Episode description

It’s finally here: the first episode of Conversations, Season 4 of The Past, The Promise, The Presidency! As you may have learned from previous seasons, when we at the Center for Presidential History talk about “presidential history,” we’re thinking deep and wide. And our conversations this season will be no different. The postal system, Mormons, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, Charlie Brown: you’ll hear about all of them as presidential history this season! 

But this week, we’re diving straight into a topic that obviously intersects with the presidency: partisan politics. Since independence, the U.S. has seen a host of political parties. Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, Whigs, Democrats, Anti-Masons, Populists, and more. Throughout those same decades, intra-party politics have undergone their own changes, and the Republican Party of the last three decades is no exception. 

This episode, we are exploring the rise of the new Republican conservatism beginning in the 1990s and tracing its evolution through the Trump presidency to today. And we’re doing that with one of the premier historians of the era: Dr. Nicole Hemmer. Hemmer is a historian and Director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University. She specializes in the history of American media, conservatism, and the presidency, and explores all of these topics and more in her book Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.