Power

Most recent scholarship, while supporting the view that the policy was vicious, has not addressed the question of genocide.

On early American attempts to kick out foreigners.

Rick Perlstein’s epic series shows political history and cultural history cannot be disentangled.

The House approved a constitutional amendment to dismantle the indirect voting system, but it was killed in the Senate by a filibuster.

The process varied by state, with some making accommodations for the new voting bloc and others creating additional obstacles.

A review of Eric Foner's The Second Founding.

Washington supported a much more limited conception of executive privilege.

In 1920, James Weldon Johnson went to Washington, armed with census data, to fight rampant voter suppression across the American South.

McCarthy never sent a single “subversive” to jail, but, decades later, the spirit of his conspiracy-mongering endures.

When J.F.K. ran for President, a team of data scientists with powerful computers set out to model and manipulate American voters. Sound familiar?

There is, and always has been, a vanishingly thin line between charismatic democratic rulers and charismatic authoritarians.

Black people suffer disproportionately from police violence. But white skin does not provide immunity.

All empires fall. When they do, the violence and terror they’ve wrought on others has a way of coming back around.

Who counts determines whose interests are represented in government.

Before presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, before Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, there was Congresswoman and firebrand Bella Abzug.

Why the framers created the Electoral College — and why we need to get rid of it.

How immigration enforcement and policing became entwined

They understood that revolution means dismantling old power structures, violently if necessary.

Worried that the presidential power to undo convictions can be taken too far? Look no further than Lincoln’s successor.

The long history behind the Army's Jim Crow forts.

In 1860, a novel paramilitary-style organization mobilized hundreds of thousands against the Southern planter class.

She designed Social Security and public works programs that helped bring millions out of poverty. Her work has been largely forgotten.

About 8,500 women attended the camps inspired by the CCC and organized by Eleanor Roosevelt—but the "She-She-She" program was mocked and eventually abandoned.

Is being "political" the central force in our identities?

Two recent books put the reemergence of anti-immigrant sentiment in the Trump era into historical relief.

Indigenous scholars have long contested the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis. Today, it is clear that the disease thesis simply doesn’t hold up.

Charles Sumner and the fight for equal naturalization rights.

The real challenge is not simply to replace Trump, but to fix a system that produces, promotes, and protects the toxicity that defines his presidency.

We all know, in the abstract, that Wilson was a white supremacist. But here’s how he wielded his racism against one accomplished Black American.

Dustin Tahmahkera details the life of the last chief of the Comanches, Quanah Parker.