Power

Why we should resist hero-worshipping Ukraine’s president.

The defeat of Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 changed the way justices are confirmed today.

Lin­coln’s interactions with black Americans provides a valuable resource for understanding a more farseeing Lincoln than the voices of despair have described.

Infrastructure has a long history of cloaking racism and preventing justice.

Supreme Court confirmation hearings feature senators talking a lot, and nominees nodding politely until they can leave.

How Washington outsources its dirty work.

The number one complaint: Children had to go to school in the dark.

Revisiting post-war activist movements around the world to understand generational conflicts in the left.

The importance of an unambiguous report that cannot be weaponized by Trump supporters.

The radicalization of a congressional clerk in the 1800s and the introduction of the telegraph set a young country on a new trajectory.

Current attempts to correct historical discrimination by local and regional offices of the USDA have been met with charges of "reverse discrimination."

Who did neoliberalism?

Institutions meant to secure peace, from NATO to the U.N., date back to Truman’s Presidency. So do the conflicts threatening that peace.

The same ideas that have harmed D.C. for more than a century are again rearing their ugly head.

His approval rating hit historic lows, his party was fractious, crises were everywhere. But Truman rescued his presidency, and his legacy.

Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Congress enacted several laws restricting the sale of alcohol to Native Americans.

Roscoe Conkling was a successful politician and an able lawyer. But the colorful and irascible senator had no desire to serve on the high court.

Southern pro-slavery states weren't the only states calling for disunion before the Civil War erupted.

How Charlotta Bass, a Black woman and peace activist, anticipated America’s path to militarism.

Why can’t America see that?

Tennessee’s surprising role in the adoption of life-saving seat belt laws.

A new book aims to recover the Constitution’s pivotal role in shaping claims of justice and equality.

Amidst growing suspicion that equality talk is cheap, a new book explains where egalitarianism went wrong—and what it still has to offer.

An American conservatism which subtly or directly marginalizes the Founding is on a fast track to a conservatism at odds with America’s roots itself.

The conservative plot to suppress the Black vote has relied on racist caricatures, then and now.

The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

The inequitable dismissal of US soldiers following the conclusion of the Civil War.

And why spying on the “bums” has been terrible for schools.

Using the congressional filibuster to prevent voting rights legislation isn't new. It has roots in the 19th century.

A historian of global health explains how the lack of ICU beds in low-income communities is the result of government spending cuts dating back to the 1970s.