Edward VIII, the King of England, and President Richard Nixon have at least one thing in common. Both of them gave up their offices before the end of their terms. In the King's case, he abdicated the throne after less than a year in order to marry a woman who was an American socialite, who had been divorced twice, at a time when such a thing was ( Read more... )

William Howard Taft suffered the indignity of not only losing his bid for re-election, but of finishing third in the contest, behind the victor Woodrow Wilson and also behind third party candidate Theodore Roosevelt, who had once been Taft's friend, and who was now his biggest critic.


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Perhaps one of the most prolific and active retirements of any former Presidents was that of John Quincy Adams, the 6th President of the United States. Elected as President in 1824 in a controversial election, (Adams was chosen as President despite finishing second in popular and electoral votes because no candidate had won a majority in the ( Read more... )

In November of 2019 the theme of this community was impeachment and as we concluded at the end of that series, the constitutional process of impeachment has become as much of a political process as it has a legal one. History has shown that during times of intense political polarization, impeachment can be used by one side in an attempt to ( Read more... )

James Buchanan was the third in a series of "doughface" presidents. Hailing from Pennsylvania, Buchanan's biographer Jean Baker theorizes that Buchanan was "an intellectual and electoral hostage" to the South, and was so enamored with the ways of the south that he let ideology trump pragmatism. Secession began on his watch, and Buchanan is ( Read more... )

As I began to write this entry, the jury was deliberating in a Manhattan courthouse in a case cited as "The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump." The former president faced 34 felony charges of falsifying business records with the intent to commit or conceal another crime. At the center of things are payments made to pornographic ( Read more... )

On March 9, 1841 the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in the landmark case of United States v. The Amistad. The case is remarkable in the annals of Presidential history because the case was an appeal which was successfully argued by a legal team which included Congressman and former President John Quincy Adams.


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On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob believed by many to be composed of supporters of U.S. president Donald Trump. The attack occurred two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. The mob bypassed security officers and occupied the Capitol, causing damage and preventing ( Read more... )

Abortion access is expected to be a key topic during the upcoming campaign for President. This is the first presidential election to be held in the aftermath of two major court rulings that affected access to abortion. The first is the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, in which the United States Supreme Court overturned ( Read more... )

How much time should pass before a President's legacy can be assessed with true objectivity and without any intellectual bias skewed by the historian's political ideology? Is such assessment impossible during the President's lifetime, or during the lifetime of those old enough to vote during that presidency? Whatever the requisite time of passage ( Read more... )