Collage showing people gathering at the site of school shootings.

The Second Generation of School Shootings

The fear that overtook us that day in 1988 was unfamiliar to most Americans. Now all too many know how it feels.
President Abraham Lincoln, bareheaded at center, giving the Gettysburg Address, Pennsylvania, 1863

The Party of Lincoln Ignores His Warning Against Mobocracy

“There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law,” declared the man who would be America’s sixteenth president.
Two adults holding hands with a child in front of a Christmas tree

The Oracle of Our Unease

The enchanted terms in which F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed modern America still blind us to how scathingly he judged it.

The Return of American Fascism

How a legacy of violent nationalism haunts the republic in the age of Trump.
Youth members of a German-American Bund camp raising a flag, 1934.

American Fascism: It Has Happened Here

Americans of the interwar period were perfectly clear about one fact we have lost sight of today: all fascism is indigenous, by definition.

American Immigration: A Century of Racism

On Daniel Okrent's "The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America."

‘The Lehman Trilogy’ and Wall Street’s Debt to Slavery

If the play holds up a mirror to our moment, it is by registering slavery in a peripheral glance only to look away.

How "America First" Ruined the "American Dream"

Author Sarah Churchwell on the entangled history of America’s most loaded phrases.

End of the American Dream? The Dark History of 'America First'

When he promised to put America first in his inaugural speech, Donald Trump drew on a slogan with a long and sinister history.