August 20th – Constitutional Chats Podcast

Amity Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, the national foundation dedicated to honoring the values of America’s thirtieth president.The Foundation, at which she also serves as CEO, gives the most competitive scholarship in the United States, the Coolidge Scholarship. She writes a column, the Forgotten Book, for National Review, and serves as a fellow of the National Review Institute. She is currently at work on two books for HarperCollins, one on Theodore Roosevelt and Progressivism, and the other a short history of the Twentieth Century economy.

​Miss Shlaes is one of the foremost historians of our era. She is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man: Graphic (a graphic novel version of her history), Coolidge, a full biography of the thirtieth president, and The Greedy Hand, a profile of the tax code. In 2019, Miss Shlaes published Great Society: A New History, a dramatic story with lessons both dark and bright for our current time.

Miss Shlaes is a winner of the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize, whose jury she led after winning for a decade. In 2021 she won the most prestigious prize for conservatives, the Bradley Prize. She is co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize. In 2023, she was awarded the William F. Buckley Prize for Political Thought. Over the years, she has served at the Council on Foreign Relations as senior fellow in political economy. Many readers know Miss Shlaes from The Wall Street Journal, where she served on the editorial board, writing on foreign policy, taxation, and other topics, or from the Financial Times and Bloomberg, where she served as a columnist for a total of ten years. Over the years she has published in many periodicals, including The New Yorker (on the demise of the Deutsche Mark), Foreign Affairs, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Miss Shlaes is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale College. She did graduate work at the Freie Universitaet Berlin on a DAAD Fellowship, and later served in Berlin as JP Morgan fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She is married to Seth Lipsky, editor of the New York Sun. The Lipskys have four grown children.