Lindsay Chervinsky knew other historians had written extensively about America’s second president, John Adams.

But none of those books were written before January 6, 2021, when an insurrection at the nation’s capitol ended the tradition of peacefully transferring power in the U.S. — a tradition that started with Adams himself.

In her new book, “Making the Presidency,” Chervinsky looks back at Adams life and focuses on how George Washington’s successor shaped the presidency in the final years of the 18th century. She argues that it was Adams who established political norms for the executive branch — norms that are quickly being discarded by the current administration.

What can the second president teach us about our country’s 47th? That’s on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

Guest:

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• Lindsay Chervinsky is a presidential historian and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Her new book is “Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic.”

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It’s Valentine’s Day! To mark the occasion, Big Books and Bold Ideas is dipping into the archives to focus on love — and not just romantic love. This show highlights love of all kinds: familial love, love between friends, even the love of books.

We start with Leif Enger, who joined host Kerri Miller in Red Wing last June to talk about his novel, “I Cheerfully Refuse.” Enger’s latest book is dystopian in nature, but at its heart, it’s a love story.

We then dip into Miller’s conversation with British-Nigerian author Ore Agbaje-Williams, whose subversive and wickedly funny novel, "The Three of Us,” delves into love between friends. Is it possible our friendships are more foundational than the bonds we form with romantic partners?

We end with Jedidiah Jenkins and his memoir, “Mother, Nature.” It recounts a five-thousand-mile road trip he and his mother took to retrace the route his parents traversed in the 1970s as they walked across America. It sounds sentimental. But it’s really Jedidiah’s attempt to reconcile two conflicting truths: that his mother loves him completely and that she does not accept that he’s gay.

If you want to hear the complete conversation from any of today’s authors, click the links above or look for the episodes in your favorite podcast.

At what cost revolution?

In Fabienne Josaphat’s new novel, “Kingdom of No Tomorrow,” 20-year-old Nettie Boileau trades the turmoil of Duvalier’s Haiti for the tumult of 1960s America. Settling with her aunt in Oakland, she is drawn to the social programs spearheaded by the burgeoning Black Panther Party.

But her focus on healing and public health is soon subsumed by the revolution and her passionate relationship with Black Panther leader Melvin Mosley.

Josaphat drew on her own family’s history for insight into the activism of the Panthers. Her father, an attorney, was imprisoned during Francois Duvalier’s reign in Haiti. And she remembers reading her father’s books as a child, biographies and memoirs of leaders in the Civil Rights Movement.

“I remember starting to do my research about the Black Panthers and thinking to myself, ‘I think I know about this already but I don’t know how. Where did I learn this?’” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “And then I realized, it was probably me going through [my father’s] books.”

Josaphat brings the gift of those books full circle with her new novel as she brings the inner workings of the Black Panthers to fresh light, including how the fight for social justice didn’t always mean equal rights for women.

Guest:

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• Fabienne Josaphat was born and raised in Haiti. Her new novel “Kingdom of No Tomorrow” was awarded the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2023.

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