Recent op-eds and editorial pieces:
- “What Dred Scott teaches us about the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling” Washington Post, May 7, 2022
- “The Danger of Seeking Compromise on Voting Rights” Washington Post, December 17, 2021.
- “The Electoral Count Act is Broken. Fixing it requires knowing how it became law” (with Erik Alexander), Washington Post, October 8, 2021.
- “Ted Cruz thinks 2020 is like 1876. He’s right but not for the reason he thinks” (with Erik Alexander), Washington Post, January 6, 2021.
- “Republicans Rediscover the Dangers of Selling Bunk to Their Constituents” The Atlantic, November 25, 2020
- “Americans worry about 2020 being another 2000, but the real worry is another 1876,” (with Erik Alexander), Washington Post Outlook Section, October 20, 2020
- “The Supreme Court Used to be Openly Political: It Traded Partisanship for Power” Front page, Washington Post Outlook Section, September 25, 2020
Recent Interviews & Other Media Appearances:
- Supreme Court Historical Society (May 2023)
- Lincoln Presidential Foundation Warning Signs & Four Score Speaker Series (November 2022)
- Dickinson College “Past, Present, & Future of the Political Supreme Court” (September 2022)
- You Don’t Have to Yell (December 2021)
- The Alarmist! (January 2021)
- NPR’s Throughline (December 2020)
- American History Tellers, with Lindsay Graham (December 2020)
- The Trial Brief, with David Oddo (November 2020)
- The Democracy Works Podcast, The McCourtney Institute for Democracy (October 2020)
- The Last Best Hope?, The Rothermere Institute at Oxford University (June 2020)
During the pandemic, CSPAN filmed a lecture on “The Civil War as a Constitutional Crisis,” from my course, Constitutional History to 1877, which I teach at Penn State. The video is part of their “Lectures in History” series.
I was also featured in several media outlets in January 2020 during Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, drawing on my expertise and politics and law during Andrew Johnson’s 1868 impeachment trial:
- WBUR Boston’s “On Point” Radio: “Presidential Historians on What They’re Watching for During the Senate Impeachment Trial”
- Al Jazeera’s “The Stream”: “Impeachment Trial: What Does it Really Mean for Donald Trump?”
- AP News: “Crime Required for Impeachment? Not So, Say Legal Experts”
CSPAN has featured some of my appearances on roundtables and giving book talks here:
- On the Election of 1876 as part of “Presidential Transitions,” panel at the American Political History Conference, June 2022
- On Contested Elections in the Nineteenth Century, sponsored by the Massachusetts Historical Society, January 2021
- On Associate Justice of the Supreme Court John Catron as part of “James K. Polk’s Politics and Times,” Knoxville, TN, April 2019
- On the sectional crisis of the 1850s as part of the Civil War Institute’s “The Politics of the 1850s” roundtable, June 2019
- Discussing my book at Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC, focusing “The Washington Fraternity in the 1850s,” January 2014
H-Net interviewed me about my article “The Politics of Continuity and Change in the Long Civil War Era: A State of the Field” here.
You can listen to some of my interviews about my book, Washington Brotherhood, here:
- Capital District Civil War Roundtable, June 2019
- Ben Franklin’s World with Liz Covart, April 2016
- Civil War Book Review, Summer 2014
- Civil War Talk Radio with Gerry Prokopowicz, June 2014