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Unforgotten Documentary TV, 1 Hylan Boulevard, Staten Island, New York, NY (2026)

08/07/2026

Ronald Reagan (40th, 1891-1989) appeared in 53 films during his acting career from 1937-1964.

Reagan made his acting debut in the film Love Is on the Air in 1937 and was the lead alongside June Travis. Reagan made roughly 30-films, mostly B-films that often were under an hour long, when he took a break in 1942 for active military service during World War II. Reagan, however, never left the country nor saw combat and was stationed mostly in California where he helped the military with over 400 training videos. Reagan was able to occasionally work on other films during his service and he was discharged in December 1945.

Reagan’s three most important films were arguably All American (1940), Kings Row (1942), and Bedtime for Bonzo (1951). In All American, Reagan played the role of George Gipp which subsequently earned him the nickname “Gripper” from reporters. Though Reagan was never regarded by critics as a particularly good actor (he did win four monthly Photoplay Awards, recognitions form readers of Photoplay Magazine on what their favorite performance of the month was), Reagan did earn praise for his supporting role as an amputee in Kings Row, a major box office success that made over $5 million off of a $1 million budget. And one of Reagan’s last acting roles was Bedtime for Bonzo, in which he acted alongside a chimpanzee and became something of a punching bag film to ridicule Reagan, though Reagan always defended the picture, the performance, and the primate.

Image Credit: The New Yorker

08/07/2026

Andrew Johnson (17th, 1865-1869) died on this day in 1875.

Johnson returned to Greenville, Tennessee after his presidency and mulled several different forward for himself: from retirement to reentering politics to becoming a railroad magnet. Ultimately, Johnson grew restless with his pseudo-retirement and, having become embittered towards his political enemies and seeking vindication, decided to return to politics. Johnson sought the Democratic nomination for Senate in Tennessee in 1869, but was defeated by Republican Henry Cooper. He tried again in 1872 during a special election, but ultimately came in third, having run as an independent. Johnson tried for a third time in 1875 and this time succeed, winning his Senate seat by a single vote and on the 54th ballot. Johnson remarked, “Thank God for the vindication.”

Johnson remains the only former president to serve in the Senate. His vindication in the Senate, however, was short lived. He used his Senate position largely to criticize president Ulysses S. Grant and his pro-Reconstruction policies. Johnson departed Washington DC for Ohio in late July 1875 to make a series of speeches to defend his legacy. En route, he suffered a stroke while staying at his daughter’s home in Elizabethton, Tennessee. On the evening of July 30, he suffered another stroke and passed away in the early hours the following day. He was 66 years old. Johnson is buried in Greeneville, Tennessee with his body wrapped in an American flag and a Constitution under his head, per his wishes.

Image Credit: Rare Newspapers

08/07/2026

Warren G. Harding (29th, 1921-1923) in a colorized photograph alongside (from left to right) Vice President Calvin Coolidge, Chief Justice William Howard Taft, and Robert Todd Lincoln.

This photo was taken on May 30, 1922 at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. A memorial in the nation’s capital to honor Lincoln emerged shortly after his assassination in 1865. Architect Clark Smith proposed designed for the first such memorial but there were insufficient funds for the project so it laid dormant until the start of the 20th century. Several bills were introduced to designate funds while Theodore Roosevelt was president, but all were unable to pass the House. In 1910, Senate Bill 9449 passed which created a commission to begin identifying a design and location for the memorial with Taft selected to serve as commission chair.

Architect Henry Bacon designed the memorial, though many believed the concept to be too ostentatious for someone of Lincoln’s humble nature. Many proposed a simple log cabin shrine instead. Construction began in 1914 and despite significant design changes during construction and the United States’s subsequent involvement in World War I, work was completed on time in 11922. In his dedication speech, Harding said, “Abraham Lincoln was no superman. Like the great Washington, whose monumental shaft towers nearby as a fit companion to the memorial we dedicate today, the two testifying the grateful love of all Americans to founder and savior—like Washington, Lincoln was a very natural human being, with the frailties mixed with the virtues of humanity. There are neither supermen nor demi-gods in the government of kingdoms, empires, or republics. It will be better for our conception of government and its institutions if we will understand this fact. It is vastly greater than finding the superman if we justify the confidence that our institutions are capable of bringing into authority, in time of stress, men big enough and strong enough to meet all demands.”

Image Credit: Ohio Magazine

08/07/2026

Martin Van Buren (8th, 1837-1841) generated controversy at the start of his administration with his Cabinet selection.

Van Buren felt in an odd position when it came to his initial Cabinet choices as president. After much deliberation, Van Buren chose to retain nearly all of Andrew Jackson’s Cabinet. This was done as Van Buren, having served as Jackson’s Vice President, had not only helped with choosing many of these individuals alongside Jackson, but had developed strong, professional relationships with each of them. However, this decision angered other Democrats, who wished Van Buren would rely on the patronage system and promote more loyal supporters. Many also wanted to see new Cabinet members selected from other states not represented in the Cabinet makeup, such as Pennsylvania.

Despite retaining much of Jackson’s Cabinet, Van Buren wished to govern very differently from his predecessor. He envisioned himself as more akin to the leadership of George Washington, who served largely as a mediator in Cabinet meetings and encouraged frank discussions and dialogue. Van Buren also sought to avoid some of the more controversial aspects of Jackson’s administration, namely the recurrence of informal Cabinet meetings which led to gossip and which then also often led to scandals, such as the Petticoat Affair. To avoid this, Van Buren managed his Cabinet and administration with a rigid sense of professionalism and attempted to maintain neutral during debates. He hoped these decisions would bolster and better unify the Democratic Party, but in many ways it led to greater resentment from other Democrats and Van Buren’s often inability to politick and socialize led to him being cartoonishly viewed as elitist.

Image Credit: Free Speech Center

08/07/2026

Ulysses S. Grant (18th, 1869-1877) died on this day in 1885.

Mere days before his death, Grant finished his 336,000 word memoirs, a task which he had set about doing less than a year earlier. (For comparison, this is roughly the length of the entirety of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings). Grant needed to write his memoirs as it was virtually his only remaining option to financially sustain his family after his death. The year previously, Grant lost nearly all of his money (roughly $100,000 or $3.2 million adjusted for inflation) following the collapse of Wall Street brokerage firm, Ward & Grant, established by his son, Buck, and Ferdinand Ward. Ward operated the business as one of the first Ponzi schemes, which resulted in Grant’s investment being lost.

That same year, as Grant was recovering from a broken hip, he was diagnosed with fatal throat cancer, likely caused by his regular cigar smoking. Grant would work with his friend, Mark Twain, to create a literary contract to sustain his family and secure an unheard of 70% royalty from The Century Magazine for his memoirs (Grant had originally planned for 10%). Grant moved to a friend’s cottage on Mount McGregor in Saratoga, New York to finish his writings, where this photo was taken. Grant would succumb to his throat cancer mere days after finishing the manuscript on this day at 8:08am. His last word was reportedly simply, “Water.” The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant would become an enormous commercial and critical success, with Grant’s widow, Julia, receiving $450,000 ($14.7 million adjusted for inflation) on royalties. Grant is entombed in a sarcophagus beside Julia at Grant’s Tomb in New York City, New York, the largest mausoleum for an American president.

Image Credit: Rare Newspaper

08/07/2026

Martin Van Buren (8th, 1837-1841) died on this day in 1862.

Van Buren left office frustrated and disappointed with his 1840 presidential election loss and was determined to return to the White House in the years after. He positioned himself to be nominated by the Democratic Party in 1844, but his opposition to the annexation of Texas alienated him with key party figures such as Andrew Jackson and ultimately James K. Polk was nominated. Van Buren eyed another run in 1848 but again lost the Democratic Party nomination, this time to Michigan Senator Lewis Cass. He would, however, be the nominee for the Free Soil Party. While he didn’t win any electoral college votes, Van Buren won 10% of the popular vote on a platform opposing the expansion of slavery. He formally retired from politics after this election.

With age, Van Buren’s became more outspoken about slavery, criticizing the Dred Scot decision from the Supreme Court in 1857. However, he viewed the new Republican Party with suspicion and worried they were exasperating tensions on slavery. He attempted to call for a constitutional convention in 1860 after states began to secede from the Union, but failed to do so. His health began to decline in 1861 after contracting pneumonia and Van Buren became bedridden. He succumbed to heart failure on this day at 2am at his Lindenwald estate in Kinderhook, New York. He was 79 years old. Van Buren holds the record for having seen more successors than any other president at eight. He is buried at the Kinderhook Reformed Church Cemetery.

Image Credit: VanBuren Papers

08/07/2026

Rutherford B. Hayes (19th, 1877-1881) invoked the Monroe Doctrine to stop the building of an early Panama Canal proposal.

With the Suez Canal having been finished construction in 1869, Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French diplomat and developer, turned his eyes to the Isthmus of Panama. Owned at the time by Colombia, the location seemed an ideal spot for connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean much as how the Suez Canal connected the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. Fearful of French expansion into Mexico as a result of this project, Monroe invoked the Monroe Doctrine to halt the completion of the canal project.

In a message to Congress in 1880, Hayes stated, “The policy of this country is a canal under American control…The United States cannot consent to the surrender of this control to any European power or any combination of European powers.” This invocation of the Monroe Doctrine was ignored by De Lesseps who pursued the project with justo. He managed to raise significant amount of funds and began construction in 1882. However, multiple landslides, the spread of malaria and yellow fever, and corruption with funds led to the collapse of the project and the Panama Canal Company declared itself bankrupt in 1888.

Image Credit: Library of Congress

08/07/2026

⭐️⭐️1/2 The Presidential Pardon: The Short Clause with a Long, Troubled History by Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash

Having recently read Walter Isaacson’s The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, I was intrigued with what another short book focused on a single sentence in American writing would bring forward. Prakash focuses on the 20-word clause within the Constitution expressing the powers and limitations of the presidential pardon. With this having ‘history’ in its title, I was hoping for a history of the presidential pardon. But that’s not really what this book ultimately focuses on. There is some history to be found here, however I hate to say it but the history detailed is relatively encyclopedic in terms of dryness and more Wikipedia in terms of depth. Probably the most (in)famous presidential pardon (Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon) barely receives two pages. The overwhelming majority of presidents are not even mentioned.

Instead, nearly half of the book is concerned with the pardons of Joe Biden and Donald Trump and creating (I would argue) false equivalences with them. I certainly didn’t expect Hunter Biden and autopens to take up more of the page count here than Abraham Lincoln. Nor did I particularly want that. Sadly, this is less of an engaging history book and more of an attempt at explaining the most recent, controversial pardons of the current and former administration and balancing them with equal levels of scrutiny. Prakash himself admits as such in the actual book, summarizing the largest section of this as “tawdry.” If one would enjoy a “tawdry” read, perhaps this is for them. If not, then I would be hard pressed to recommend The Presidential Pardon, particularly to those interested in learning about the history of the presidential pardon.

Image Credit: The President Guy

08/07/2026

George H.W. Bush (41st, 1989-1993) with his English Springer Spaniel, Ranger.

Ranger was one of the puppies of the Bush family dog, Millie. While not having been as famous as Millie (this spaniel “co-authored” a book with Barbra Bush and was called “the most famous dog in America”) Ranger received considerable attention from the press and White House staffers. In one noted incident in 1992, Bush wrote a humorous memo to his staff telling them that Ranger had been put on a strict diet and that staff were discouraged from giving snacks to this “friendly blimp.”

Throughout his life, Bush kept spaniels but in his later years, he began keeping Labrador retrievers that could be better trained as service dogs. This included the service dog, Sully, a Labrador retriever, who was gifted to Bush shortly after Barbra’s passing in April 2018. Though Bush didn’t have Sully for long (Bush himself died in November 2018), Sully has been commemorated with a statue at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum and is still working as a service dog at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Image Credit: NBC

08/07/2026

William McKinley (25th, 1897-1901) with Vice Presidential candidate Garret Hobart in a 1896 campaign poster.

McKinley’s second Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, succeeded McKinley following the former’s assassination, but Roosevelt was not McKinley’s first Vice President. Hobart served in this role from 1897 until his death in 1899. Hobart was a longtime New Jersey politician and held considerable sway in the key swing state heading into the 1896 election. Both McKinley and his advisor, Mark Hanna, believed Hobart could help with necessary political support in the state, and that Hobart’s views aligned with McKinley’s. Hobart utilized a front-porch campaign approach like McKinley, and ultimately the McKinley-Hobart ticket defeated William Jennings Bryan and Arthur Sewall with 271 electoral college votes to 176.

McKinley and Hobart became close friends and developed a strong working relationship. Frequently, McKinley would call on Hobart for advice and insight, though he still did not attend Cabinet meetings. Reporter Arthur Dunn remarked years later, “for the first time in my recollection, and the last for that matter, the Vice President was recognized as somebody, as a part of the Administration, and as a part of the body over which he presided.” The McKinley’s and Hobart’s regularly dined and vacationed together with Second Lady Jennie Hobart stepping in for First Lady Ida McKinley during times of illness. An expert in the legislature, Hobart earned a reputation as being the “Assistant President” given his mastery at pushing legislation along within the Senate. In 1898, Hobart began experiencing heart issues and nearly collapsed on the floor of the Senate. Come November 1899, his health began to deteriorate to the point of being bedridden and he died at the age of 55 on November 21, 1899.

Image Credit: Listen 2 Read

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