Power

James M. Smith explains the last debates between Loyalists and Patriots prior to the official outbreak of the American Revolution.

Why John Adams was peculiarly unsuited to the moment.

Only a certain kind of person, both foolish and resolute, would choose to study a subject so extensive, yet so restrictive, as the secrets of nuclear weapons.

We say we’re for it. We’ve never truly had it. These next few years will determine its fate.

The “great replacement theory” is nothing new.

Thaddeus Stevens was a fierce opponent of the “odious” compromises in the Constitution, and of the North’s compromises after the Civil War.

When 'seditious' and 'unpatriotic' speech was criminalized in the U.S.

Leadership battles tell us a lot about where a party is headed.

Americans have always been deeply divided.

Decades of stigmatizing and trying to police the homeless have perpetuated the problem.

A conversation between a historian and the creator of a new documentary short about NRA leader Harlon Carter.

The first volume of Frederik Logevall’s biography of JFK reveals the scope of his ambition and the weakness of his political commitments.

Liberty for some has always entailed a lack of liberty for many others.

The tales of the three fallen senators, as well as some other notable beefs in history.

Let's talk about the period when Roosevelt actually created the modern welfare state.

The 1968 Gun Control Act had the right idea — but it came too late.

Richard Russell was a segregationist and a fervent opponent of civil rights. So why does his name still adorn the Russell Senate Office Building?

The decades after the Civil War saw mass participation and mass outrage, followed by a period of orderly reform. What can we learn from that era today?

A new book argues that mail service played a critical role in the U.S. government’s westward expansion and occupation of Native lands.

For more than three centuries, something has been going horribly wrong at the top of our society, and we’re all suffering for it.

Without the now-obscure land investment affair, Georgia might have been a "super state."

Lady Bird Johnson and Nancy Reagan grappled with the contradictions of a role that is at once public and private, superficial and serious.

How an automated algorithm constrained Congress for a century.

On Kyle Riismandel’s “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975–2001.”

In the heat of the Cold War, Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade became a media sensation.

The former first lady fought the conservative Reagan administration in an attempt to get her husband to pay more attention to the deadly pandemic.

Today’s progressives are children of the old Republican Party, not the New Deal Democrats. Roosevelt and his followers stood for nearly everything they oppose.

It is time to reckon with America’s racist legacy of Interstate Highway planning and engineering.

The U.S. is a diverse nation of immigrants—but it was not intended to be, and its historical biases continue to haunt the present.

A new book by Ruth Ben-Ghiat discusses the past and present challenges posed by authoritarianism, but misses the conditions in which it arises.