Hi there, this is Lillian Cunningham, host of Presidential.

It's hard to believe, but it's been four years since I originally made this podcast.

Since then, I've created two other series that I know many of you have listened to,

institutional and moonrise, but the whole time I've continued to think about presidential history.

I recently moderated a panel at WBUR City Space in Boston that I think a lot of you who've

listened to the presidential series would find interesting. It was called unprecedented

presidents, and it was a discussion about how the Trump presidency fits into historical context.

On stage, I spoke with three great historians who looked back over the arc of presidential history

to reflect on what's really new and unprecedented here. The experts were Alexis Coe,

the author of the George Washington biography, You Never Forget Your First,

Drew Guilpin Faust, the former president of Harvard University and a prominent civil war historian,

and then Julian Zellazer, a professor of political history at Princeton University,

and a biographer of 20th century presidents like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan.

Many thanks to WBUR Boston's NPR news station for letting us share this recording with you

presidential listeners. Here's the discussion that I had with Alexis Drew and Julian. It was recorded

in February 2020, and it's been lightly edited just to bring the length down. Here we go.

Live from WBUR City Space in Boston, here is unprecedented presidents.

Hi, it's great to be here, and it's such an honor to be with these three really distinguished

presidential historians. The topic tonight that we're really going to focus on is this sort of

examination of what's unprecedented and precedented about this moment that we're living through right

now. I think that a lot of people, and we certainly hear this, as journalists at the Washington

Post, a lot of people have this sense that we're living through a uniquely wild and uncharted time,

...