Sitemap - 2025 - A User's Guide to History

Andrew Johnson: Mind the impressions

The Selfish Gene

Abraham Lincoln: Timing is everything

Enhanced free speech

James Buchanan: Be careful what you wish for

Bait and switch?

When TJ cried treason

Pardon?

Franklin Pierce. The limits of conciliation

Is prosperity a Ponzi scheme?

Faith and reason

Millard Fillmore: Do the best you can

It doesn't take a conspiracy . . .

Zachary Taylor: Know your limitations

Cosmopolitanism and nationalism

The curse of William Jevons

James Polk: One and done

Operation Paperclip

Maxwell's demon and Schrodinger's cat

When life changes in an instant

John Tyler: Power is as power does

Pricing the future

Burke v Paine

No (language) cops on the beat

After Trump?

William Henry Harrison: Don't die

What's left to teach . . .

Sagebrush and seabed

How Trump outfoxed the founders

Martin Van Buren: The best laid plans

Do pigs have politics?

Migration and war

Is it bribery if you would have done it anyway?

Pi in the sky

Two fingers or three?

Andrew Jackson: Check your emotions

What's wrong with eugenics?

John Quincy Adams: Know thyself

It takes one to know two

James Monroe: Hire well and heed your hire

James Madison: Times change, so should you

Republic or democracy?

Peak capitalism, peak democracy

Capital punishment

Sweet Auburn

Thomas Jefferson: Scruple not

Work to live?

Do as Cromwell said, not as he did

John Adams: Lighten up

Protesting too much

George Washington: Walk away

When push comes to shove

When rumors of a foreign connection . . .

Saints and cynics

The Cumberland Gap

Ain’t it Grand?

Roosevelt to Reagan to Trump

Eden redux

What are the odds?

BQ 10: Did God create man? Or vice versa?

Who shaves the barber?

Making it up

The hardest task for any political system

BQ 9: What drives the engine of history?

Limousine liberals, penthouse populists

Grant at Shiloh: Bend, then rebound

What's my tribe?

A Christian, a Muslim and a Jew walk into a bar . . .

The politics of unhappiness

AGI: Tool or tyrant?

The prehistory of the vaccine wars

What if . . . FDR had not had polio?

A tale of two revolutions

O Canada

Electric Charlie and Engine Charlie

Socrates and the Fourteenth Amendment

Valuing work

BQ 8: Biology and culture

Cicero on dictatorship

Balls and strikes

What if . . . Pickett's charge had succeeded?

Resign or resist?

When the earth trembles

Go west

Shock treatment

BQ 7: How do dictatorships work?

Power to the podcast

Dividing the world

What if . . . TR’s wife hadn't died?

BQ 6: How does cooperation happen?

The mechanics of democracy

BQ 5: Linear or cyclical?

Colonel Washington starts a world war

Skeptical of climate change?

An army in the streets

BQ 4: Materialism or idealism?

The incredible vanishing Congress

A brief history of America Inc.

BQ 3: Why are some nations richer than others?

Does anyone care about democracy?

What do you call a corollary to a corollary?

BQ 2: Does human nature change over time?

Mr. R's neighborhood

What if . . . the Watergate burglars hadn't been such bunglers?

The teacher's friend: Donald Trump

Paying the president

BQ 1. Why no World War III?

Chesterton's fence and Panama's canal

Catalog of clever ideas: Prices

What if Truman hadn’t used the bomb?

Ballad of the Presidents: Reagan to Trump

Ballad of the Presidents: Kennedy to Carter

Overrinsured?

Washington no Cincinnatus

Ballad of the Presidents: Truman and Eisenhower

If Lincoln had let the secessionists go

Ballad of the Presidents: Harding to FDR

25 for 25. Declining birthrates (2010s)

Ballad of the Presidents: TR to Wilson

25 for 25. The iPhone (2007)

Ships of stone, sails of lead

Ballad of the Presidents: Johnson to McKinley

Sisyphus rocks

Ballad of the Presidents: Lincoln

Ballad of the Presidents: Polk to Buchanan

25 for 25. The Battle of Seattle (1999)

The search for meaning