He’s often dubbed the “most powerful man in the free world,” but the president of the United States can take a back seat to economic or social forces in the eyes of many modern-day historians.

Not 93-year-old William Leuchtenburg of UNC-Chapel Hill. In the latest issue of American Scholar, another veteran historian — 70-year-old Michael Sherry of Northwestern — praises Leuchtenburg’s new 900-page history of presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. One of the factors eliciting Sherry’s positive review is Leuchtenburg’s old-school approach to his subjects.

He is perhaps today’s greatest presidential historian, and not of the presidency as some insular realm, but as it intersected with national life, which makes this book also a history of the nation in the 20th century.

He practices a neglected art. Periodically, historians get the call to “focus once again on the American presidency,” as a recent History News Network article put it, but few seem to answer it. None of the many graduate students I’ve taught or known over the past four decades have focused on the presidency, though they’ve done great work about how particular presidents have dealt with particular problems. I continue to admire Leuchtenburg’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963), perhaps the best single volume on its subject, and often press it into the hands of my graduate students. Its top-down, political, and presidential approach—students overlook its rich material on the local and the regional—seems dated to them. In their own politics, they think that presidents matter. But most scholarship they read points them toward race, class, and gender; toward the grass roots rather than the top; toward the particular rather than the sweeping. They don’t disdain Leuchtenburg’s book; they just don’t know what to make of its force and clarity. Accustomed to authorial voices that can be hidden or slippery, they are flummoxed when told straight out what to think. …

… Leuchtenburg’s generation presumed that presidents mattered a lot but rarely made that presumption explicit. Leuchtenburg does. While acknowledging the weight of “impersonal forces,” he remains “persuaded that twentieth-century America was significantly shaped by its presidents.” He carries that argument through the book, as well as a corollary about the aggrandizement of presidential power, without beating readers over the head with it.

If nothing else, this book will add more fuel to ongoing debates over presidential legacies.