<p>Widely considered the leading presidential historian of his generation, Jeffrey Engel connects America’s past with our present, helping our nation find a way forward by bringing history to life with humor and insight. </p><p>Today’s problems are nothing new. The United States has faced wars, pandemics, and political division before. While history is an imperfect guide to enacting a better future, it’s the best guide we have. It’s also a guide both for, and full of, people. While others might focus on the dry and statistical view of the past, Engel goes inside the lives of the people on the ground who made history happen. From the White House to the front lines to the factory floor, he shares new revelations and insights, with humor to help us find a way forward by studying those who walked the same path before.</p><p>Jeffrey A. Engel is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, Professor in the William P. Clements Department of History, and a Senior Fellow of the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies. Trained at Cornell University, Oxford University, and Yale University, he received his PhD in American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001. He has previously taught at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Texas A&M University, where he was the Kruse ’52 Professor and received recognition for teaching at the college, university, and system levels. In 2019, SMU’s Resident Life Students named him their campus-wide Hope Professor of the Year.</p><p>Engel has authored and edited a total of thirteen books on American foreign policy and the American presidency, the latest including <em>When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War </em>and the co-authored <em>Impeachment: An American History</em>. Engel is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, and in 2025 he was the Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Vienna School of International Studies.</p>
Leading Presidential Historian of our time; Podcast host, <i>The Past, The Promise, The Presidency</i>; and Founding Director, SMU's Center for Presidential History
<ul><li><strong>America at 250: A Founder’s Report Card</strong></li><li>It’s been two and a half centuries since minutemen fired on redcoats at Lexington and Concord. A year later the Continental Congress declared independence, declaring as well that “All men are created equal,” being endowed by their creator with the same right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Questioned even as they were written, those words echoed over ensuing generations as the United States grew from a piddling player on the periphery of the international system to the world’s most dominant force since imperial Rome. Those original ideas permeated in particular the nation’s three great existential crises—its founding, Civil War, and Great Depression—and force us to ask what those early revolutionaries might think about our nation today? It’s not an easy question. Anyone who tells you “The founders thought” shouldn’t be listened to. They were as diverse in perspective and opinion as we. And they were tough graders as well. </li><li><strong>Surviving America’s Existential Crises</strong></li><li>Every generation faces crises. Yet only three times in our nation’s history has the republic’s very existence been in doubt. George Washington left his well-earned retirement to provide a symbol of stability and virtue the new nation would not have formed without. Abraham Lincoln oversaw a country rent in two. Franklin D. Roosevelt governed during an economic crisis so great many wondered if democracy itself could survive. Today our politically-riven nation may well face only the fourth existential crisis in its long history, and only the lessons of the past can help navigate the rocky shoals ahead.</li><li><strong>Putin and the Presidents</strong></li><li>US-Russian relations are at a new post-Cold War low. But those tensions go far beyond the current crisis over Ukraine. Russian-American antagonisms stem instead from long-standing geopolitical differences — different worldviews, really — held by American and Russian leaders since the Cold War’s End. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev set the stage for change, but only one man has been a constant in their critical bilateral relationship since: Vladimir Putin. His personal story reveals much of why the world is at war with Russia today, a story told through the evolution of his relationship with the U.S. Presidents he’s known: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. </li><li><strong>Seeking Monsters to Destroy: How America Goes to War</strong></li><li>The United States began in war, and war remains an omnipresent feature of American life today. But not all American wars have been the same. Some have been waged as self-defense, others as wars for liberation. Some for conquest and some as righteous crusades. American leaders since George Washington have considered carefully the best way to rally their people to fight—and frequently to kill people who look, talk, and pray just like Americans, and the evolution of how Americans rally to war reveals not only who we fight, but how, in ways too deeply ingrained for policymakers to fully appreciate, leaving them unaware of the cognitive and ideological constraints that often shape their decisions, and thus their nation’s fate. </li></ul>