Power

A visual breakdown of the U.S. Senate by age.

Since Jeannette Rankin was elected in 1916, 352 women have served in the House and 46 in the Senate. About two-thirds entered Congress during or after the 1990s.

Six decades ago, leaders in the GOP backed away from the conspiracy theories peddled by the leader of the increasingly influential John Birch Society.

“There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law,” declared the man who would be America’s sixteenth president.

A new history of five heroes of the revolutionary period considers the power and instability of charismatic leadership.

In 1964, the John Birch Society was the most active far-right group in the United States—unless you count the Republican Party.

The Bleeding Kansas parallels with our current moment get weirder and darker.

Although he did not openly endorse every one of the many precepts of the antislavery Constitution, Lincoln framed his positions entirely within its parameters.

A violent confrontation between the IWW and the American Legion put organized labor on trial, but a hostile federal government didn’t stop the IWW from growing.

The storming of the Capitol on 6 January was not a coup. But American democracy is still in danger.

The storming of the Capitol was an expression of the antidemocratic strands in American history.

The 14th Amendment offers a remedy that is both simpler and likelier to work.

Invoking the specter of voter fraud to undermine democratic participation is a tactic as old as the United States itself.

While Wednesday's images shocked us, they fit into our history.

An image from the Capitol captures the distance between who we purport to be and who we have actually been.

But the belief that America previously had a well-functioning democracy is an illusion.

The rioters at the Capitol are part of an unbroken American tradition. Sweet talk about our “better angels” did not defeat them before and will not now.

True democracy in America is a young, fragile experiment that must be defended if it is to endure.

Some supporters of the violent mob scene at the Capitol proclaimed it was the beginning of a “Second American Revolution.”

The Texas senator claims to be moved by the spirit of 1876, but he’s just another huckster playing a risky game with democracy.

Trump fans are better off as Americans.

Born enslaved, he was elected to Congress in the wake of the Civil War. But the impact of this momentous step in U.S. race relationships did not last long.

In pardoning Nixon, the 38th president opened the floodgates to boundless executive power.

Guns have always loomed large in Black people's lives — going all the way back to the days of colonial slavery, explains reporter Alain Stephens from The Trace.

Abraham Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans consider John Brown mad. Yet it was Brown’s strategy that brought slavery to an end.

States have a legitimate way to influence national politics. Forcing their will on other states isn't it.

On the ten year anniversary of Aziz Rana's book, Henry Brooks interviews him on his influential book and what it might teach us about the legacies of populism.

The story of Indigenous women’s participation in the struggle for women’s suffrage is highly complex, and Zitkala-Ša’s story provides an illuminating example.

Material benefits trumped FDR's terrible civil rights records.

On the continued revolutionary rhetoric and ideology that persisted in America even after the American Revolution.