Power

The white supremacist conspiracy theory that has inspired horrific violence in the past five years dates back to Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo.

An expert on the white-power movement and the “great replacement” theory puts the act of terror in context.

A new book chronicles the life of the 19th century political giant of Salmon Chase.

According to experts who monitor the radical right, the white supremacist ideology that police say drove the Buffalo gunman has begun moving into the mainstream.

A conversation with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on his new book, which investigates the co-option of identity politics and the importance of coalitional organizing. 

Historian Gary Gerstle lays out an era's policies and ideologies, and what undermined them.

Historian Barbara J. Fields explains why you can't understand what happened in 1619 without understanding what happened in 1607.

There is little mention of abortion in a four-thousand-word document crafted by fifty-five men in 1787. This seems to be a surprise to Samuel Alito.

In 'What It Took to Win,' Michael Kazin traces the history over the past two centuries of what he calls ‘the oldest mass party in the world’.

In the years before Barack Obama was elected, many groups on the extreme right kept a relatively low profile. With the election of a Black president, that changed.

The rise and fall of the WASP.

Why our politics are growing ever more extreme — and democracy itself is under siege.

Neo-Nazi propaganda, military deployment and the F.B.I. raid in Waco, Texas, radicalized Timothy McVeigh and led to the Oklahoma City attack.

What connection does the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson have to the party of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris?

American government succeeded, Tocqueville thought, because it didn’t empower the people too much.

The Department of Homeland Security was supposed to rally nearly two dozen agencies together in a streamlined approach to protecting the country. So what the hell happened?

A conversation with historian Gary Gerstle about understanding neoliberalism as a bipartisan worldview and how the political order it ushered in has crumbled. 

Is the Republican Party compatible with democracy?

On the promises and perils of very recent history.

The key witness in Clarence Thomas’s nomination process discusses how sex and race shaped the new Justice’s experience, and her own.

You likely think of the American West as deeply conservative and rural. Yet history shows this politics is very new indeed.

Diversity, national Identity, and the fraught history behind the State Department’s search for diplomats who “look like America.”

How and why did Johnson consider American military involvement in Vietnam a worthwhile cause that would benefit American interests and American lives?

The American socialism movement's open participation in and with the broad democratic left benefits the socialist cause.

"The Deportation Express: A History of America through Forced Removal" traces the historical roots and spatial routes of systemic denial, arrest, and removal from the United States.

A new book situates the War on Terror as a story of domination which traces back to the founding of the US as a settler-colonial and slaveholding behemoth.

How political figures have framed anti-LGBTQ bigotry as being pro-child and pro-parent.

On the pro-business transformation of the Democratic Party.

Josh Hawley’s attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are part of a long, sad tradition.

David Halberstam’s title The Best and the Brightest was steeped in irony. Did these presidential advisers earn it?