Event Video

James N. Giglio describes John F. Kennedy as “the most medicated, one of the most courageous, and perhaps the most self-absorbed of our presidents.” Giglio reveals the latest research on Kennedy’s presidency, from his deft handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis to his destructive sexual obsessions.

Giglio is a distinguished professor of history at Missouri State University and author of Debating the Kennedy Presidency.

Part of this year’s series on the U.S. presidency.

Historian Shawn Leigh Alexander looks at the forgotten men and women who in the late 19th century took up the cause of civil rights for African Americans. Creating groups such as the Afro-American League, the Afro-American Council, the Niagara Movement, the Constitution League, and the Committee of Twelve, these pioneers developed the methodology of boycotts, propaganda, lobbying, and moral suasion that would bear fruit only long after they had passed on.

Alexander is an assistant professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas.

President Calvin Coolidge gets a bad rap, says author Amity Shlaes, who notes that under his leadership the economy grew at a rate of four percent annually, taxation was low, and the budget was balanced.

Historian Bud Bowie looks at economic miscalculations by Confederate President Jefferson Davis and other Southerners that in effect doomed their cause even as it was winning on the battlefield.

Foremost among these was the belief that the North would never risk ruining the immensely important cotton trade by waging war on secessionist states.

Bowie is a professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.