James M. Banner Jr.
James M. Banner Jr. is an independent historian in Washington, D.C. The cofounder of the National History Center, he is now a visiting scholar in the history department of George Washington University. Banner is a coeditor of Becoming Historians (2009), the author of Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History (2012), and the editor of Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today (2019). His latest book is The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History is Revisionist History (2021). Banner's play, "Good and Faithful Servants," adapted from the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson, is under development.
FEATURED LECTURE
Presidential Misconduct: The Long View
OAH Lectures by James M. Banner Jr.
Drawn from Banner's edited book of essays, "Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today," this lecture will cover the record of presidential misconduct originally prepared in 1974 by a group of historians, of whom Banner was one, for the Impeachment Inquiry of the House Committee on the Judiciary and brought up to date in 2019 through the administration of Barack Obama. The sole comprehensive account of its subject in the historical literature, its contents are open to many interpretations.
Designed principally as a general guide to graduate students as they commence their preparations to be professional historians, this lecture, building on Banner's 2012 book, Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History, reviews the state of the discipline of history today, proposes the practices and institutions deserving of attention in both academic and public history arenas, and ends on the necessity of graduate students' charting the professional courses best for them.
In our era of disputed elections, the presidential elections of 1800 and 1801--one involving voting in each state, the other in the House of Representatives--have new salience. This outcome of this duo of elections, arguably the first "critical election" outcome in the United States, created a Democratic majority that lasted for 60 years, threatened the constitutional fabric, and laid the groundwork for path-breaking constitutional developments. But there's more to say about it than we've recognized, especially if we focus directly on the election of 1801, which resolved the deadlocked electoral college vote. The effort to resolve the deadlock offered the first instance of disinterested constitutionalism--a commitment of which we could use more today--in the nation's history. And, as the lecture argues, close examination of the resolution of the electoral deadlock brings to the fore the election's possible, and so far overlooked, links, personal as well as juridical, to John Marshall's decision in Marbury v. Madison only two years later.