Welcome to SilentCal.com, a blog devoted to Calvin Coolidge and his era. Written by Amity Shlaes and Joe Thorndike, it features historical documents, commentary, and analysis. It’s not a blog about current politics, although the subject may come up from time to time. It is a blog that takes history seriously, both as a discipline and as an element of civic culture.

Amity Shlaes is a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg and director of the Four Percent Growth Project of the George W. Bush Institute. She is a contributor to Marketplace, the public radio show, and has appeared on numerous radio and television shows over the years. Amity was formerly a columnist for the Financial Times and, before that a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, specializing in economics. In the early 1990s she served as the Journal’s features, or “op ed” editor. Prior to that she followed the collapse of communism for the Wall Street Journal/Europe. Over the years she has published in the National Review, the New Republic, Foreign Affairs, the American Spectator, the Suddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.

Joseph J. Thorndike is director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts and a Visiting Scholar in History at the University of Virginia. He has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Times, Barron’s, the American University Administrative Law Review, and L’Economie Politique (France). He is the author of Their Fair Share: The American Tradition of Progressive Taxation (Urban Institute Press, forthcoming) and the co-author (with Steven Bank and Kirk Stark) of War and Taxes(Urban Institute Press, 2008). He is also the editor (with Dennis J. Ventry, Jr.) of Tax Justice: The Ongoing Debate (Urban Institute Press, 2002).