UPCOMING EVENTS

Monday, August 24. 6:30 PM – 7:30 p.m. Senate House State Historic Site. Keynote, Voices of Revolution 250th series.

Tue, Sep 15, 2026, 6:30–8:00 p.m. Center for Brooklyn History. I’ll be in conversation with Jesse Wegman to celebrate his new book, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution. James Wilson—one of only six men to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and one of the first six justices ever seated on the Supreme Court—is an important founder most Americans have never heard of. And like all founders, he’s a little messy: Wilson died broke, terribly ill, and hiding from creditors in the back room of a North Carolina tavern in August 1798.

Reply Some: Herbert Hoover v. Periodization

Reply Some is a recurring dispatch in which I selectively respond to your questions and comments.

Jesse Wegman asks:

Was it you who provided me with the fascinating nugget that since Lincoln’s assassination, every American president has lived at the same time as Herbert Hoover? (And extra credit if this ever comes up at pub trivia night: Kamala Harris was born the day Hoover died.)

Sounds like something I would say to Jesse—a friend, a legal scholar, and an author with a thing for the founding era. Over the years, we’ve covered a lot of ground, and I hope he always thinks of me when attribution seems likely and/or flattering.

As for Hoover: He’s right—but this fact is better than trivia-night fodder.

Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the United States, was born on August 10, 1874, while Andrew Johnson was still alive, and lived until October 20, 1964, when Barack Obama was a toddler in Hawaii. Every president from Andrew Johnson through Donald Trump therefore lived at the same time as Herbert Hoover.1

And Jesse’s “extra credit” tip—Kamala Harris was born the day Hoover died—is worth considering as more than a fun fact. Hoover was born during Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 became law before his first birthday. Harris’ parents met because they were active in the civil-rights movement, and Hoover died, and she was born, less than four months after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The symmetry is, for my lot, indecently neat: she would become the first female, first Black, and first Asian American vice president.

There’s another example you may know: In 1790, John Tyler, the 10th president, was born while George Washington, POTUS 1, was still in office. Harrison Ruffin Tyler, his grandson, died at 96 during Donald Trump’s second term. How do two lives bridge 235 years? Late fatherhood, twice over. John Tyler was 63 when his son Lyon Gardiner Tyler was born, and Lyon was 75 when Harrison arrived.

A third, smaller-scale, adjacent echo: Helen Viola Jackson, the last known surviving widow of a Civil War veteran, died in December 2020—meaning a living marital connection to the Civil War persisted into the COVID pandemic. In 1936, Jackson, 17, married James Bolin, a 93-year-old Union veteran James Bolin, more than seventy years after the war ended. They kept their marriage a secret for decades.

Hoover makes twenty-nine presidents contemporaries. John Tyler and his grandson span Washington’s first term to 2025 in two lives. Trace the line from Andrew Jackson through a Civil War veteran and it ends not in sepia, but among people who remember wiping down groceries. They make American history suddenly, almost indecently, short, but my favorite historical compression prop is John Quincy Adams, 6th president and son of John Adams, founder and 2nd president.

Nearly fifteen years after leaving the White House, Adams sat for a daguerreotype in 1843—four years after the new photographic process was introduced in France. A man who grew up among the people who made the Revolution lived long enough to have his actual face captured by a technology we instinctively file in a different historical century.

We consider Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and the civil-rights era distinct periods, and chronologically, they are. But periodization can create false walls. History does not change the set when one era ends and another begins—and the old cast often lingers.

See you soonish! In the meantime, you can find me on Instagram and, on occasion, Bluesky and Twitter. My books are at Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookstore or library. If you’d like me to sign or personalize my books, purchase copies from Oblong Books.