Richard Kreitner

The back-and-forth life of Confederate James Longstreet.

The life of Judah Benjamin, a Southern Jew who served in the Confederate government, can tell us only so much about the American Jewish encounter with slavery.

In his new book, The Crooked Path to Abolition, James Oakes argues that the Constitution was an antislavery document.

Thaddeus Stevens was a fierce opponent of the “odious” compromises in the Constitution, and of the North’s compromises after the Civil War.

Disunion is hardly a new theme in American politics. In this moment of tumult, it would be unwise to rule out its return.

They were not the nation's first settlers, but they were the most fractious.

A contested presidential election in 1876 produced a devastating compromise.

Why secession, separatism, and disunion are the most American of values.

Wielding the outside agitator trope has always, at bottom, been a way of putting dissidents in their place.

The shameful career of Roger Sherman, mild-mannered Yankee.

The ideology of the men who celebrated the United States while fighting for its dissolution is still very much alive.

What the political crisis in post-revolutionary America has to teach us about our own time.

An interview with Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf.

“Together with other ‘know nothing’ organizations scattered through the country, it represents a basic, continuing phenomenon in American society.”

“The bearing of this upon social conditions can hardly be overestimated.”

"Who shall blame the Sioux for defending themselves, their wives and children, when attacked in their own encampment and threatened with destruction?"

“Very sensible men have declared that they were fully impressed at such a time with the conviction that it was the burning of the world.”