"As a historian, I’m glad to see my profession getting some much deserved publicity. But I also worry about the rapid-fire, superficial way history is being presented, as if it’s mostly a matter of drawing historical analogies. The result is that readers and viewers get history lessons that are often misleading when it comes to Mr. Trump, and shed little light on our current travails."

Moderator Professor Nicholas Burns was joined by panelists David French, Juliette Kayyem, Gil Kerlikowske, and Moshik Temkin to discuss the ramifications of President Trump’s executive order on immigration. The panelists discussed a wide range of issues relating to border security, constitutional law, and refugee and anti-terrorism efforts under the Trump administration. The panelists also discussed the future of immigration law under the new administration, focusing on the new slate of advisors and cabinet members in the White House and how immigration and refugee law will change moving forward.

For many Americans, the recent events in Ferguson raised disturbing questions. But not all Americans were equally disturbed, or disturbed by the same things. Surveys and polls conducted since Darren Wilson, a white police officer, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, reveal a stark divide between whites and blacks. Whereas a clear majority of African-Americans consider the conduct of the police outrageous and typical, most white Americans were far more critical of the disorder that followed Brown’s death. Fox News and its ilk dwelled on “looters” rather than on the sources of African-American alienation. Americans seem to be stuck in an endless repetition of 1968, the year that many African-American communities erupted in anger after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., and many white Americans responded fearfully to that anger and protest by voting for Richard Nixon.

Will the death penalty ever be abolished in America? Executions, and the states that carry them out, are in decline. Public support for the death penalty, though still high, has been falling. Many abolitionists are hopeful that the end of the death penalty in the U.S. is nigh. The horribly botched execution of Clayton D. Lockett in Oklahoma in April even brought President Obama into the picture. He called the incident "deeply disturbing" and ordered a policy review.