News, Media & Publications

For anyone who missed East Anglia Prof. Kaeten Mistry and Kinder Institute Chair Jay Sexton’s February 5 conversation on the history of national security whistleblowing in the U.S., you can now access C-SPAN’s recording of the event using this link. In addition, you can find out more about Prof. Mistry’s current work with Dr. Hannah […]

Scholars have long debated the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, yet have tended to define it narrowly, focusing on a single intellectual tradition, and on the use of the term within a single text, the Declaration of Independence. In this insightful volume, Prof. Carli N. Conklin considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety […]

The Sourcebook examines the diverse characteristics of the departments, agencies, and other organizational entities that comprise the federal executive establishment and catalogues a comprehensive set of characteristics for each entity, including structure (e.g., commission or single-head agency, internal organization), personnel (e.g., number and types of appointed positions, limitations on removal), decision-making processes and requirements, political oversight, […]

The idea that the three branches of the U.S. government are equal in power is taught in classrooms, proclaimed by politicians, and referenced in the media. But, as David Siemers shows, that idea is a myth, neither intended by the Founders nor true in practice. Siemers explains how adherence to this myth normalizes a politics […]

Kinder Institute Endowed Chair and Professor of History Jay Sexton hopped on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show” on November 8 to discuss his new book A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History, published in October by Basic Books. You can listen to the full interview here.

In A Nation Forged by Crisis, Kinder Institute Chair in Constitutional Democracy Jay Sexton contends that our national narrative is not one of halting yet inevitable progress but of repeated disruptions brought about by shifts in the international system. Sexton shows that the American Revolution was a consequence of the increasing integration of the British […]