Professor Cotlar specializes in the history of the United States in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War. His first book - Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Trans-Atlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic - won the Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. 

We discuss teaching politics in an objective way, forming evidence based arguments, and the difference in controversy between the 1619 and 1776 projects.