Event Video

Author Robert W. Merry wraps up the presidential election – and the Hail to the Chiefs series – with a fresh, playful, and challenging way of rating our presidents. He is the author of Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians.

Merry has been a Washington correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and the executive editor of Congressional Quarterly.

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

Historian Terry Beckenbaugh maintains that the Civil War was inevitable given the failure of the nation’s political leadership to resolve fundamental questions over the nature of the American republic and the meaning of constitutional liberty.

Beckenbaugh examines the leaders of the North and the South, the issues and ideologies that drove debate, and the effect politics had on the war.

Beckenbaugh is an assistant professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

With his thick spectacles, big teeth, and boundless energy, President Theodore Roosevelt was a cartoonist’s dream subject. Rick Marschall, author of Bully! The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt: Illustrated with More than 200 Vintage Political Cartoons discusses this most dynamic of chief executives.

Marschall is a former political cartoonist. Bostonia magazine calls him “perhaps America’s foremost authority on popular culture.”

For all his accomplishments and advanced thinking, Thomas Jefferson could not get beyond his own limited perspective in matters of race. Drawing from new archaeological work and previously overlooked evidence, historian Henry Wiencek examines the factors that led Jefferson, once an emancipationist, to keep some of his own children as slaves.