Power

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.

On the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago.

A grand strategy for a turbulent world.

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

Scientists peered into the partisan abyss. They looked to see why hostility has become so high between groups with different political leanings.

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.

Vito Marcantonio fought racial, social, and economic injustices, promoting cross-cultural solidarity and progressive ideals amid McCarthyism and segregation.

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.

Heather Cox Richardson argues that there are two Americas: one interested in equality, the other in hierarchy. But it's not that simple.

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

When Nixon practiced law, he declined divorce cases because he disliked frank sexual talk from women. Trump asked Playboy to run a “Girls of Trump” feature.

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

Americans are seized by conspiracy theories, and as a result, democracy is in peril—so conventional wisdom holds.

Plus: One historian’s about-face on the Communist record.

How Ayabe-way-we-tung guided his tribe in the midst of colonization.

“The most underrated president” was a model of successful governance in a world in flux.

The signs that precede the crumbling of American political parties and the creation of new ones.

Far from a novel form of populism, J. D. Vance’s appeals are indistinguishable from the economic vision of the 1970s John Birch Society.

John Ganz offers a whirlwind tour of the cranks, conservatives, and con artists who helped remake the American right at the turn of the 21st century.

Why few Native Americans are celebrating the centennial of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

The Roberts Court has made the current crisis of American democracy perpetual.