Once again, this blog's anniversary caught me by surprise. It's been a busy year, with Donald Trump and the Van Buren Papers taking up a lot of space. Thank you for reading, and I hope you like the site redesign.
Van Buren Papers Project Receives NHPRC Grant
Reblogged from the PMVB website: We are thrilled to share the news that the Van Buren Papers received an NHPRC grant for 2017-18. The official Cumberland University press release: Cumberland University received a grant for $60,752 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) for the Papers of Martin Van Buren (PMVB) project. The funds will …
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WPLN Visits the Van Buren Papers
Chas Sisk of Nashville Public Radio recently visited the Papers of Martin Van Buren office Chas spent 90 minutes interviewing me and several students (David Gregory, Ally Johnson, and Zach Morgan) who are working on the project over the summer. You can read or listen to the interview through the link at the PMVB website.
Interview with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb
Last month, I had the privilege of sitting down with C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb and being interviewed for his show, Q&A. It was a heady and nerve-wracking experience, not the least because I had been sick for a couple of days before I flew to D.C. (Remember that when you watch the interview.) We talked …
Would Andrew Jackson Have Prevented the Civil War?
Yesterday, I addressed Donald Trump's statements about Andrew Jackson and the Civil War. A lot of other historians since then have jumped in to lament Trump's historical ignorance, a view I sympathize with. Trump wasn't satisfied to let the criticism go and took to the Twitter machine to reinforce his historical analysis: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/859209801175269376 Whether Jackson would …
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Is Donald Trump Right About Andrew Jackson and the Civil War?
In an interview with Salena Zito airing today, President Donald Trump makes a couple of curious observations about Andrew Jackson and the Civil War. As others have observed, Trump has trouble with verb tenses, and his grasp of history is rudimentary and often grossly inaccurate (here, here, and here). Both of these weaknesses are apparent in this interview. …
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The Little Magician Needs You!
As regular readers know, Cumberland University launched the Papers of Martin Van Buren project last February. We have spent the last 13 months working hard to organize the project and begin transcribing Series 1 documents. In an effort to move the project forward, our state representative has introduced Amendment #59 to the Tennessee Higher Education funding …
Trump’s Visit to The Hermitage
I had the good fortune of spending a couple of days at The Hermitage this week. On Tuesday evening, the Andrew Jackson Foundation premiered its new visitor film. It is a much more visually exciting film than the previous version, and it generally treats Old Hickory positively. On Wednesday, I returned to the site to …
Books for Fall 2017
Introduction to Historical Methods Conal Furay and Michael J. Salevouris, The Methods and Skills of History: A Practical Guide, 4th ed. (Wiley Blackwell, 2015) ISBN 9781118745441 Mark Gilderhus, History and Historians, 7th ed. (Pearson, 2010) ISBN 9780205687534 Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin (PublicAffairs, 2007) …
Donald Trump Is Not a Twenty-First Century Andrew Jackson
I've written about the Trump-Jackson comparison several times (here, here, and here), so when I was asked to contribute a piece on it to the OAH's The American Historian, I took the opportunity to bring together my thoughts into something more coherent than a blog post. You can read the entire American Historian piece, but …
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