Mourning the Presidents w/ Lindsay Chervinsky
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A Presidency is defined by the decisions that a person makes while serving as Executive, but a Presidential legacy is about much more than that. In Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture, (UVA Press, 2023)Lindsay Chervinsky and Matthew Costello have brought together a collection of chapters that explore the ways that mourning ceremonies, causes of death, and moments of passing impact the way that we remember a President at the time they die, and how new research and a more inclusive understanding of US history have reshaped Presidential legacies in the years that follow. In this episode, Lindsay joins Ben and Bob for a conversation about some of the fascinating stories crafted by the book's contributing authors and how Presidential legacies might tell us more about ourselves than the individuals who have served in the Oval Office.
Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky is a historian of the American Presidency who is currently a fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Her first book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution (Belknap Press, 2020) won multiple awards and was the topic of our conversation for her first appearance on The Road to Now in episode 184. You can learn more about Lindsay and her work at her website: LindsayChervinsky.com
If you enjoyed this episode, you'll probably also like our conversation with Jeffrey Engle on the history of Presidential impeachment (RTN episode 109).
This episode originally aired as episode 263 on February 20, 2023. This rebroadcast was edited by Ben Sawyer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the road to now. This week on the show, we are sharing our |
| 0:10.2 | fantastic conversation with the always brilliant Lindsay Trevinsky, a conversation about her book |
| 0:15.2 | Morning the President's Lawson Legacy in American Culture, which she co-edded with Matthew Costello. |
| 0:21.8 | It's a fantastic collection of chapters that look at the way we have mourned presidents over time |
| 0:27.7 | and what that can tell us about the moment that they passed away. |
| 0:31.5 | We'll be back with new episodes start next week. |
| 0:34.7 | Patrons, thank you for keeping us going. |
| 0:37.1 | I hope you guys are not boiling out there. |
| 0:41.4 | Take care. |
| 0:43.9 | We are here with Lindsay Siervinsky, and she has co-edited a collection of essays about the deaths and the |
| 0:53.3 | remembrances and the memorializations of presidents, dead |
| 0:57.8 | presidents, as we all like to say, everybody loves dead presidents. It's called mourning the |
| 1:02.4 | presidents, loss and legacy in American culture, edited by Lindsay M. S. Sivinsky and Matthew R. |
| 1:10.1 | Costello. Lindsay, welcome back to The Road to Now. |
| 1:12.9 | Well, thank you so much for having me back. |
| 1:14.6 | I appreciate it. |
| 1:15.7 | It's great to have you here. |
| 1:17.1 | And this collection, I mean, it's pretty incredible, I think. |
| 1:22.0 | And it spans from the first president who passed away to the last president who passed away. |
| 1:29.7 | And anyone listening right now, |
| 1:33.7 | they're like, so you're just going to tell a list of how people died. There's some of that in this collection. But more than that, there is the collection of like how their memorials are shaped and then how |
| 1:40.6 | we today remember them. So could you just start off by explaining to us, like, |
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