Episode 11: Lincoln with Dr. Megan Kate Nelson and Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky

This week we get 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.

Dr. Megan Kate Nelson is the author of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which was a Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Her most recent book, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America was published by Scribner on March 1, 2022, the 150th anniversary of the Yellowstone Act, which created the first national park in the world. Saving Yellowstone has won the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Nonfiction, and is one of Smithsonian Magazine‘s Top Ten Books in History for 2022.

Her new book, The Westerners: Myth-Making and Belonging on the American Frontier, will be published with Scribner in April 2026.

She is an expert in the history of the American Civil War, the U.S. West, and popular culture, and have written articles about these topics for The New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, Slate, and Smithsonian Magazine.

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a presidential historian and the Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library. She is the author of the award-winning books, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution and Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic, and co-editor of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture. She regularly writes for public audiences in the Wall Street Journal, The Bulwark, Time Magazine, USA Today, CNN, and the Washington Post.