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.

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.
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.
Donald Trump; Alexander Hamilton.

Trump Is Hamiltonian, Not Jacksonian

He believes in Federalist 70’s “Energy in the Executive.”
A Democratic donkey with its head cut off is surrounded by hands pointing at charts and graphs.

How Strategist Brain Took Over the Democratic Party

During the Reagan revolution, Democrats settled on a new way to win—and it’s destroying them now.
JD Vance

J.D. Vance's Anti-Declaration

Truths self-evident no more.
An 1880 Harper's Weekly illustration titled Women at the Polls in New Jersey.

Women in New Jersey Gained—and Lost—the Right to Vote More Than a Century Before the 19th Amendment

Vague phrasing enfranchised women who met specific property requirements. A 1790 law explicitly allowed female suffrage, but this privilege was revoked in 1807.
An illustration of the citizens’ committee in Fort Worth, Texas arresting a striker during the Great Southwest Strike of 1886.

Populism Was Born From a Rural-Urban Alliance

In 1880s Texas, farmers and factory workers discovered they had the same enemy: corporate capitalists.
A throng of Trump supporters, some in colonial garb, march through Washington D.C.

The 19th-Century Precursors to the Crises of Trump’s America

Revisiting history shows that violence and constitutional disputes are nothing new in US politics.
Declaration of Independence marked up with red marker.

Here Are the Declaration of Independence’s Grievances Against King George III. Many Apply to Trump.

It’s uncanny.
Engraving of Founding Fathers reading the Declaration of Independence while onlookers rally.

Does America Have a Founding Philosophy?

It depends on how you read the Declaration’s “self-evident” truths.
A man walks down the street dressed as Uncle Sam and carries a large baby Donald Trump doll.

Cracked, Costly Fantasies

The legacy of right-wing ideologies in California.
Collage of Richard Nixon and vintage images of mushroom clouds.

The President’s Weapon

Why does the power to launch nuclear weapons rest with a single American?

Why America Got a Warfare State, Not a Welfare State

How FDR invented national security, and why Democrats need to move on from it.
Donald Trump shakes the hand of a border patrol officer while a line of others waits to meet him.

State of Exception

National security governance, then and now.
A man in a field of white flags representing Los Angeles residents who died of COVID-19.

How Did We Fare on COVID-19?

To restore public trust and prepare for the next pandemic, we need a reckoning with the U.S. experience—what worked, and what didn’t.
Collage of James Madison writing, Justice Scalia speaking, White House and Constitution.

Putting the "Executive" in “Unitary Executive”

We cannot divorce the independence of the executive branch from its substance.
H.A. Smith is sworn in as a first witness at a HUAC hearing.

American Hysteria

Red Scare can be read as solid history of the years it depicts—and chilling prophecy of the years to come.