Episode 11: Lincoln with Lindsay Chervinsky and Megan Kate Nelson

This week Historians At The Movies gets into Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. And I've got two of the best damn historians working today to talk about it. And yes, we're ranking the hottest presidents of all time.

About our guests:
Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and currently is a fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. She received her B.A. with honors in history and political science from George Washington University, her masters and Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, and her postdoctoral fellowship from Southern Methodist University. Previously Dr. Chervinsky worked as a historian at the White House Historical Association. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Bulwark, Time Magazine, USA Today, CNN, NBC Think, and the Washington Post. Dr. Chervinsky is the author of the award-winning book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, recently out in paperback, and the forthcoming book An Honest Man: The Inimitable Presidency of John Adams.

Dr. Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of four books: Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner 2022); The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020; finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History); Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia, 2012); and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (Georgia, 2005). Megan writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, and TIME. For several years, she also wrote movie and TV series reviews for the Civil War Monitor. Before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014, Megan taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She grew up in Colorado but now lives outside Boston with her husband and two cats.