C-SPAN Videos

Benjamin Franklin was an inventor, author, politician, postmaster, and civic activist.

But noted economist and Franklin biographer Mark Skousen reminds us that Franklin was also a businessman and an entrepreneur whose autobiography is often considered to be the first “rags to riches” account in American history.

Taking the White House requires a team, and America had never seen anything like the husband-and-wife team of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Historian William H. Chafe, a pioneer in the study of American politics through the personal lives of politicians, reveals the core complexity of the Clintons as individuals, as a couple, and as national figures.

Chafe is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History at Duke University and the author of Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal.

Seemingly austere and reportedly passive in the face of a national economic calamity, Herbert Hoover is somewhat of a political orphan. But biographer George H. Nash argues that Hoover was a much more dynamic, accomplished, and remarkable figure than the hoary stereotypes suggest.

Between 1975 and 1995 Nash lived in Iowa near the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, where he prepared three volumes of the definitive biography of the 31st president.

Co-presented with the Truman Library Institute; co-sponsored by KCUR’s Up to Date.

Author Brandon G. Kinney explores the complex series of events that led to the brief but bloody Mormon War of 1838, a conflict over religion, ideology, and land pitting Joseph Smith and his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints against other Missouri residents, the governor, and the state militia.

Kinney is a graduate of the Creighton University School of Law and practices law in Butler, Missouri. He is the author of The Mormon War: Zion and the Missouri Extermination Order of 1838.