Power

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?

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.