As petroleum prices go through the roof, the government starts bailouts and the lending market stumbles, doomsayers toss around talk of a new Depression. As one of the policies that helped with a Depression was the New Deal, talk of a new “New Deal” has also been bandied about.

This Thirteen Forum lecture/panel discussion casts the New Deal in contemporary terms, through the lens brought by two writers. Join columnists Amity Shlaes and Jonathan Alter as they square off with strikingly different interpretations of the New Deal and its meaning for both Election 2008 and the country’s future.

Shlaes is the author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (2007), and a columnist for Bloomberg; Alter is the author of The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope and a senior editor for Newsweek.

See more on this and other Thirteen Forums here. This lecture was presented by the New-York Historical Society.