History with David Rubenstein

After serving for three months as vice president, Harry S. Truman, at age 60, suddenly inherited the White House. How did Truman, a seemingly unprepared provincial, become the steadfast leader who, in the rush of events, helped shape the postwar world?

John F. Kennedy was one of the most iconic political figures of the 20th century, a man known universally by his initials. From his college days to the end in Dallas, he was fascinated by the nature of political courage and its relationship to democratic governance. How should we understand JFK and his role in US and world politics?

Candice Millard, in conversation with David M. Rubenstein, offers an extraordinary account of President Garfield’s momentous, if brief, presidential career, and the legacy left not only by his work but by his death.

In 1960, one out of every 25 people in the United States was of Latino heritage. In 2023, it is one out of five. In 2050, it will be one in three. Latinos are our largest, oldest, most undercounted, fastest growing, and least understood community. Prizewinning author Marie Arana explains who they are and what they have meant to America.

In popular memory, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the quintessential political “natural.” Yet for all his gifts, as a young man Roosevelt nonetheless lacked depth, empathy, and an ability to think strategically. Those qualities, so essential to his eventual success as president, were skills he acquired during his seven-year journey through illness and recovery.

Many Americans’ knowledge of slavery is largely limited to the antebellum South, but prior to 1827, New York City actually had the largest enslaved population of any city outside of the South. In lower Manhattan, the African Burial Ground alone holds the remains of as many as 20,000 enslaved Blacks.

In the late 1600s, separated by the North Sea, English polymath Robert Hooke and Dutch cloth-merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked through their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine: complex living organisms are made up of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Hooke christened them “cells.”

Craig L. Symonds is professor of history emeritus at the United States Naval Academy and the author of Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay.

Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens.

Beverly Gage is professor of 20th-century American history at Yale University and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.