American Caesars

The twentieth century has been called 'the American Century', and award-winning biographer Nigel Hamilton now gives us the lives of the twelve men who presided over America's imperial fortunes -- the good, the bad and the truly awful.
2016 will see the next United States presidential election. The U.S. is on the defensive in the Middle East, facing a resurgent Russia, and competing with a Chinese empire flexing its modern military muscles. Can the American empire – established as a benign imperial undertaking at the conclusion of World War II – maintain its global economic and military hegemony? Looking at the lives and careers of the ‘American Caesars’, from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush and the role of the U.S. Presidents during World War II, historian and biographer Nigel Hamilton will draw a perspective on the challenges facing the U.S. – and us all – today. Where are our Eisenhowers today? Where are our Kennedys? Our Trumans? Where is the American courage?

Nigel Hamilton is an historian and award-winning biographer, and Senior Fellow in the McCormack Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Boston. He has written many books including JFK: Reckless Youth (1992), American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (2011) and The Mantle of Command, FDR at War, 1941-1942 (2014). He is currently working on the second volume of this FDR opus; Commander in Chief: FDR’s Battle With Churchill, 1943. Hamilton has contributed to dozens of television documentary programs and often writes op-ed pieces for the New York Times and the London Independent.

This lecture is organized in cooperation with Biography Institute, affiliated to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen.