<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> In 2025 Engel will be the Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Diplomatische Akademie Wien (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>The Historical Significance of the 2024 Presidential Election: A Bipartisan Look</strong></li></ul><p>Every four years we are told the upcoming election is the most important of our lifetime. It usually isn’t. But every now and then, the nation’s fate indeed hinges on the outcome of a presidential vote. This is one such year. Both major party candidates cast their opponent as an existential threat, and the nation’s future will likely prove much different under a Trump or a Harris presidency. But beyond the noise, the fearmongering, and our collective exhaustion, what makes this election so significant from an historical perspective? We’ve had razor-thin and disputed elections before. Since 2000 the popular vote winner failed to gain an electoral college victory—and thus the White House—twice. That had only happened three times in the prior two centuries, and we remain in the shadow of January 6, 2021 and its unprecedented challenge to the final tally. Will similar electoral and constitutional chaos occur again in 2024? Will the candidate’s character ultimately matter more than their vote count? This keynote, focused not on partisanship but on a dispassionate view of history, offers insights and leadership lessons drawn from previous contests, including the existential ones, offering a glimpse into what we might expect in November, in January, and beyond. </p><ul><li><strong>Surviving America’s Existential Crises</strong></li></ul><p>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.</p><ul><li><strong>America at 250: A Founder’s Report Card</strong></li></ul><p>It’s been two and a half centuries since minutemen opened fire on redcoats at Lexington and Concord in a moment typically considered the start of America’s war for independence. The country they helped forge grew over time from a piddling player on the periphery of the international system to the world’s most dominant force since imperial Rome. What would those early revolutionaries, including the group that fired the shot heard round the world, their counterparts that published the Declaration of Independence the next year, and the ensuing generation that wrote a new constitution think about our nation today? Anyone who tells you “the founders thought” shouldn’t be listened to. They were as diverse in perspective and opinion as we today. But consistencies abounded within their thinking, enough to ask how we’d fare if that first generation graded ours today.</p><ul><li><strong>Putin and the Presidents</strong></li></ul><p>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. </p><p> </p><p> </p>