Supporters cheer during an election night watch party for Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D) in Atlanta
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Warnock’s Win Points to the Need For Ongoing Political Organizing

Georgia’s own history highlights what out-organizing voter suppression really entails.
African Americans campaigning for Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, and Confederate symbols in Georgia.

Minority Rule(s)

Georgia’s competitive runoff election is the result of centuries of white supremacist efforts.
The Capitol Building in ruins within a US-shaped crater.

Why Our Country Is Too Big Not to Fail

Maybe the United States was doomed from the start. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau can explain why.
C. Wright Mills.

C. Wright Mills’s "The Power Elite" Still Speaks to Today’s America

Mills exposed postwar American power and warned of an authoritarian turn in the book, which speaks to our own moment of inequality and right-wing anger.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
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Two Opposing Approaches To Public Health May Be on the Ballot in 2024

Governors Ron DeSantis and Gretchen Whitmer took opposite approaches to covid in swing states — but each sailed to reelection.
Side-by-side of Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock
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The Racist Origins of Georgia’s Runoff Elections

Sen. Raphael Warnock and challenger Herschel Walker, both Black, square off in a contest designed to empower White voters.
Portraits of white men.

How 155 Angry White Men Chained Alabama to Its Confederate Past

Their plan required not only a social and legal division along racial lines but a political one, too — a separation that persists today.
James K. Polk.

The President Who Did It All in One Term — and What Biden Could Learn From Him

James K. Polk is considered one of the most successful presidents, even though he did not seek reelection.
Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole standing alongside an elephant on Capitol Hill, 1995.

Myths of Doom

Can the origins of today’s right be traced to the 1990s?
Mike Lawler, Republican candidate for New York's 17th Congressional District.
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The GOP Can Thank Suburban N.Y. For its Slim Control of The House

How a red wave in a solidly blue state helped tip the balance.
Photograph of protesters and text from a 1944 edition of "Are You An American?"

The Failure of a Public Philosophy

How Americans lost faith in the possibility of self-government.
JFK and Jacqueline in the convertible limousine in Dallas.

A Weekend in Dallas

Revisiting political assassinations.
Portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville

‘A Great Democratic Revolution’

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”
A lithograph of Daniel Webster from William H. Brown’s 1845 series “Portrait Gallery of Distinguished American Citizens”

We Fought Over American National Identity During the Antebellum Period. The Fight Should Be Ongoing.

A new work of history finds the best antidote to today’s authoritarian politics in Daniel Webster’s 19th-century civic nationalism.
Illustration of Robert Greenstein holding his glasses

How One Man Quietly Stitched the American Safety Net Over Four Decades

Robert Greenstein isn’t a household name. But his career lobbying for the poor has changed the lives of millions of Americans.
Hand tossing a coin.

Why Is America Always Divided 50–50?

Despite wrenching economic and political changes in the country, Democrats and Republicans keep finding themselves nearly tied in election after election.
Drawing of people gathered around a speaker at the liberty tree.
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The Letter That Helped Start a Revolution

The Town of Boston’s invention of the standing committee 250 years ago provided a means for building consensus during America’s nascent independence movement.
Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. with Kimberly Teehee

Cherokee Nation Is Fighting for a Seat in Congress

Thanks to an 1835 treaty, they’re pushing Democrats to approve a nonvoting delegate.
Print shows Rebel troops killing the citizens of Lawrence, Kansas, and setting fire to the buildings.

Where Will This Political Violence Lead? Look to the 1850s.

In the mid-19th century, a pro-slavery minority used violence to stifle a growing anti-slavery majority, spurring their opposition to respond in kind.
Elder Leslie Mathews, an organizer with Michigan United, joins leaders of the Reproductive Freedom for All campaign as they speak to supporters on July 11 in Lansing, Mich., after turning in 753,759 signatures to qualify for Michigan's November ballot.
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Abortion Initiatives Expose the Promise and Peril of Direct Democracy

Ballot initiatives, referendums, and other forms of direct democracy have a mixed track record of empowering the people.
An American flag stylized as a ball bearing maze.

The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

How our inability to change America’s most important document is deforming our politics and government.
Map of the Cherokee Country in 1900

How the Supreme Court Failed to Stop the Brutal Relocation of Indigenous American Nations

On the legal challenges to racist presidential policy that led to the Trail of Tears.
Black and white photo of Charles Sumner

“A Solemn Battle Between Good and Evil.” Charles Sumner’s Radical, Compelling Message of Abolition

The senator from Massachusetts and the birth of the Republican Party.
Left: cover of "The New Yorkers," a book by Sam Roberts, featuring a collage of black and white photographs of different people. Right: 1884 illustration of British soldiers in long coats fighting with New York men
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Isaac Sears and the Roots of America in New York

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.
The Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs addressing a crowd, circa 1910.

How World War I Crushed the American Left

A new book documents a period of thriving radical groups and their devastating suppression.
A hand demonstrates a push lever system in voting booth, and students wait in line to vote in a mock election held at Morgan State University in Baltimore

The Forgotten First Voting Rights Act

How the defeat of the 1890 Lodge bill presaged today’s age of ballot-driven backlash.
Protests at a Los Angeles City Council Meeting

L.A. Backstory: The History Behind the City Council’s Racist Tirades

Where did the behind-closed-doors racist garbage from some leading Los Angeles elected officials come from?
Black and white photo of Eugene Debs being released from an Atlanta federal prison on Christmas Day, 1921.

The American Socialism That Might Have Been

Despite their minority status, the Socialists had been a significant force in American politics before patriotic war hysteria brought on an era of repression.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) displays the signed Parental Rights in Education bill, also known as the "Don't Say Gay" law, while surrounded by elementary school students during a news conference on March 28.
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Conservatives’ Panic Over Teachers Misses How Little Freedom They Have

Calls for control over educators are manufactured political myths as they’ve never had the power to push an agenda.
Map of British colonies of North America in 1776.

Colonial America Is a Myth

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