Michael Nelson

Biography

Michael Nelson is professor of political science at Rhodes College. A former editor of The Washington Monthly, he has published twenty books on the American presidency, national elections, and higher education. In recent years he has written articles for VQR about Abraham Lincoln, C. S. Lewis, Garrison Keilloir, Frank Sinatra, Ward Just, Stephen Carter, Robert Caro, and other subjects. More than forty of his articles have been anthologized in works of political science, history, and English composition.

See Work

Autumn 1980

James David Barber and the Psychological Presidency

By Michael Nelson
Winter 2003

Power Dark, Power Bright: Robert A. Caro, Robert Moses, and Lyndon B. Johnson

By Michael Nelson
Autumn 1996

“One Mythology Among Many”: The Spiritual Odyssey of C. S. Lewis

By Michael Nelson
Spring 1980

The White House, Bureaucracy, and Foreign Policy: Lessons From Cambodia

By Michael Nelson
ESSAYS / Summer 2002

The Good, the Bad, and the Phony: Six Famous Historians and Their Critics

By Michael Nelson

What a bad time it has been for the nation’s best-known historians—that is, for the small number of historical writers, some affiliated with academic institutions and some not, whose books regularly inhabit the bestseller lists, whose faces...

Spring 1998

Ward Just’s Washington

By Michael Nelson