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In 2011 Barack Obama invited ten distinguished biographers to the White House to ask them one question: which past American president should I emulate? This was not the first time Obama asked scholars this, but the answer he received would differ as presidential legacies waxed and waned. In 2008 Obama chose Lincoln; in 2009, Reagan; and in 2010, Theodore Roosevelt.
Perspectives on Presidential Leadership is an examination of presidential legacy, and in particular an analysis of the first ever UK ranking of American presidents which took place in 2011. In thirteen chapters, thirteen individual presidential administrations are assessed. Some presidents have been considered a success, others a failure; both types are featured in these thirteen case studies in a measured attempt to understand how the perception of presidential leadership evolves, shifts, and contorts across three centuries of American politics. The case studies also derive from the expertise of the collected British, Irish and Canadian authors, all of whom are leading scholars in their fields, and many of which took part in the 2011 survey.
At a time when understanding presidential legacy is in high demand, this book offers a unique international perspective. Through extended commentary and inter-disciplinary study of the UK perspective it provides groundbreaking research.
List of contents
Introduction: Rating America’s Presidents, a UK Perspective; Iwan Morgan. 1. The Meanings of Going First: George Washington and the Presidency; Finn Pollard 2. John Quincy Adams: An Exceptionally Average President?; Peter O’Connor 3. A Poetic Presidency: Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman and the "Second American Revolution"; Clare Frances Elliott. 4. Andrew Johnson: The Wrong Man in the Wrong Place; Iwan Morgan 5. A (Near) Great President: Theodore Roosevelt as the First Modern President; Michael Patrick Cullinane 6. Re-evaluating the Presidency of Warren G. Harding; Niall Palmer 7. Simply the Best: FDR as America’s Number One President; Tony McCulloch 8. King’s Last President: A Canadian Prime Minister’s Perspective on Harry S. Truman’s First Term; Hector Mackenzie 9. LBJ: If not for Vietnam; Sylvia Ellis 10. The Reagan Presidency in Retrospect: An Assessment of Reagan's Legacy; Sally-Ann Treharne 11. George H.W. Bush and Presidential Peacemaking in Ranking American Presidents; J Simon Rofe 12. President Bill Clinton: Ranking, Reputation, and Legacy; John Dumbrell 13. An Obama Doctrine?; Omer Aziz and David G. Haglund
About the author
Michael Patrick Cullinane is senior lecturer of U.S. history at Northumbria University, UK and a specialist in presidential statecraft, presidential legacies, and transatlantic relations. He is the author of Liberty and American Anti-Imperialism, 1898-1909 (2012) which examines the anti-imperialist movement during the "great debate" in U.S. foreign policy over imperial expansion. Cullinane has also published several articles and chapters on the politics and legacy of Theodore Roosevelt. He is currently working on a lengthier monograph investigating Roosevelt’s posthumous image over a century of memorialization.
Clare Frances Elliott is lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at Northumbria University, UK. Her research interests are in transatlantic literary studies and she is currently editing The Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies for Edinburgh University Press with Leslie Eckel and Andrew Taylor and completing a monograph, Atlantic Blake: Transnational Romanticism. Elliott has edited, with Andrew Hook, Francis Jeffrey’s American Journal (Glasgow: Humming Earth Press, 2011) and is the author of several articles on Francis Jeffrey, William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. She serves on the executive committee for the Transatlantic Studies Association.
