Tom Arnold-Forster

Kinder Career Development Fellow in Atlantic History

I am a historian of the modern United States. My research explores the political and intellectual histories of liberalism, democracy, and the state in the twentieth century. I also have interests in histories of journalism, political thought, and US foreign relations.

My first book, Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton, 2025), provides a new historical account of a leading political writer who shaped the development of American liberalism and democratic theory across the twentieth century. It won the 2025 History Book Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and was reviewed in the Nation, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. You can hear me talk about the book on the New Books Network here.

I am currently writing a book about Watergate, tentatively titled Visions of Watergate: Democracy and Legitimacy in the American State. By exploring a range of contemporary debates about what Watergate meant for the American state, and by moving beyond insider narratives about high politics and corruption, this book aims to rethink Watergate’s significance as a legitimacy crisis for American democracy. A pilot article from this project is forthcoming in the Historical Journal. I have also published on urban politics, media history, jazz history, and pedagogy.

At the RAI I work with colleagues at the University of Missouri to deliver the Kinder Institute’s MA in Atlantic History and Politics. Before coming to Oxford, I taught US history and the history of political thought at King’s College London. I completed my BA, MPhil, and PhD at the University of Cambridge, where I was also a Junior Research Fellow. My research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Library of Congress, the University of Chicago Library, and the Newberry Library. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Books:

Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025).

Visions of Watergate: Democracy and Legitimacy in the American State (book project in development)

Articles and Chapters:

“Mary McCarthy and the Watergate Crisis,” Historical Journal (accepted and forthcoming).

“The American Berserk as Pedagogic Challenge,” in Teaching American Studies in Britain: Perspectives and Possibilities, eds. Megan Hunt and Lydia Plath (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), 49–55.

“Walter Lippmann and Public Opinion,” American Journalism 40, no. 1 (2023): 51–79. [Winner of the 2024 Dorothy Ross Prize, Society for US Intellectual History]

“Journalism and Corruption in Chicago, 1912–1931,” Historical Journal 65, no. 5 (2022): 1374–96.

“Rethinking the Scopes Trial: Cultural Conflict, Media Spectacle, and Circus Politics,” Journal of American Studies 56, no. 1 (2022): 142–66.

“Democracy and Expertise in the Lippmann-Terman Controversy,” Modern Intellectual History 16, no. 2 (2019): 561–92.

“Dr. Billy Taylor, ‘America’s Classical Music,’ and the Role of the Jazz Ambassador,” Journal of American Studies 51, No. 1 (2017): 117–39.

Reviews and Review Essays:

Review of At the Center: American Thought and Culture in the Mid-twentieth Century by Casey Nelson Blake, Daniel H. Borus, and Howard Brick, American Political Thought 10, no. 1 (2021): 158–60.

“New Histories of American Newspapers,” Historical Journal 63, no. 5 (2020): 1390–1400.

“Democratic Dilemmas of the Cold War,” Global Intellectual History 5, no. 4 (2020): 390–95.

I’ve also written reviews for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and Dissent.