Power

Ballot initiatives, referendums, and other forms of direct democracy have a mixed track record of empowering the people.

How our inability to change America’s most important document is deforming our politics and government.

On the legal challenges to racist presidential policy that led to the Trail of Tears.

The senator from Massachusetts and the birth of the Republican Party.

Like so many other reluctant revolutionaries in New York, he seemed the antithesis of the rabble in arms that the British identified with the mobocracy.

A new book documents a period of thriving radical groups and their devastating suppression.

How the defeat of the 1890 Lodge bill presaged today’s age of ballot-driven backlash.

Where did the behind-closed-doors racist garbage from some leading Los Angeles elected officials come from?

Despite their minority status, the Socialists had been a significant force in American politics before patriotic war hysteria brought on an era of repression.

Calls for control over educators are manufactured political myths as they’ve never had the power to push an agenda.

Rather than a “colonial America,” we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial.

How David O. Russell’s movie messes around with the story of the Business Plot.

Since the 18th century, American politics has functioned via coalitions between competing factions. Can alliances survive today’s partisan climate?

The promise of US federalism is that states will be “laboratories of democracy." The reality is that states are more often laboratories of authoritarianism.

The consequences of racial separation are significant for left political organizing aimed at building a multiracial working-class majority.

A new book provides a framework that engages with “big history” or “deep history” while avoiding explanations that flirt with forms of determinism.

Some lessons for Joe Biden from the ’70s presidents who lived it.

Such a doctrine would be antithetical to the Framers’ intent, and to the text, fundamental design, and architecture of the Constitution.

Remember Dan White? He was the Kyle Rittenhouse of his day. No wonder Tucker Carlson loves him.

"The New York Times" as the world's most exhausted professor.

Back when monarchs had much more power—and news was far from instantaneous—it had major implications in the American colonies.

A conversation about changing the American story.

Supporters of the “independent state legislature theory” are quoting fake history.

America’s gerontocracy is disconnecting Congress from the rest of the country.

The rise of the “economic style of reasoning” in the 1960s cannot be properly understood without attending to the political fallout of earlier decades.

The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism.

“Colorblindness,” an ideology that denies race as an organizing principle of the nation’s structural order, reaches back to the drafting of the US Constitution.

An annotated collection of resources from the Bunk archive that help explain the shifting sands of American politics.

President Ford’s unconditional pardon of Richard Nixon created political controversy. It also tarnished Ford’s own reputation with the American public.

Three books explore a history of fractious extremism that predates Donald Trump.