Power

Our racial history is complex and important, but debates today are eliding entire chapters of it.

Economic and social issues with roots in the 1994 midterms are still being debated today.

A new history shows how neoliberalism took power during a period of crisis, which leaves open the question of whether it can be forced out as a result of one.

The most vitriolic and morally panicked conservative figures of the 1990s contributed just as much to modern American conservatism as Ronald Reagan did.

The rise of a new tax politics has made it harder to address our problems, and now it threatens democracy, too.

Without a name for it, figuring out why it happened is that much harder.

The second section of the Fourteenth Amendment offers severe penalties for menacing the right to vote—if anyone can figure out how to enforce it.

Historical experts and former Carter advisers fact-check the critics who have compared Joe Biden to Jimmy Carter.

In the 19th century, Americans dumped poor migrants overseas. Now some governors are shipping them off to other states.

A history of the bureau and its place in the federal government.

The partisan redistricting tactics of cracking and packing aren’t merely flaws in the system—they are the system.

Public heath and race at the US-Mexico border.

On the alarming origins of the current political moment.

What prospects are there today for assessing American politics and history from an early Hofstadterian remove?

How would the presidency have looked under Joseph Lane, a Democrat, as opposed to Abraham Lincoln?

What shark attacks in 1916 could tell us about the midterms in 2022.

Examining the ingredients—time, grain, government regulations—that have made bourbon an enduring national favorite.

Unearthing the deep roots of racialized voter suppression—and explaining how they shape ballot access today.

American Democratic Socialism has deep roots in the very “American” values it is accused of undermining.

In the absence of tax dollars, American cities like Baltimore are now funding themselves by fining the poor instead of taxing the rich.

The legacies of our racial past, and the prospects ahead for an embattled republic.

How right-wing school panics seek to repeal modernity and progress.

The foremost challenge of Grant’s day has not gone away. His response to it merits our attention.

In the 1990s, the New Democrats trusted corporations to do the right thing. The results were disastrous.

In an era of laissez-faire governance, a growing number of federal and state regulations were justified as necessary to protect public health and morality.

Fights over fugitive slave laws pitted states against each other and showcased the risks of the federal government not supporting liberty.

Clashes between sovereignty rights and civil rights reveal an uncomfortable and complicated story about race and belonging in America.

The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic instincts of another.

The contradictory past and uncertain future of the Democratic Party.

Are alarmist narratives about a “new civil war” obscuring the real battle in US politics: the fight for democracy?