The late Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the great scholar of the New Deal, liked to talk about how the best historians know that history is “an argument without end.” Now a new generation of authors has taken up that argument, and it’s as controversial as ever.

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.

This event was held by the New-York Historical Society.