Steve Pincus and Keith Gessen discuss Pincus’ most recent book, The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government, which argues that the politically radioactive concerns of 2016 – immigration, income inequality, economic stimulus, austerity, the national debt, government size, trade – were precisely those that concerned the Founders 240 years ago.    

Steve Pincus, the Bradford Durfee Professor of History at Yale, is the author of Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1668; England’s Glorious Revolution 1688-89 and most recently 1688: The First Modern Revolution. He was a Fellow at the Cullman Center in 2014-2015.

Keith Gessen, a founding co-editor of n+1, is the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men. His translations from Russian include It's No Good by Kirill Medvedev, and Svetlana Alexievich's Tchernobylskaia Molitva (Voices from Chernobyl). Gessen, who has written about Russia for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic, andThe New York Review of Books, was also a Cullman Center Fellow in 2014-2015.

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