Richard White

Historian Richard White on the greed, ineptitude and economic cost behind the transcontinental railroads, and the implications for infrastructure policy today.

In Jill Lepore's "These Truths," ideas produce other ideas. But new ideas arise from thinking humans, not from other ideas.

How much monopoly is too much monopoly?

From fee-based governance to the “friendships” between the rich and public officials, the 19th century practices we once banished are back.

From log cabins to Gilded Age mansions, how you lived determined where you belonged.

A new biography of Andrew Jackson recounts a bloody history, and reveals disturbing parallels between the 1830s and the Trump era.

Despite what Steve King says, the U.S. was never a Christian nation.

There was a time when Americans valued 'competency' over riches and saw wealth as the cause of poverty.