This week on The Past, The Promise, The Presidency: Presidential Crises we examine how James and Dolley Madison responded to The War of 1812, often referred to by both contemporaries and historians as the "Second War of Independence." Upon arriving at the White House, British troops thoroughly enjoyed a feast and fine wine before systematically setting fire to the building. They then turned their attention to the Capitol building, the Library of Congress, and every other public buildin...
Oct 14, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast Our first topic this season is our first president, George Washington, father of the country, general, surveyor, statesman, slave owner, whiskey distiller, debtor, and a man whose dental history every poor kid with braces hears about. Washington was the first man to hold the office, of course, and some still argue that he was the best. Everyone agrees that he set the standard by which all other presidents would be judged. Today, we will explore the presidency of George Washington and his biggest...
Oct 07, 2021•1 hr 28 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast After 28 episodes covering the presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump, as well as two emergency response episodes, we’ve learned so, so much and we hope you have too. We decided to close out the season with a live season finale so that you, our fantastic listeners, could participate and shape the conversation. On Thursday, April 15, we gathered for this live event and recorded it to share here with you. Our sound is going to be a little different because it was a live event, but hopeful...
Apr 22, 2021•1 hr•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Donald John Trump, the 45th president of the United States. So, so much to say. And yet, Trump’s presidency is also so fresh, what could we say in an introduction that you’d not already know? The only president ever impeached twice by the House of Representatives; he was also the first in more than a century to voluntarily refuse to attend his successor’s inauguration. He was also one of only five presidents to have won the Electoral College vote without also winning...
Apr 15, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th president of the United States. Also, the first in more than two centuries who didn’t identify as white. Obama’s tenure remains fresh, yet hard to fully evaluate given the tumult that followed in his wake—and to some minds, the tumult that arose in direct response to his presidency. If we were taping this podcast a decade ago, in 2010 or 2011 during Obama’s first term, we might well have talked about his presidency as a culmination, a v...
Apr 08, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States. Full disclosure for those who don’t know, the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum resides on SMU’s campus, about a mile as the crow flies from our offices here at the CPH. Here’s your brief primer on George W. Bush. Perhaps unnecessary to say given that you’ve already met his father, but yes, W was born to wealth and privilege, and spent his first years in Connecticut while his father finished up at ...
Apr 01, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, the first baby boomer to hold the office, and indeed, the second youngest man ever elected president. Clinton’s legacy is ongoing and a work in progress even now nearly thirty years since he took office. Changing political winds, changes within the democratic party in particular, a changing sensibility over welfare and the war on crime, and let’s face it, a different sensibility of what constituted s...
Mar 25, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States, and the man who came to the Oval Office arguably with the greatest pre-presidential resume of all. Ok, Eisenhower makes a good bid in this fight, but consider Bush’s credentials: he was a war hero, successful businessman, a congressman, Ambassador to the United Nations, chief envoy to China, head of the Republican National Committee, head of the CIA, and then for eight years Ronald Reagan’s vice pre...
Mar 18, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th President of the United States. It’s not too much a stretch to say we are living in the America Ronald Reagan envisioned, one in which market forces matter as much as morality in the formation of policy decisions, the American military is strong and taxes quite low by historical standards, and a Supreme Court with a noticeable conservative bent. The man who brought the conservative movement from its 1964 nadir until Barry Goldwater to t...
Mar 11, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about the 1970s. Which means we’re talking about two presidents today: Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. As you’ll soon hear, the 70s are hard. They were a time of transition, and historians often treat it as such, as a bridge between the raucous sixties of Vietnam and Nixon to the era of self-gratification and glitz that was the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. Now, that might not be fair to this decade, which historians are increasingly unpacking and exploring, seeing it as more t...
Mar 04, 2021•57 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Richard Milhouse Nixon, the 37th President of the United States. But the real question is…which Nixon?? Among the most mercurial of our presidents, some might say Machiavellian while others would reach for malevolent, Richard Nixon was a man who changed over the course of the more than quarter century he spent at the beating heart of American politics. Or, did he? He came of political age fighting communists, and left the White House with legal fights that would dog ...
Feb 25, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, and arguably its most consequential. Note we did not say best or greatest or anything overexuberant like that. But if you are talking about presidents who left their mark on American society, presidents from the past whose impact we still feel today in our daily lives, for good and for ill, you could do worse than to put Johnson at the top of your list. That was true for civil rights and race relations, ...
Feb 18, 2021•57 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States—a vigorous president forever young in our memory because tragedy snatched him too early from our view. Kennedy stands near the top of public rankings of presidential greatness, though professional historians tend to rank him slightly lower, a distinction that captures the way the Kennedy mystique, the Camelot White House, the fashionable president with an even more glamorous wife, retains a hold on our ...
Feb 11, 2021•59 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, a two term president with arguably the greatest pre-presidential resume of them all. It’s not everyone who could fill out a job application, and under experience, write: “saved Western civilization.” That might be a stretch, but only a small one. It was Ike, after all, who oversaw the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, and then did as much as anyone to build the structures of long-term American prosp...
Feb 04, 2021•57 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Harry S Truman, the 37th president of the United States, a man with the unenviable task of following Franklin Roosevelt, AND of overseeing the end of the largest war in human history. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked when consoling the newly-widowed Eleanor Roosevelt. Harry, she said, “is there anything WE can do for YOU, for YOU are the one in trouble now.” That date was April 12, 1945. The war still raged in Europe and the Pacific, and amazingly, it w...
Jan 28, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Actually, we have two episodes for you on FDR. He’s that important, and being the only person ever elected to the White House four times, he was also in office long enough to have created several legacies when issues of race arise. Just how important was he? Well, here’s one way to look at it: there have been three true existential crises in American history, moments not just of stress or strife, but perilous times when the very existence o...
Jan 21, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Actually, we have two episodes for you on FDR. He’s that important, and being the only person ever elected to the White House four times, he was also in office long enough to have created several legacies when issues of race arise. Just how important was he? Well, here’s one way to look at it: there have been three true existential crises in American history, moments not just of stress or strife, but perilous times when the very existence o...
Jan 14, 2021•51 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast After the events of January 6, 2020, we invited a few friends and historians to offer their interpretations of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building. While our understanding of this historic moment will continue to evolve, we invite you to think of this conversation as a first draft of history. Featuring Dr. Jeffrey Engel, Dr. Sharron Conrad, Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith, and Dr. Timothy Naftali. For more information about our guests and the episode, please visit pastpromisepresidency.com ....
Jan 08, 2021•52 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about the roaring twenties. It’s a decade often recalled with wistful longing, and more than touch of trepidation. Longing, because that is what Americans largely felt in this era: a longing to move past the pain of the Great War and the great pandemic. Trepidation, for us if not for them, because we know the traumas that 1930s and ‘40s would bring. Sometimes it’s no fun to know what comes next, and if you don’t know what we are referring to…well, then you better stick aro...
Dec 17, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States and arguably the most consequential. Note, I did not say one of the greats. They aren’t holding a spot on Mt. Rushmore for him. Certainly not lately, as the national reckoning over race during 2020 has landed hard on Wilson, whose reputation has been sullied by the widespread realization that he might just vie for the unenviable title of most racist president of all. That’s a hard list to evaluate, especially gi...
Dec 10, 2020•50 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States and arguably the most consequential. Note, I did not say one of the greats. They aren’t holding a spot on Mt. Rushmore for him. Certainly not lately, as the national reckoning over race during 2020 has landed hard on Wilson, whose reputation has been sullied by the widespread realization that he might just vie for the unenviable title of most racist president of all. That’s a hard list to evaluate, especially gi...
Dec 10, 2020•59 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about William Howard Taft, the 27th President of the United States. The only person on our nation’s history to serve both as Commander-In-Chief and as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Taft is one of those people in history with the sad fate of having his name forever recalled…alongside someone else’s. But really, what did you expect would happen to the man Theodore Roosevelt picked to be his successor. As we’ll soon see, with friends like these….. Today we...
Dec 03, 2020•50 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt, TR, or Teddy, was one of the all-time great personalities in American history. Larger-than-life, captured in stone on Mount Rushmore, inspiration for the Teddy Bear and featured in countless movies, he was at once is intriguing, frustrating, thoughtful and blustery, a man ahead of his times, yet also stuck in the rut of arcane thinking. TR left a legacy of economic reform, social reform,...
Nov 19, 2020•1 hr•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States, the president who brought the country into the twentieth century and whose death left the nation in the hands of one of the all-time-great leaders, and characters, in American history, Theodore Roosevelt. Historians typically view McKinley’s time in office as a moment of, well less transition, than visible transformation, as the country entered the new century more industrialized, urban, and globally powerful...
Nov 12, 2020•53 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Presidents Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th presidents of the United States—one of the most unusual transitions in US history. Cleveland served one term from 1885 to 1889, lost the election to Benjamin Harrison, who was in turn replaced by Cleveland in 1892. Whew. And you thought our times were complicated! Our two experts today will fill in the details of their stories, and how their politics continue to inform our current moment. For...
Nov 05, 2020•49 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Presidents James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur. Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, was only in office six and a half months before he died from medical complications following a botched assassination. Just sixteen years after Lincoln’s death, Garfield was the second president assassinated. His vice president, Chester Arthur, served the remainder of his term. We will learn from two experts about why Arthur’s presidency was dominated by civil servic...
Oct 29, 2020•52 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th president of the United States, a man whose name is synonymous with the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow in the south. But perhaps his legacy isn’t quite that simple. Here’s a quick refresher on Hayes. Born in Ohio in 1822, he was trained as a lawyer, prior to enlisting in the Union Army during the Civil War. After serving bravely in the war, he was elected to Congress and then as Governor of Ohio. Although Hayes had been a...
Oct 22, 2020•49 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th president of the United States, a man whose story is inextricably intertwined with the history of race in America. He was, after all the, the commanding General of the Union Forces that ultimately won the Civil War, and he was present at every step of the way as the country faced perhaps an even larger task: reconstructing a workable union in the wake of the war. A national hero, he served contentiously under Andrew Johnson following Lincol...
Oct 15, 2020•44 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast Last week, President Donald Trump revealed he has tested positive for COVID-19. After experiencing symptoms and trouble breathing, he was transferred to Walter Reed Medical Center on Friday night, October 2, 2020. While receiving treatment, President Trump's staff and doctors released conflicting and confusing information about his health. But 2020 isn't the first time a president and his doctors have kept information about health a secret. In fact, more often than not, presidents keep...
Oct 08, 2020•40 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Andrew Johnson, the 17th president of the United States, a man whose presidency is synonymous with the missed opportunities of the post-Civil War era. Never elected, Johnson instead became president after Abraham Lincoln’s tragic assassination. Rather than continuing Lincoln’s agenda, Johnson instead undermined black citizenship, and attempted at every turn to thwart the Republican Party’s Reconstruction efforts in the South. He is today remembered as a bitter, angry...
Oct 01, 2020•42 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast 
