James Garfield, the 20th President of the United States, held the office for just 200 days, and spent the last 80 of those days in agony, after being shot by a crazed office seeker. He would ultimately die from a combination of his gunshot wounds as well as negligent medical treatment, and is considered to be the second President to be assassinated ( Read more... )

The 1844 election for President of the United States was unique and interesting for a number of reasons. It was the election in which it looked like Henry Clay would finally win the big prize after a couple of unsuccessful runs for the White House, and one in which his challenger, the obscure Tennessee politician James K. Polk, appeared to be ( Read more... )

In his speeches during the Great Depression era, Franklin Roosevelt would often invoke the image of "the forgotten man," a term he used to describe those Americans who were suffering the most during the period of economic turmoil. As author Amity Shlaes points out, the term was orginally coined to the 19th century Professor and Episcopal clergyman ( Read more... )

Author and journalist Chris Whipple draws upon his amazing array of sources, including the present and many of the past White House Chiefs of Staff, to take the reader inside the current workings of the West Wing and Oval Office in his 2023 book The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House. Many of these sources were gathered for Whipple's ( Read more... )

As the Great Depression overtook the United States in the early 1930s, Americans looked in desperation for a savior, even going so far as to flirt with some of the extreme forms of government that had taken hold in Europe, such as fascism and communism. When Herbert Hoover alienated the nation over his failure to address the economic suffering of ( Read more... )

As mentioned in an earlier post, this was a slack year for reading for me, something I'm hoping to correct for 2023. I'm always on the lookout for new books for potus_geeks and for the new year, here are six that I'll be looking for next year (some of which I've already pre-ordered.)

( New Books for Potus Geeks in 2023 )

It is with considerable embarrassment that I admit that in the past year, although the potus_geeks library (now housed in Linn Creek, Missouri) grew by leaps and bounds, this was not a year of prolific reading for yours truly. Or at least what reading I was able to fit in was not confined to the subject matter of this community. There were also a number of ( Read more... )

In 1936 Franklin Delano Roosevelt steamrolled to victory in his first bid for re-election, capturing 523 of 531 electoral votes and winning almost every state, save for two. Sounds like a pretty boring story for a history book, right? Not when it's told by the amazing and engaging historian David Pietrusza, author of some of the most entertaining ( Read more... )

In 1977, famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote The Age of Uncertainty (which was also made into a BBC series) in which he predicted a coming period of economic instability, inefficiency and social inequity, and called for government policies and interventions to remedy these problems. Stephen Poloz, the ninth Governor of the Bank of Canada ( ( Read more... )

In his 2022 work Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America, author Bob Riel has written the book that potus_geeks and those enamored with Presidential History have been waiting for. In an efficient yet informative and engaging style of writing, the author looks at every Presidential election from George ( Read more... )