UConn’s Draper Chair in American History, Professor Manisha Sinha, has dominated recent discussion over the ongoing impeachment process of President Trump in op-eds and media interviews. In addition to providing commentary on the current political environment and the House’s fourth impeachment, she also draws strong comparisons to the first presidential impeachment of Andrew Johnson. As noted by Sinha, there are many similarities including that of presidential overreach and encroachment on the powers of Congress. To learn more about the parallels between impeachment past and present, please check out the following links:

New York Times: “Donald Trump, Meet Your Precursor” (November 29, 2019).

KPFA 94.1: Special Broadcast – House Judiciary Committee opens hearing on Trump Impeachment (December 4, 2019).

This is Democracy: Episode 68 – The First Presidential Impeachment (December 5, 2019).

NPR: A Look Back at the First Presidential Impeachment In the U.S. (December 11, 2019).

KCBS Radio San Francisco 7:40 AM (December 13, 2019).

On November 29, Professor Manisha Sinha contributed another excellent historical analysis to the New York Times’ Opinion section. Titled “Donald Trump, Meet Your Precursor,” Professor Sinha compares the racism and “impeachment-worthy subterfuge” of Presidents Donald Trump and Andrew Johnson. Sinha writes, “Historical parallelism rarely works in a simplistic manner. But it does work when historians discern broad similarities and patterns that link our present moment to the past. Many fallible men have inhabited the office of the presidency. Only a handful have been so oblivious to the oath they took that they have met the constitutional standard for impeachment.” 

To read more, click here.

On Friday, November 8 at the UConn School of Law, a panel discussion will take place to honor and celebrate the career of Professor R. Kent Newmyer.  The celebration will include a panel discussion with Prof. Mary Bilder from Boston College Law School and Prof. Jed Shugerman from Fordham Law School. The theme will be “Story’s Children: The Rule of Law in an Age of Political Disruption – From Jacksonian to America to Our Times”. The event will take place from 11-12:30 pm in the Reading Room of Starr Hall.

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Newmyer has been a Professor of Law and History at the UConn School of Law since 1997 where he taught a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses in American history, specializing in the political, constitutional and legal history of the early national period. Prior to teaching at the law school, he taught American History at UConn from 1960-1977. He has received two awards for teaching and in 1988 was named a Distinguished Alumni Professor for excellence in teaching and scholarship, the highest faculty honor bestowed by the University.

As an author, Professor Newmyer is best known for Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (1985) and John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (2001). A second edition of his short volume on The Supreme Court Under Marshall and Taney was published in 2006. Professor Newmyer’s books have been reviewed in various history journals and law reviews, as well as in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Republic. He has appeared on C-Span’s “Booknotes,” and most recently was a commentator in a National Public Television documentary (produced by Channel 13 in New York City) on the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Newmyer’s latest book is The Treason Trial of Aaron Burr: Law, Politics and the Character Wars of the New Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2012). His article on the Burr trial appears in the May/June 2013 issue of Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Associate Professor Fiona Vernal recently was interviewed by the Time to Eat Dogs podcast in an episode titled “The City Built by Travel.” Following the creation of her exhibit, “From Human Rights to Civil Rights: African American, Puerto Rican, and West Indian Housing Struggles in Hartford County Connecticut, 1940-2019″ at the Hartford Public Library, Prof. Vernal discusses the various travel experiences of Hartford’s communities. 

On Friday, October, 18, large demonstrations erupted across Chile after a fare increase occurred in the capital of Santiago – resulting in the largest popular demonstration in the country’s history. In UConn Today, Mark Healey, Associate Professor and head of the History Department, provided a Q&A that historicizes the protests and situates the unrest within a wider frame of the South American region. According to Healey, “[i]t’s important to understand that present-day democratic Chile remains the child of the dictatorship that ended in 1990″ and that, throughout the region, “[t]here are lots of worrisome echoes of the past right now, most obviously the images of presidents standing in front of generals that have become ubiquitous in the last few weeks.”

To read the article, please click here.

Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, UConn Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music, was recently interviewed by “In Vivo” podcast, which shares the fascinating stories of researchers at UConn. In the process of drawing attention to how UConn is a “pioneer of research and innovation,” In Vivo discussed with Professor Ogbar how his work furthers our understanding of black nationalism, social justice, and the sociopolitical evolution of hip hop. Additionally, the episodes features a discussion of Ogbar’s next book that is a history of the rise of political power in Atlanta (from the Antebellum period to the present).