Power

An overhyped new paradigm proved to be a slogan without a movement.

The FBI’s first director built the agency around some of his own worst instincts.

A new book argues that the American right emerged out of a backlash to multiracial democracy following the Civil War.

A new book traces the long history of cloaking racism in the language of resistance to an overbearing federal government.

Georgia’s own history highlights what out-organizing voter suppression really entails.

Georgia’s competitive runoff election is the result of centuries of white supremacist efforts.

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

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.

Governors Ron DeSantis and Gretchen Whitmer took opposite approaches to covid in swing states — but each sailed to reelection.

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

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 is considered one of the most successful presidents, even though he did not seek reelection.

Can the origins of today’s right be traced to the 1990s?

How a red wave in a solidly blue state helped tip the balance.

How Americans lost faith in the possibility of self-government.

Revisiting political assassinations.

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

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

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

Despite wrenching economic and political changes in the country, Democrats and Republicans keep finding themselves nearly tied in election after election.

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.

Thanks to an 1835 treaty, they’re pushing Democrats to approve a nonvoting delegate.

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.

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.