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" With my first few books, I was aiming at an academic audience, basically, to get tenure. You can presuppose a certain amount of knowledge; you can expect that there is this common background. "

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" President Trump is doing what he can to act decisively. And if there's one thing most people have in mind in distinguishing the business world from the political world is that the CEO of a business can act decisively. "

H. W. Brands

World

Political

People

" The historic dearth of labor was perhaps the central feature of the American economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. "

" Love makes the most careful man wreckless. "

" I never admit to wishing I'd written something by another author, but if my name mysteriously appeared on the title page of 'The Guns of August,' I wouldn't complain. "

" When a president was elected with foreign policy experience, it was usually less about his foreign policy experience than other things. "

" The president is the one person who potentially could be the unifying figure in the country. And if the president or a presidential candidate basically writes off 40 states, then how in the world do the people in those 40 states feel like they have a stake in that person or that election? "

" Booker Washington was essentially the head Republican boss in the South. He was a power broker. "

H. W. Brands

Republican

Power

" It's hard to get in the head of somebody. The closest we can get is through the words they've left behind, either their contemporary correspondence or after-the-fact memoirs. "

" A president can start a war under relatively specious circumstances, and once American soldiers are under fire, Americans will support the soldiers and support the president. "

" To me, the puzzle of Ronald Reagan is how a comparatively ordinary man, someone with not extraordinary talent, accomplished such extraordinary results. At the age of 50, no one expected that this was going to be the guy who would become, at least in my interpretation, one of the two most important presidents of the 20th century. "

" When a president doesn't know the policy, it doesn't make for a very effective leader. "

" People who teach American history survey classes have a lot of ground to cover and tend to focus on landmarks. You get through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and you have to get to the beginning of the 20th century fast. It's pretty easy to go lightly on the Gilded Age. "

" When you're actually president, the spin matters a lot less. "

" The American political system is based on the president taking the initiative and Congress responding. With President Trump, it's been the opposite. "

" Reagan refused to demonize his foes. Instead he charmed them, with a few exceptions, including Tip O'Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House and the embodiment of the liberalism Reagan sought to reverse. "

" America can change its presidents, but the world doesn't change. "

" Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz. "

" I'm more inclined to say the presidency has changed Trump rather than Trump changed the presidency. He has moderated or reversed himself on most of the positions he took as a candidate. Reality has set in, as it does with every new president. "

H. W. Brands

New

President

" By the early 1960s, there was a moral consensus on what needed to be done on civil rights. "

" Americans knock themselves out, especially since 9/11, praising the military. "

" The president was not the most important political player in the 19th century. Besides Jefferson at the beginning, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, the center of politics was Congress. "

" President Obama ran a campaign in 2008 that was entirely expected from a non-incumbent. You promise, and you imply that if you elect me, everything good is going to happen. "

H. W. Brands

Happen

Everything

" The Republican Party has moved substantially to the right of where Reagan was. "

" With my students, I always have to sell my subject because I know when you're 19, 20 years old, you've got other things on your mind besides American history. What I have to do is make this as compelling as possible. "

" It wasn't the smiling Trump that people elected. It was the frowning, glowering, angry Donald Trump that people elected. "

" I cannot think of a president or administration that has taken seriously the 100 days. "

" There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling. "

" Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man. "

" The Tea Party loves Reagan because he said exactly what they want to hear. "

" I certainly don't think that the heirs of the American Revolution were a particularly noble class. "