Trying to understand Bill Clinton’s presidency requires a new toolbox of words and concepts to understand what happened in the 1990s, not just during his presidency. As the first serious history of the Clinton era, my new book The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s, tracks …
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The Gay Marriage Fight Between Hillary and Bernie
The fight between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders over former president Bill Clinton’s signing of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996, proves that good politics makes terrible history. The question of why President Clinton signed the law, and …
It’s Time to Acknowledge that Bill Clinton Dominated his era Just as Reagan did his
It’s time to take Bill Clinton, his presidency, and his times seriously. Historians dithered before getting right with Reagan, letting their political and intellectual disdain discourage thoughtful scholarship for over two decades after his inauguration. Then, suddenly, there was a Reagan love-in, with even some liberal historians …
The Challenges of Writing about the Age of Clinton
Years ago, when I was slaving away in graduate school, I visited Moscow. One Russian I visited asked me what I did. “I’m an American historian,” I answered. “Acch,” he spat, and dropping his prepositions willy-nilly said: “That’s current events! History of Kremlin is history …