United States 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 ...

Capitalism

Has Conservatism Outlived Its Usefulness?

A short note on a hoary concept

June 9, 2026 • by James Miller

Matt Walsh: The definition of conservatism … It has no definition, I think. We talk about the words that don’t mean anything anymore, words that used to be useful and maybe used to mean something and they just don’t anymore because of how they’ve been used and abused and overused. ...

Has Conservatism Outlived Its Usefulness?

Migration

Three Years After Roxham, Canada Still Scapegoats US Immigration Law

The irregular border crossing is a metonym for the complications of Canada’s changing immigration policies

June 4, 2026 • by Rachel Charney McKenzie

On September 25, 2023, about 30 miles southeast of Montreal, a lime-green excavator advanced like a centipede over concrete and gravel. Its claw-like appendage tore at the gable roof of a long white rectangular building. The structure’s walls folded inward under the pressure, and the ghost of a dark blue ...

Three Years After Roxham, Canada Still Scapegoats US Immigration Law

North America

Trump’s Way With Words

The metapragmatic presidency

May 20, 2026 • by Sanford Schram

Donald Trump has a kingly approach to his presidency—and to language. Yes, it is well-recognized that Trump does not command mastery of the basics of syntax and grammar of any language, including the one his supporters want to be declared the US national language, i.e., American English. No bother: Trump ...

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 ...

Philosophy

What Is a Beagle?

In Lab Dog, Brad Bolman probes how the beagle became such a popular subject of American science and such a potent symbol of American patriotism

April 30, 2026 • by Aaron Neber

In recent months, activists against animal testing in scientific experiments have had a few moments of important success. In December, the National Defense Authorization Act included a provision that military funding will not be spent on projects that require painful research on dogs or cats (unless they are military service ...

Podcast

The Ostriches: Part IV

“Forty to a clockless cell”

February 6, 2026 • by Val Vinokur

THE OSTRICHES: PART IV, 26 FEDERAL PLAZA Leonardo’s first inventions were machinesTo tear the bars off windows and openA prison from inside. He escaped the gibbetAnd the stake and wandered the marketBuying caged birds to set free. Every sketchAnd painting an endless draft for a pictureOf the mind in its movement, infinite. He ...

North America

One Battle After Another

With ICE in Minneapolis: An eyewitness account

January 21, 2026 • by Emily Condon

On Tuesday morning, January 13, I was driving home after dropping my 9-year-old son off at school. There were ICE vehicles everywhere, I was surrounded by them on Park Ave. After a block or two of this, I parked and got out of my car. I saw that there were many ...

Politics

“Things Happen”

On one’s sense of impending doom

January 20, 2026 • by Arthur Goldhammer

Americans have long enjoyed a robust and righteous sense of impunity. No matter how badly our government blundered, we nevertheless clung confidently to the notion that we would always land on our feet. It has been said (allegedly by Bismarck, but there is little evidence to support the attribution) that “there ...

History

Honest Truths From Wrongful Deaths

In an excerpt from Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror, the author surveys how left-wing intellectuals responded to 9/11

December 3, 2025 • by Jeremy Varon

The first war the United States fought following 9/11, I argue, was a “war of interpretation” over the root causes and deep meaning of the attacks themselves. Below is a section from the first chapter of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War (University of Chicago Press, 2025), in ...

Sports

Eight Months to Learn Spanish

The 2026 World Cup will be a revelation, proving soccer’s arrival in the United States and inviting more Americans to see themselves as part of a Spanish-speaking Americas

November 25, 2025 • by Sean Jacobs and Ivan Pech Luna

On Sunday, October 26, Spain’s two powerhouse clubs, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, met once again in El Clásico, the name given to any clash between the two. Both teams command massive global followings, including in the United States, and this weekend was no exception. The match, held at the ...

History

From William Lloyd Garrison to Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

A brief genealogy of nonviolent resistance

November 18, 2025 • by Bennett Parten

In 1959, Martin Luther King Jr., then only 30 years old and fresh off leading the Montgomery bus boycotts, traveled to India to pay homage to one of his heroes, the late Mahatma Gandhi. Over the course of five weeks, King met with Indian heads of state, spoke with some ...