Unprecedented American Presidency

This Palgrave Pivot presents a comprehensive introduction along with four essays on the institution of the American presidency, reflecting on broad implications for American political culture and practice. Each by an eminent scholar of the presidency, these pieces provide a thorough understanding of the uniqueness of the executive office of government and its evolution, with special emphasis on twentieth and twenty-first century practices and challenges. Together, they help to shed light on the current political crisis, and explain the circumstances in which Donald Trump has come to occupy this central office of American democracy.

Thomas Sanders is Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy. Previous works include Brower and Sanders, The World in the Twentieth Century; the edited works Historiography of Imperial Russia and Encounters in World History; with Gary Hamburg and Ernest Tucker, Against the Mountains: Russian-Muslim Conflict in the Caucasus.