Power

Many founders expressed their hope that slavery would be abolished, while simultaneously exerting themselves to defend it.

On Nelson Rockefeller and the disappearance of moderate Republicans from American politics.

A new book tells the story of American communism as an integral part of 20th-century US history, with Communists “as social critics and social change agents.”

America long ago rejected the trappings of monarchy in favor of republicanism, but many have wanted to have it both ways.

A new book on how 9/11 altered the national psyche also demonstrates how it stunted progressive politics.

What the three-fifths clause meant at ratification.

Anti-Trump Republicans revere Ronald Reagan as Trump’s opposite—yet in critical ways Reagan may have been his forerunner.

The 40th president inadvertently prepared the ground for the 45th in multiple ways.

The factionalized press was the site of campaigning in the U.S.'s first contested presidential elections.

In 1916, an unlikely duo exposed political corruption in Indiana, setting a new precedent for fair voting across the country.

Revisiting the Agrarian-Distributists and their fabrication of an American past.

Demography has not managed to be destiny in the past half-century—but predictions of a millenarian shift have not lost their appeal.

The spirit of socialism has coursed through the American Midwest ever since the movement emerged, continuing to animate the political landscape today.

America’s southern states were once strongholds for the Democratic Party. In 1952, Eisenhower decided to win them over.

In 2002, Republicans attacked the patriotism of a distinguished Democratic veteran. It worked and they've kept doing it ever since.

By suggesting that those seeking asylum in the U.S. are dangerous, Trump echoes the often false narratives around the 1980s Mariel boatlift.

My grandmother and the fight over the 1964 Mississippi delegation.

A grand strategy for a turbulent world.

Liberalism’s relationship to equality has, his­torically, been far from a warm embrace.

Is this America?

In the 20th century, American Communists were seen as an enemy within. In reality, they were ordinary people with complex lives that deserve to be chronicled.

And national security became everything.

Kamala Harris is the heir to a political lineage that dates back to a chain-smoking, hard-drinking mastermind elected to Congress from San Francisco in 1964.

What the scholarship on biraciality tells us about politics now.

A college group pioneered the dirty tricks that led to Watergate. Fifty years later, the tactics still poison politics.

Maurice Isserman’s history of American communism documents both its achievements and its fatal obeisance to Soviet doctrines.

Vice presidential nominees weren't tasked with flinging mud until the last 40 years.

It is hard not to figure the 1968 election as inaugurating the cultural and political polarisation of the American electorate so evident today.

The Democratic Party, and the US political system as a whole, is a very strange beast.

Douglass elaborated a political theory attuned to the differential character of law as it applied to slaves and other outlaws.