Alexis de Tocqueville

Whatever the “City on a Hill” is, the phrase was not discovered by Kennedy or Reagan.

America is now ruled by a single elite class rather than by local patrician smart sets competing with each other for money and power.

James Shapiro’s recent book looks at why Shakespeare has been a mainstay of the cultural and political conflicts of the country since its founding.

Who tells our stories has always mattered.

Most recent scholarship, while supporting the view that the policy was vicious, has not addressed the question of genocide.

Inequality comes in waves. The question is when this one will break.

Seven scholars discuss the definition, nature, practice, and periodization of corruption in the United States.

The idea that democracy and billionaires are incompatible might seem radical to conservatives. But to America’s founders, it seemed like common sense.

There isn’t any rule against tobacco spitting on the House floor, but there is one against wearing a hat.

This past year has shown that the U.S. is far from immune to the forces shaping the rest of the world.

In the 1930s, the Germans were fascinated by the global leader in legal racism—the United States.

That time Stalin coined the term “American Exceptionalism.”

American bureaucracy's long and useful history.

Conservatives dream of returning to a world where private charity fulfilled all public needs. But that world never existed, and we're better for it.

David Garland makes a powerful argument that will persuade many readers that the death penalty is unwise and unjustified.

For many reasons, senators don’t have the time, or the inclination, to get to know one another—least of all members of the other party.

The moral contradiction of a nation torn between allegiance to its highest ideals and awareness of the base realities of racial discrimination.