government

Democracy works only when enough of us believe democracy works.

Editor’s Note: Eric P. Liu is the CEO and co-founder of Citizen University, a non-profit organization promoting civic empowerment, and the author of numerous books on civic engagement. This essay was adapted from a talk Mr.

Annals of the Third House

Bernard A. Weisberger | April 1996

New legislation means to bring lobbyists out into the sunlight. History suggests they’ll bask there.

I am always a little dubious of unanimous votes like the 421-0 landslide by which the House of Representatives passed a bill to regulate lobbying at the tail end of 1995.

Speaking of Speakers

Bernard A. Weisberger | July/August 1995

A look at the very small group of powerful and effective men who are Newt Gingrich’s truest models

It is not easy to be non-partisan about a confrontational politician like Newt Gingrich, but I think it’s reasonably objective to say that he has elevated the job of Speaker of the House to a level of visibility that is rare in its two centuries of existence.

Reinventing Government, 1882

Bernard A. Weisberger | February/March 1994

They had the perfect remedy for the bloated bureaucracy: the civil service.

The explicit premise behind this column, it should be clear to regular readers, is borrowed from Ecclesiastes (or Koheleth) and declares that “there is no new thing under the sun.” It is sometimes hard to justify; I am not sure what Ecclesiastes would have mad

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.