on student debt indicates that Americans may be ready to move on from the austerity politics that defined the Republican Party from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump....

The Politics of Student Loan Cancellation

Europe & Central Asia

Part 1: A Just War?

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

September 7, 2022 • by James Carroll

In nations bracketing the North Atlantic a great sigh of relief could almost be heard: how great to be free once more to demonize Moscow....

Ronald Reagan

The Waning of the American Illusion

And the virtues of democratic idealism

When We Lose, We Win

Episode 60: Talking with historian Brenda Wineapple about civil rights, culture wars, the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial and her new book, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted A Nation

Hit Them in the Pocketbook

Our Next Guantánamo

Immigrants might become the next target for state-sponsored terrors

Counting the Social Cost of What College Costs

The financial burden of higher education is not an unfortunate accident, nor is it a “fact of life” or a “natural consequence” of going to college

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

Might the U.S. Military Support Nuclear Disarmament?

Its senior leadership is uniquely positioned in the present moment to pursue a revolutionary possibility

Part 5: After Ukraine

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

Part 4: Moments of Moral Reckoning after Wars End

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

The Elusive Latino Voter

History reconsidered

The Politics of Student Loan Cancellation

The American Left needs to keep pressing for more ambitious solutions to the problem of student debt

Part 1: A Just War?

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

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