Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln enters the American story as a silhouette before he becomes a figure—long-limbed, awkward, moving through a world of stumps and distances, carrying books as if they were tools and ideas as if…
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American Presidents
Verified podcast archive on the lives and administrations of American presidents.
Nathaniel Gorham – Acting President of Congress (1785–1786)
Nathaniel Gorham’s turn in the chair began not with trumpets but with the small, exacting necessities that keep a weak government from collapsing into embarrassment. The famous man elected to preside—John Hancock, emblem of…
Richard Henry Lee – President of Congress (1784–1785)
Richard Henry Lee’s tenure in the chair arrives in the afterglow of a miracle and the onset of a long migraine. The miracle was the war’s end—Washington’s graceful bow at Annapolis, the definitive treaty…
Thomas Mifflin – President of Congress (1783–1784)
Thomas Mifflin’s year in the chair belongs to the narrow space where performance and contrition meet: a politician and soldier with a reputation dinged by whispers from the coldest winter of the war, returned…
Elias Boudinot – President of Congress (1782–1783)
In the last hard winter of the war, when rumors of peace traveled faster than pay and slower than hunger, a compact, careful New Jersey lawyer with a Huguenot name took the chair of…
John Hanson – Often Mythologized as First President Under the Articles (1781–1782)
The story most people hear about John Hanson arrives as a neat provocation: before George Washington there was another “first president,” a dignified Marylander who held the office under the Articles of Confederation and…
Samuel Huntington – Last Continental Congress President / First Under the Articles (1779–1781)
In the late autumn of 1779 a spare, careful man from Connecticut took the chair in Philadelphia and set about the unglamorous work of keeping a rebellion orderly. Samuel Huntington did not look like…
Arthur St. Clair – President of Congress (1787)
Arthur St. Clair’s year in the chair feels like a hinge cut out of iron: heavy, cold to the touch, load-bearing in a way that is easy to miss if you only glance at…
Cyrus Griffin – Final President of Congress (1788–1789)
Cyrus Griffin’s season in the chair arrives like the last careful breath before a long swim—measured, deliberate, and entirely aware that the air he is gathering must carry more than just himself. When he…
John Jay – President of the Continental Congress (1778–1779)
On a gray December afternoon in 1778, a slender man with a narrow, thoughtful face and a faint scar along his cheekbone took the chair at the front of a crowded hall in Philadelphia.…