One of the best journalists ever to cover Washington was Tom Wicker of the New York Times. When finally he retired in 2004, having covered all of the regimes from Eisenhower to George W. Bush, he appeared on our program to talk about his many encounters with the Presidents – including how he got a prominent place on Nixon’s Enemies List.

The immediate connection is that they were borm on the same day – within hours of one another. The further connection is of course that each changed the course of history in an irreversible way. Adam Gopnick of the New Yorker magazine did a brilliant book on the subject, and here he is in a program from 2009.

A team of academically based historical specialists examines “the anatomy of revolution” and inquires what was shared by – and distinctive about – the French, English, American and Russian revolutions. A guiding question is whether modern convulsions in the alteration of power are truly “revolutionary.”

Elizabeth the First had a much more demanding assignment than the current Queen of England. The arts of ambiguity – combined, where necessary, with ruthlessness – seem to have been the basis of her effective and creative rule. All of this is under delightfully detailed examination in this 2003 conversation with two specialists in “Elizabethan” history.

Is gravitation a key to history so that everything that goes up must come down? Daniel Garrison, professor of the History of Classical Antiquity at Northwestern University, examines the fall of Rome, asking whether the West is now going through the same stages of decline.