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From Jefferson To Jackson To Lincoln To Fdr To Reagan, Every Great President Inspires Enormous Affection And Enormous Hostility. We'll All Be Much Saner, I Think, If We Remember That History Is Full Of Surprises And Things That Seemed Absolutely Certain One Day Are Often Unimaginable The Next.

-Jon Meacham

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From Jefferson To Jackson

Jon Meacham

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From Jefferson To Jackson To Lincoln To Fdr To Reagan, Every Great President Inspires Enormous Affection And Enormous Hostility. We'll All Be Much Saner, I Think, If We Remember That History Is Full Of Surprises And Things That Seemed Absolutely Certain One Day Are Often Unimaginable The Next.

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From Jefferson To Jackson To Lincoln To Fdr To Reagan, Every Great President Inspires Enormous Affection And Enormous Hostility. We'll All Be Much Saner, I Think, If We Remember That History Is Full Of Surprises And Things That Seemed Absolutely Certain One Day Are Often Unimaginable The Next.

A Lot Of People, Including Business Leaders, Think The Future Belongs To China. Globalization Is Not A Zero-sum Game, But We Need To Hone Our Skills To Stay In Play.

Barack Obama Is Many Things; Among Them, He Is A Tough And Even Ferocious Political Warrior.

Justified Or Not, The Supreme Court Has A Kind Of Sacred Status In American Life. For Whatever Reason, Presidents Can Safely Run Against Congress, And Vice Versa, But I Think There Is An Inherent Popular Aversion To Assaults On The Court Itself. Perhaps It Has To Do With An Instinctive Belief That Life Needs Umpires.

Extremists Often Derive Their Inspiration From Literal Interpretations Of Texts That Should Rightly Be Read Not As Associated Press Reports From The Ancient World, But As Theological And Literary Enterprises Requiring Independent Intellectual Assessment.

[t]o Argue That Something Is So Because It Is In The Bible Is More Than Intellectually Bankrupt.

Part Of What I Loved - And Love - About Being Around Older People Is The Tangible Sense Of History They Embody. I'm Interested In Military History, For Instance, Because Both My Grandfathers Fought In World War Ii. I'm Interested In Writing Because One Of Those Grandfathers Wrote Books.

The American System Of Political Spending Is So Unregulated That It Might Make Adam Smith Rethink Free Markets.

One Wonders Whether The Obama Re-election Campaign May Be On The Right Track As It Seeks To Apply The You-break-it-you-own-it Rule To Bush And The American Economy. Hardly A Day Goes By Without President Obama Or His Surrogates Arguing That It Takes Longer Than Four Years To Recover From An Economic Crisis So Long In The Making.

We Chose The Most Interesting Image Available To Us To Illustrate The Theme Of The Cover, Which Is What We Always Try To Do. We Apply The Same Test To Photographs Of Any Public Figure, Male Or Female: Does The Image Convey What We Are Saying? That Is A Gender-neutral Standard.

Steadiness Of Faith, Was, In The Long Run, As Illuminating And Essential As Sophistication Of Thought.

The More We Can Do To Support And Promulgate The Intellectual Traditions Of The Abrahamic Faiths - Of Judaism, Christianity, And Islam - The Better Armed We Will Be To Fight Fundamentalism.

I Am A Huge Admirer Of Franklin Roosevelt's, And I Believe Social Security Has Done Untold Good In Alleviating The Once-widespread Issue Of Poverty Among The Elderly. Fdr Believed In The Greatness And Generosity Of Americans - But He Was Also A Cold-blooded Politician.

A Globalized World Is By Now A Familiar Fact Of Life. Building Walls Or Moats May Sound Appealing, But The Future Belongs To Those Who Tend To Their People And Then Boldly Engage The Rest Of The World, Near And Far.

The Decline And Fall Of The Modern Religious Right's Notion Of A Christian America Creates A Calmer Political Environment And, For Many Believers, May Help Open The Way For A More Theologically Serious Religious Life.

Given That Religious Faith Is An Intrinsic Element Of Human Experience, It Is Best To Approach And Engage The Subject With A Sense Of History And A Critical Sensibility.

I Do Not Believe 'newsweek' Is The Only Catcher In The Rye Between Democracy And Ignorance, But I Think We're One Of Them, And I Don't Think There Are That Many On The Edge Of That Cliff.

Like The Bible-a Document That Often Contradicts Itself And From Which One Can Construct Sharply Different Arguments-theology Is The Product Of Human Hands And Hearts.

An Epic Subject Requires A Writer Of Epic Skill And Scope, And We Have A Perfect Pairing In Cleopatra And Stacy Schiff. Absorbing And Illuminating, This New Biography Will Endure.

World War Ii Ended The Great Depression With One Of The Great Public-private Industrial Collaborations In The History Of Man.

It's Possible That The 2012 General-election Race Will Be The Least Overtly Religious One Since 1972, The Last Campaign Before Roe V. Wade And The Rise Of Jimmy Carter Brought Evangelicalism Into The Political Mainstream. That's Because Faith Remains A Complicated Issue For Obama, Who Is Still Wrongly Thought To Be A Muslim In Some Quarters.

As Crucial As Religion Has Been And Is To The Life Of The Nation, America's Unifying Force Has Never Been A Specific Faith, But A Commitment To Freedom - Not Least Freedom Of Conscience.

If A Person Is Homosexual By Nature - That Is, If One's Sexuality Is As Intrinsic A Part Of One's Identity As Gender Or Skin Color - Then Society Can No More Deny A Gay Person Access To The Secular Rights And Religious Sacraments Because Of His Homosexuality Than It Can Reinstate Jim Crow.

The Middle Class, One Of The Great Achievements In History, Is Becoming More Of A Relic Than A Reality.

The Way To Put Oneself In A Position To Take The Harder, More Honorable Political Path Is To Argue For One's Virtues In A Vigorous Way.

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Once The Cry And The Cause Of A Generation Of Progressives To Make America Safer, Fairer And Cleaner, 'regulation' Is Now A Dirty Word In Our Politics. Even Democrats Are Quick To Talk About Cutting Regulations; Republicans Hate Them With - How To Put It? - Evangelical Fervor.

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The Attacks Of September 11 - And Subsequent Acts Of Terror From London To Madrid To Fort Hood, Texas - Embody The Most Repulsive Of Human Instincts, The Will To Power At The Price Of The Lives Of Others.

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