Exhibits

Exhibit

American Corruption

The constant tug of war between those who try to bend government for their own gain and those who try to root out corruption and reform the system.

Exhibit

Federal Bureaucracy

The federal government is the nation’s biggest employer. To many, its size is a problem in itself. This exhibit asks: how big is too big, and what do we miss when we focus on size alone?

Exhibit

Social Safety Net

How Americans through the years have approached the thorny questions of identifying who the government is obliged to help and how such assistance should be funded and distributed.

Jimmy Carter speaking during his presidential campaign in 1976.
Exhibit

Legacies of Jimmy Carter

Historical reappraisals of Carter's legacies in foreign relations, the economy, the environment, and electoral politics.

Exhibit

Trumpism

A presidency often referred to as "unprecedented" has deep roots in American history.

Exhibit

Voting Rights: A Retrospective

Voting, a right not initially enshrined in the Constitution, has been secured, revoked, and contested since the nation's founding era.

Know-Nothing flag
Exhibit

The Many Faces of Nativism

As this exhibit shows, anti-immigrant sentiment has been a throughline of American history.

Exhibit

A Big Tent

Exploring the history of the Democratic Party, from its earliest days through the New Deal, the Long Sixties, and the post-Cold War era.

Declaration of Independence (1819), by John Trumbull
Exhibit

Declaring Independence

A collection of resources about the meanings of the 1776 document in its own time – and in ours.

Exhibit

President Precedents

How Americans understand the powers of the office and the legacies of past leaders.

Exhibit

“All Persons Born or Naturalized in the United States...”

A collection of resources exploring the evolving meanings of American citizenship and how they have been applied -- or denied -- to different groups of Americans.

Voter with mask
Exhibit

Election of 2020

A look back at what historians have had to say about this epic contest over the nation's future.

Split rectangle: one side blue, one side red.

How Today’s America Came About

Two different accounts from Prospect’s co-founders on how Postwar prosperity gave way to rising inequality, political polarization, and cultural conflict.
Photograph of Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904).

How National Self-Sufficiency Became a Goal of the Right

What looks like Trump-era economic nationalism has deep roots. German nationalists of the 1800s and fascist leaders of the 1930s imagined power through autarky.
Edit of different mayoral candidates distored to spiral

Fusionism Has Never Worked. Democrats Keep Trying Anyway.

Mamdani’s NYC mayoral rise revives debates over Democratic fusionism, echoing 1890s Populist struggles with establishment power.
Eric Schmitt

The Schmittian Enemy

What's up at the NatC Conference.
"Home in the Woods," an 1847 painting by Thomas Cole.

A Republican Excursion

As a new book on their travels together shows, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's friendship went beyond politics.
Soldiers watching a nuclear explosion.

Why Don’t We Take Nuclear Weapons Seriously?

The risk of nuclear war has only grown, yet the public and government officials are increasingly cavalier. Some experts are trying to change that.
William F. Buckley Jr. (far right) with his brother, New York senator James L. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, and Barry Goldwater at National Review’s twentieth-anniversary celebration, New York City, November 1975

Conservatism’s Baton Twirler

A Republican administration that wages war against immigrants and colleges should be understood as the culmination of William F. Buckley conservative movement.
Louis Ludlow.

War Powers to the People

Louis Ludlow’s war referendum amendment was the high-water mark of American antiwar populism.
Frank Meyer testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1959.

Frank Meyer’s Path from Devoted Communist to Promoter of Conservative ‘Fusionism’

A detailed, exhausting, and ultimately too-gentle treatment of the midcentury writer and editor, Frank Meyer.
Donald Trump in the Oval Office, with a portrait of Ronald Reagan in the background.

Like Reagan, Trump Is Slashing Environment Regulations, but His Strategy May Have a Deeper Impact

Both presidents have records as avid deregulators of environmental rules for industry, but Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on science go in a different direction.
Frank Meyer

Movement to Movement

Frank Meyer’s journey took him from communist agitator to conservative kingmaker.
Zohran Mamdani stands at the podium during a campaign rally.

Zohran Mamdani Is Part of Municipal Socialism’s Long History

If he wins the New York City mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani will not be in totally uncharted territory.
Constitutional convention painting blurred as if being spun in circles.

Remake America

If we want democracy to survive, we need a vision that’s going to be more compelling than the one the authoritarians are offering.
Richard Nixon
partner

Inside the Saturday Night Massacre: Nixon, Watergate and the Fight for Accountability

Nixon’s 1973 firing of a Watergate prosecutor raised questions about executive power, accountability and the limits of the law.
Trump wearing a crown, superimposed on a lithograph of the Boston Massacre.

Trump Is the Enemy of the American Revolution

He has produced a crisis much like the one the colonists faced two and a half centuries ago. Now it’s our responsibility to uphold the Founders’ legacy.
President Johnson shaking hands with Martin Luther King Jr

Work in Progress: The Voting Rights Act

The often-overlooked institutions of the federal government truly do matter and so do the individuals who lead those institutions and give them direction.
“The Gerry-Mander.” Although not the first version of Elkanah Tisdale’s famous cartoon, this one notably includes all the towns of Essex County. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Gerry-Mander_Edit.png#/media/File:The_Gerry-Mander.png.

The Original Gerrymanders

The history of gerrymandering suggests that the current redistricting race for short-term partisan gain indicates a period of political instability on the way.
An astrology chart by Joan Quiqley.

Hoover Makes Available the Newly Processed Papers of Nancy’s Reagan’s White House Astrologer

How an astrologer's direction steered presidential travel, public appearances, and meetings.
An abolitionist lithograph depicting enslaved people celebrating the Fourth of July while a white judge sits on bales of cotton with his feet on the Constitution, 1840

The Contradictory Revolution

Historians have long grappled with “the American Paradox” of Revolutionary leaders who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Black people.
Mel Bradford on the cover of Southern Partisan magazine in 1992.

A Paleoconservative War Story

The conservative movement "assumed it had intellectual ownership over the presidency," but an NEH appointment fight reveals the Reagan administration disagreed.
Collage of images including spacecrafts, the moon and President Kennedy surround a jumping Elon Musk.

How NASA Engineered Its Own Decline

The agency once projected America’s loftiest ideals. Then it ceded its ambitions to Elon Musk.
Ed Feulner and the Heritage Foundation

The Trumpist Legacy of Ed Feulner and the Heritage Foundation

Ideological entrepreneur, architect of ruin.
John F. Kennedy waves to a cameraman a crowd of supporters in Los Angeles in 1960.
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To Bounce Back, Democrats Need a New John F. Kennedy Moment

JFK's presidential win in 1960 offers a guide for how Democrats can rebound in 2025.
George Lunn, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and other politicans at the Democratic National Nominating Convention in 1924.
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The Socialist Mayor Who Came 100 Years Before Zohran Mamdani

George Lunn, socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York rose to power in 1911 by making a difference in people's lives.
Fiorello La Guardia

Lessons from La Guardia

Can Zohran Mamdani reshape New York—and national—politics like Mayor Fiorello La Guardia once did?
Grover Cleveland

The Gilded Age Roots of American Austerity

Both Trump and Cleveland employed the rhetoric of worthiness and efficiency, anti-fraud and anti-corruption, as justifications for their austerity measures.
Robert LaFollette Sr.
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The Legacy of Robert La Follette's Progressive Vision

Robert La Follette saw politics as a never-ending struggle for democracy and fairness and preached perseverance.
Cartographic depiction of the Union armies Anaconda plan shows a snake wrapping around the American South.

The President's Awesome War Powers

Where they come from, how they've evolved, and how they could change.
Composite Curtis Yarvin, a crown, an atom diagram, and a cathedral.

Curtis Yarvin’s Cranky Yearnings

He didn’t give the tech right new ideas—not really. What he gave them was permission.
A magnifying glass rests atop Arthur Schlessinger's THe Cycle of American History.

What If the Political Pendulum Doesn’t Swing Back?

"The Cycles of American History" foresaw American voter dealignment, and an age of voters prioritizing personality over party—but it didn’t anticipate Trump.