Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump

The Alliance for Civics in the Academy hosted "Comparative Civics: Beyond Western Civ" with Dongxian Jiang, Shadi Bartsch, Simon Sihang Luo, and Peter Levine on December 10, 2025, from 9:00-10:00 a.m. PT. There is broad agreement that effective citizenship requires a firm understanding of the history and principles of the American constitutional system. But what about the insights, lessons, and perspectives that can be drawn from foreign contexts? How might the study of other societies–including those with autocratic systems or markedly different cultural traditions–enhance one’s preparation for effective American citizenship? This webinar explores what global perspectives can teach us about citizenship and democracy at home. Panelists: Dongxian Jiang: Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies, Department of Languages and Cultures, Fordham University.  Shadi Bartsch: Helen A Regenstein Professor of Classics; Director Emerita, Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, University of Chicago Simon Sihang Luo: Nanyang Assistant Professor, Public Policy and Global Affairs Programme, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Moderator: Peter Levine: Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Service, Tufts University; Executive Committee Members, Alliance for Civics in the Academy 

The Hoover Applied History Working Group hosted a special book-launch seminar: Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump on Tuesday, December 2, 2025.  What happens when Americans lose faith in their religious institutions—and politicians fill the void? Please join us for a seminar that will discuss the forces that create leaders and hold their followers captive. Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of reasonable and responsible leaders. Nuanced debates have given way to the smug confidence of yard signs. How did we get here? In Spellbound, Worthen argues that we will understand our present moment if we learn the story of charisma in America. From the Puritans and Andrew Jackson to Black nationalists and Donald Trump, the saga of American charisma stars figures who possess a dangerous and alluring power to move crowds. They invite followers into a cosmic drama that fulfills hopes and rectifies grievances—and these charismatic leaders insist that they alone plot the way. The story of charisma in America reveals that when traditional religious institutions fail to deliver on their promise of a meaningful life, people will get their spiritual needs met in a warped cultural and political landscape dominated by those who appear to have the power to bring order and meaning out of chaos. Charismatic leaders address spiritual needs, offering an alternate reality where people have knowledge, power, and heroic status, whether as divinely chosen instruments of God or those who will restore national glory. Worthen’s centuries-spanning historical research places a crucial religious lens on the cultural, economic, and political upheavals facing Americans today.

After the Hoover Applied History Working Group book-launch seminar on Tuesday, December 2, 2025, Hoover Institution fellow Niall Ferguson interviewed Molly Worthen the author of Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump. Watch the full book-launch seminar here: https://youtu.be/bXkccTi7ZDE

The Hoover History Lab and its Applied History Working Group in close partnership with the Global Policy and Strategy Initiative held The Arsenal of Democracy Technology, Industry, and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices on Thursday, November 20, 2025, from 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM PT. The event featured the authors Eyck Freymann, Hoover Fellow, and Harry Halem, Senior Fellow at Yorktown Institute, in conversation with Stephen Kotkin, Kleinheinz Family Senior Fellow. The US military stands at a moment of profound risk and uncertainty. China and its authoritarian partners have pulled far ahead in defense industrial capacity. Meanwhile, emerging technologies are reshaping the character of air and naval warfare and putting key elements of the US force at risk. To prevent a devastating war with China, America must rally its allies to build a new arsenal of democracy. But achieving this goal swiftly and affordably involves hard choices. The Arsenal of Democracy is the first book to integrate military strategy, industrial capacity, and budget realities into a comprehensive deterrence framework. While other books explain why deterrence matters, this book provides the detailed roadmap for how America can actually sustain deterrence through the 2030s—requiring a whole-of-nation effort with coordinated action across Congress, industry, and allied governments. Rapidly maturing technologies are already reshaping the battlefield: unmanned systems on air, land, sea, and undersea; advanced electronic warfare; space-based sensing; and more. Yet China’s industrial strengths could give it advantages in a protracted conflict. The United States and its allies must both revitalize their industrial bases to achieve necessary production scale and adapt existing platforms to integrate new high-tech tools. FEATURING Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University and a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the U.S. Naval War College, China Maritime Studies Institute. He works on strategies to preserve peace and protect U.S. interests and values in an era of systemic competition with China. He is the author of several books, including The Arsenal of Democracy: Technology, Industry, and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices, with Harry Halem, and One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World. His scholarly work has appeared in The China Quarterly and is forthcoming in International Security.  Harry Halem is a Senior Fellow at Yorktown Institute. He holds an MA (Hons) in Philosophy and International Relations from the University of St Andrews, and an MSc in Political Philosophy from the London School of Economics.  Mr. Halem worked for the Hudson Institute’s Seapower Center, along with multiple UK think-tanks.  He has published a variety of short-form pieces and monographs on various aspects of military affairs, in addition to a short book on Libyan political history. Stephen Kotkin is the Kleinheinz Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School), where he taught for 33 years. He earned his PhD at the University of California–Berkeley and has been conducting research in the Hoover Library & Archives for more than three decades. Kotkin’s research encompasses geopolitics and authoritarian regimes in history and in the present.

The Alliance for Civics in the Academy hosted "Out of Many, One: Creating a Pluralistic Framework for Civics in Higher Education" with Paul Carrese, Jacob Levy, Minh Ly, and Brian Coyne on November 12, 2025, from 9:00-10:00 a.m. PT. With increasing cross-partisan support for renewing civic learning in higher education, an important question emerges: how can colleges and universities create a framework for civic education that cultivates shared democratic values while honoring pluralism and diverse perspectives? This webinar explores this challenge in depth, highlighting guiding principles and exemplary approaches for creating a shared vision of civic education suited to a pluralistic society. Panelists: Paul Carrese is Director of the Center for American Civics, and professor in the School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership, at Arizona State University, serving as the School’s founding director 2016 to 2023. Formerly he was a professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy, co-founding its honors program blending liberal arts and leadership education. He teaches and publishes on the American founding, American constitutional and political thought, civic education, and American grand strategy. His forthcoming book is Teaching America: Reflective Patriotism in Schools, College, and Culture (Cambridge, May 2026). He has held fellowships at Oxford (Rhodes Scholar); Harvard; University of Delhi (Fulbright); and the James Madison Program, Princeton. He served on the advisory board of the Program on Public Discourse at UNC Chapel Hill; co-led a national study, Educating for American Democracy, on history and civics in K-12 schools with partners from Harvard, Tufts, and iCivics (2021); and served on the Civic Education Committee of the American Political Science Association (APSA). He is a fellow of the Civitas Institute, UT Austin, and serves on the Academic Council of the Jack Miller Center for America’s Founding Principles and History, and the executive and on the executive Council of the APSA. He is a Senior Fellow with the Jack Miller Center, and in 2025 was an Alliance for Civics in the Academy Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Jacob T. Levy is the Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory and associated faculty in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. He is the founder and coordinator of McGill's Research Group on Constitutional Studies, whose Charles Taylor Student Fellowship is devoted to an intensive non-credit yearlong reading group of major works in the history of political, moral, and social thought. Minh Ly is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont.  His book, Answering to Us: Why Democracy Demands Accountability, will be published by Princeton University Press in March 2026. Anna Stilz, distinguished professor at Berkeley, writes, "this powerful book . . . is a must-read for anyone interested in the fate of democracy in our times."  Professor Ly’s research and teaching focus on democratic theory, the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship, economic justice, global justice, and civic education.  His work has been published in the Journal of Politics, the European Journal of Political Theory, the Review of International Political Economy, and other journals.  Before joining UVM, he was a Lecturer at Stanford University and a postdoc at Princeton. Professor Ly earned his Ph.D with distinction in political science from Brown and his A.B. from Harvard.   Moderator: Brian Coyne is an Advanced Lecturer in Political Science and serves as the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Lecturer in Undergraduate Teaching. He received his B.A. in Government from Harvard College in 2007 and his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 2014. His dissertation, "Non-state Power and Non-state Legitimacy," investigates how powerful non-state actors like NGOs, corporations, and international institutions can be held democratically accountable to the people whose lives they influence. Coyne's other research interests include political representation, responses to climate change, and the politics of urban space and planning. In addition to Political Science, he also teaches in Stanford's Public Policy, Urban Studies, and COLLEGE programs.

The Hoover History Lab invites you to "Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future", a book talk with the author, Dan Wang, on Monday, October 27, 2025 from 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. PT in the Shultz Auditorium, George P. Shultz Building. FEATURING Dan Wang is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in its Hoover History Lab and is one of the most-cited experts on China’s technological capabilities. He is the author of the forthcoming Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (W. W. Norton [US] and Penguin [UK], Fall 2025). Stephen Kotkin is director of the Hoover History Lab, Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He has been conducting research in the Hoover Library & Archives for more than three decades.

The Hoover History Lab held Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy, a book talk with the author, Francis J. Gavin on Thursday, October 02, 2025 from 4:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. PT in the Shultz Auditorium, George P. Shultz Building. It seems obvious that we should use history to improve policy. If we have a good understanding of the past, it should enable better decisions in the present, especially in the extraordinarily consequential worlds of statecraft and strategy. But how do we gain that knowledge? How should history be used? Sadly, it is rarely done well, and historians and decision-makers seldom interact. But in this remarkable book, Francis J. Gavin explains the many ways historical knowledge can help us understand and navigate the complex, often confusing world around us. Good historical work convincingly captures the challenges and complexities the decisionmaker faces. At its most useful, history is less a narrowly defined field of study than a practice, a mental awareness, a discernment, and a responsiveness to the past and how it unfolded into our present world—a discipline in the best sense of the word. Gavin demonstrates how a historical sensibility helps us to appreciate the unexpected; complicates our assumptions; makes the unfamiliar familiar and the familiar unfamiliar; and requires us, without entirely suspending moral judgment, to try to understand others on their own terms. This book is a powerful argument for thinking historically as a way for readers to apply wisdom in encountering what is foreign to them. FEATURING Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS. Previously, he was the first Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies at MIT and the Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs and the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. From 2005 until 2010, he directed The American Assembly’s multiyear, national initiative, The Next Generation Project: U.S. Global Policy and the Future of International Institutions. He is the founding Chair of the Board of Editors for the Texas National Security Journal. Gavin’s writings include Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971; Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age ; and Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy (Brookings Institution Press), which was named a 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. His IISS-Adelphi book, The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era was published in 2024. In 2025, he published Wonder and Worry: Contemporary History in an Age of Uncertainty with Stolpe Press, 2025 and Thinking Historically – A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy with Yale University Press. MODERATED BY Stephen Kotkin is director of the Hoover History Lab, Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He has been conducting research in the Hoover Library & Archives for more than three decades.

In this wide-ranging Hoover History Lab discussion, Kleinheinz Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin joins Research Fellow Dan Wang to explore the craft of history and its relevance to the present.  From his office in Hoover Tower, Kotkin reflects on his efforts to answer the big questions of history, guided by a methodology rooted in rigorous archival research, deliberate engagement with contradictory evidence, and a strategic approach to empathy in order to grasp the contexts and motivations that shape human choices at critical historical junctures. In constructing what he calls an “analytical narrative approach” with audiences, he explains how historians can apply their training and skills to show historical patterns, as well as illuminate drivers of change, relationships between structures and agency, and the workings of power: how it is accumulated, exercised, and leaves its mark on societies.  Wang and Kotkin talk about the enormous demand for historical understanding across society and sectors. In responding to that demand, Kotkin underscores the historian’s responsibility to reach both scholarly and public audiences, the dangers of using “junk history” to inform policymaking, and the need for emerging scholars to engage thoughtfully with Artificial Intelligence.  The conversation closes with Kotkin’s reflections about what historical perspective can show us about achieving sustained global peace and prosperity; details about his work and vision at the Hoover History Lab aimed at cultivating rising generations of scholars and meeting widespread public  demand for policy-relevant history; and his recommendations for five books that the audience should consider reading. ABOUT THE HOOVER HISTORY LAB The Hoover History Lab is not a traditional academic department but instead functions as a hub for research, teaching, and convening—in person and online, in the classroom and in print. The Lab studies and uses history to inform public policy, develops next-generation scholars, and reinforces the work of Hoover’s world-class historians to inform scholarship and the teaching of history at Stanford and beyond. The Lab’s work is driven by its principal investigators, who spearhead research and research-based policy projects. The Lab also encompasses a strong cohort of “staff scientist-equivalents”:  research fellows ranging from the most senior, world-renowned scholars to a full slate of exciting next-generation talents who bring fresh, multifaceted insights to our research. Rounding out our team, some of our postdoctoral scholars serve as research and teaching fellows, and we also leverage the talents of exceptional Stanford undergraduates as our student fellows, who participate in leading-edge research, just as in a scientific laboratory. This full-range approach to personnel, spanning all ages and levels of experience, ensures that the mission of the lab carries forward into the future and across to other institutions with a positive, powerful impact.

The following conversation was part of the KGB and Western Plots Against the Soviet Union event, hosted by the Hoover Applied History Working Group on on Friday, May 9, 2025. ABOUT THE TALK Stanford associate professor of history Amir Weiner joins Milbank Senior Fellow Niall Ferguson as part of a discussion of the Hoover Institution Applied History Working Group seminar series, previewing his forthcoming book, At Home with the KGB: A New History of the Soviet Security Service. Weiner examines how the Soviet security service-maintained control after Stalin—not through overt violence, but using methods such as psychological pressure, surveillance, and deeply embedded conspiratorial thinking. The conversation explores how the KGB adapted, shaped leadership transitions, and ultimately failed to prevent the Soviet collapse—offering fresh insights into the Cold War era and the mindset of its most notorious alumnus, Vladimir Putin.

The Hoover Institution Center for Revitalizing American Institutions webinar series features speakers who are developing innovative ideas, conducting groundbreaking research, and taking important actions to improve trust and efficacy in American institutions. Speaker expertise and topics span governmental institutions, civic organizations and practice, and the role of public opinion and culture in shaping our democracy. The webinar series builds awareness about how we can individually and collectively revitalize American institutions to ensure our country’s democracy delivers on its promise. The seventh session discussed Building Strategic Competence: An Urgent Priority for Government and the Academy with H.R. McMaster and Stephen Kotkin on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, from 10:00 - 11:00 am PT. We might define strategic competence as the ability to integrate all elements of national power and efforts of like-minded partners to advance US interests. The nation needs leaders who can think in real time and understand what it takes to implement ideas and strategies on the ground. The academy has an important role in educating leaders to compete effectively in war and in competitions short of war. A reinvigoration of history in higher-level education is particularly important, as many courses in diplomatic and military history have been displaced by theory-based courses, which tend to mask the complex causality of events and obscure the cultural, psychological, social, and economic elements that distinguish cases from one another. Some theories risk sapping students of strategic empathy and encourage them to reduce complex problem sets into frameworks that create only the illusion of understanding. A growing interest in applied history in some universities is a promising development.