Power

A history as intertwined with race as with partisanship.

Writing under ancient veneers allowed partisans to politicize and weaponize ancient history during the turbulent start of the Federal Republic.

Where abolitionists and congressmen—including Lincoln—dined, debated, and became bedfellows.

Newly digitized journals reveal the life of Gouverneur Morris, the Constitution preamble writer, vocal opponent of slavery and disabled congressman.

The relationship between two true believers in American exceptionalism.

A new book about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing traces the path from Ronald Reagan’s antigovernment ideology to today’s radicalized right.

Civil rights activists failed to expel an all-white, segregationist delegation. But their efforts foreshadowed later milestones in the fight for equality

Keir Milburn argues that generational analysis can explain class operation while Adolph Reed Jr. writes that it obscures historically specific social relations.

The president didn’t want to go too far on civil rights in 1948, fearing it would cost him reelection. But an obscure mayor changed the race — and his party.

Development and dispossession as a two-pronged conquest.

Public outcry over whistleblower William Morgan's disappearance gave rise to the Anti-Masonic Party, which nominated a candidate for president in 1832.

Did Richmond violate the Voting Rights Act by adding thousands of White residents? The historic Supreme Court case foreshadowed today’s gerrymandering fights.

How the law became a staging ground for unrestrained war.

The inventor of the atomic bomb, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s new film, was the chief celebrity victim of the national trauma known as McCarthyism.

The standard narrative of Roosevelt's court-packing efforts casts them as a failure. But what if they were a success?

Before going to the press, Ellsberg spent a year and a half quietly leaking the Pentagon Papers to leading antiwar lawmakers. They all declined to speak out.

Communists were excluded from an Oklahoma Pride festival recently, a reminder of how easily the Red Scare’s mechanisms for state repression can be revived.

A new book revisits Freud’s analysis of Woodrow Wilson to ask: how much do leaders’ psychologies shape our politics?

On the moral courage of Daniel Ellsberg.

A long history of disrespect, dispossession and mass slaughter is crucial to understanding the case.

After revealing the government’s lies about Vietnam, Ellsberg spent six decades as an anti-nuclear activist, getting arrested in civil-disobedience protests.

James Watt was a fiery evangelical, a cultural laughingstock—and instrumental in shaping modern GOP rhetoric on the environment.

The Temecula Valley school board in Southern California wants to erase gay rights leader Harvey Milk from history, defaming him as a “pedophile” in the process.

The 1988 presidential primary showed it wasn't always like this — and helped guide the GOP to where it is now.

The American right doesn’t need the John Birch Society these days, but that is because it’s adopted the Birchers’ extremism wholesale.

Decades of evidence reveals that work requirements for food assistance leave people hungry and hurt the economy. But supporting them remains good politics.

Obama’s official oral history contains new evidence of his indifference and foot-dragging on the most important issue of our time.

Lawyers tried to use the independent-state-legislature theory to sway the outcomes of the 2000 and 2020 elections. What if it were to become the law of the land?

Interposition was a claim that American federalism needed to preserve some balance between state and national authority.

Anna Rosenberg had massive influence in American politics for 40 years. Remembering her story offers a guide for solving problems today.