There is broad scholarly agreement that our current political world owes much to what Thomas Paine was the first to call the "age of revolutions"—that is, the several late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century decades during which revolutions rocked the globe. But what gave rise to the age of revolutions? Why, suddenly, were era-spanning monarch…

Perhaps no extant product of the U.S. Constitution has received more bipartisan animus than the Electoral College. Since 1800 there have been more than 700 proposals introduced in Congress to amend or eliminate the way in which America chooses its presidents. Yet the Electoral College lives on. Why do we have this system? Why does it inspire such c…

Is democracy in trouble? Many Americans believe so: recent polls consistently rank "threats to democracy" as one of respondents' top concerns. In the new book The Civic Bargain, authors Brook Manville and Josiah Ober look to history for examples of democracies under threat. By examining the ways in which historical democracies confronted their own …

Some 40 million people in the American West rely on water from the Colorado River. But the river’s flow has diminished, and those decreases will likely continue. What does this mean for the American West in general and California and Arizona in particular? Will booming metro areas—Maricopa County, for example—have to halt their growth? Will vast ex…

The story often told is that rural America is in decline, and that rural Americans are resentful of their suburban and urban counterparts. But Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues in her new book The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means For Our Country that rural Americans and rural America are in many ways actually …

Civics for Life and the O'Connor Institute welcome Professor Cristina Rodríguez and Mr. Adam White as they join host Liam Julian, director of Public Policy at the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute, for an online conversation and share diverse perspectives on the Future of the Court. Rodríguez and White both served as members of the Presidential Commiss…

Do open primaries and ranked-choice voting have the potential to improve American elections, or will they create more problems than they solve? Kevin Meyer, former lieutenant governor of Alaska; Steve Goldstein, executive director of Save Democracy AZ; and Jaime Molera, former Arizona superintendent of public instruction join the O'Connor Institute…

Civics for Life and the O'Connor Institute welcome Jed Perl as he joins Liam Julian, director of Public Policy at the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute, for a discussion on the relationship between art and society, the artist’s role in society, and whether art and artists have definite social and political responsibilities. Perl is the author of nine b…

Civics for Life and the O'Connor Institute welcome Professor Nick Seabrook as he joins Liam Julian, director of Public Policy at the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute, for an online conversation on Gerrymandering. Gerrymandering, according to Webster, is "to divide or arrange (an area) into political units to give special advantages to one group when v…

What is the museum’s role in society? How does – and can – the museum function as a civic space? Dr. Anthea Hartig, the first woman director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, recently sat down with Civics for Life to briefly discuss these and other questions You can find us at: https://civicsforlife.org/ Follow u…

In his book The Quest for Character, Massimo Pigliucci asks: can good character be taught? Through an exploration of Greek and Roman philosophy, and especially the interaction of Socrates and Alcibiades, Pigliucci helps us understand what makes a good leader, and how we can educate others, and ourselves, to be better people and citizens. You can fi…

Emancipation in America is often presented as a single and singular undertaking. But Professor Kris Manjapra's new book, Black Ghost of Empire, complicates that story by situating America's national emancipation in a long line of global emancipations--including the first emancipations, which occurred in America's North in the late 18th century--tha…

The Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy presents a Civics for Life Conversation with author and historian Claire Rydell Arcenas and Liam Julian, director of Public Policy at the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute. In her book America's Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life, Rydell Arcenas seeks to better understand and i…

Episode three of the three-part series "The Economy: Inflation, the Fed, and You." Inflation in America is happening for the first time in forty years, but different parts of the country are experiencing inflation differently. How do the ways in which we measure price increases, such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI), contribute to regional varianc…

Episode two of the three-part series "The Economy: Inflation, the Fed, and You." Inflation in America is happening for the first time in forty years, and the Federal Reserve has committed to fighting it. What tools can and does the Fed use to battle inflation, and what are its other economic duties beyond keeping prices stable? Who at the Federal R…

Episode one of the three-part series "The Economy: Inflation, the Fed, and You." Inflation in America is happening for the first time in forty years. Why have prices gone up and when might they come down? What role do monetary policy, the Federal Reserve, and legislators play? And what is the fiscal theory of inflation? Hoover Institution economist…

In September 1981, Senator Dennis DeConcini, a Democrat from Arizona, supported President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor as the first woman to take a seat seat on the United States Supreme Court. Hear an eyewitness to history from that unprecedented time, Senator Dennis DeConcini himself, in a moderated conversation with his long…