Historians Lindsay Chervinsky and Matthew Costello talk about why we mourn our presidents and what the rites of mourning say about the presidents we lay to rest, and the nation as a whole.
Lindsay Chervinsky is a presidential historian and author of The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. Matthew Costello is the Vice President of the David M. Rubenstein National Center for White House History and author of The Property of the Nation: George Washington’s Tomb, Mount Vernon, and the Memory of the First President
Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Dr. Matthew Costello co-authored Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture, a new book which examines the way we observe the passing of our chief executives as a means of reflection, reckoning, and reevaluation of presidential legacies and eras in our nation’s past