Episode 48: Julian Zelizer, Polarization and U.S. History

I’m joined today by Julian Zelizer, historian at Princeton University and CNN Political Analyst. He has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He has written over 900 op-eds, including his popular weekly column for CNN.com. He is also a regular contributor to The Atlantic. This year, he is the Distinguished Senior Fellow at the New York Historical Society where he is writing a book about Abraham Joshua Heschel.

He’s the coauthor with Kevin Kruse of Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, which was published in January 2019. Kevin appeared on an earlier Half Hour of Heterodoxy episode. This book is based on the class that Julian teaches at Princeton (syllabus here).

He is also the author and editor of 17 other books including The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (2015), the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress. In March 2020, Norton will publish his history of the downfall of Speaker of the House Jim Wright and the rise of New Gingrich. He has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and New America. He also co-hosts a popular podcast called Politics & Polls.

Links

Julian Zelizer & Kevin M. Kruse, Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974

Syllabus for the Princeton course on U.S. history since 1974

Books on Russia by Stephen Kotkin

Aleksandr Fursenko & Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary 

Jeffrey Engel, When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die 

Transcript

Here is a transcript of this episode.

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