Power

Cynical public speech aimed at winning political power has consequences.

They were not the nation's first settlers, but they were the most fractious.

Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America, embodying both its tumult and its promise.

And history says they have a reason to be.

In his time, the 16th president drew comparisons to a famous tightrope walker.

Misinformation and conspiracy theories can foment violence and thwart democracy.

Americans are no more selfish in 2020 than they were in the 1940s, the difference between the two moments is about national leadership, not national character.

History is asking only one question right now as Trump refuses to concede. Will the Republicans decide they are no longer an American political party?

A recent history centers the Lakota and the vast territory they controlled in the story of the formation of the United States.

Biden will take over a country facing myriad challenges. And Trump's lame-duck period could be one of the most treacherous in American history.

The 1868 Election was the first one in which hundreds of thousands of African American men voted. It also began an unfortunate history of voter suppression.

Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the vote has a familiar ring. It evokes an egregious example of election fraud in the 1890s.

How the founders settled on the system we love to hate today.

Failures inspire distrust of pollsters and calls for more shoe-leather reporting. But by the next election, we always come running back.

Jaime Harrison lost to Lindsey Graham but expanded Democrats’ vision of what’s possible in the Deep South.

An excerpt from the diary of presidential hopeful at the outset of the contested election of 1876.

Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it.

“Start-ups: they need philosophers, political theorists, historians, poets. Critics.”

President Trump has called on supporters, including law enforcement officers, to monitor election sites. Voter intimidation tactics have a long history.

In 1880, a new generation helped decide the closest popular vote in U.S. history.

The collapse of the Republican Party.

The verdict was unanimous.

The modern conception of freedom emerged as an antidemocratic reaction by elites who wanted to curtail state power.

A Trump-Biden transition is sure to be scary. But it’d be hard to beat Buchanan-Lincoln.

A political history of the present moment.

Radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.

Pursuing a Native alliance powerful enough to resist the American invaders, the Shawnee leader and his prophet brother envisioned a new and better Indian world.

Debates about what should be America’s role in the world are not new—neither is the slogan “America First.”

The messy election of 1876.

The controversy surrounding the 2000 presidential election led to sweeping voting reforms, but opened the door to a new set of problems still affecting us.