Power

The two decades leading up to WWII featured numerous connections between America and Nazi Germany that reveal Nazism was never simply a foreign or enemy force.

As Lincoln recognized, it's not enough to question the decisions, justices, or even the structure of the Court. We need to challenge the foundation of its power.

The document counted my great-great-grandfather as 3/5 of a free person. But the Framers don’t own the version we live by today. We do.

A contested presidential election in 1876 produced a devastating compromise.

Racism — not reformers demanding redress — is the source of American strife.

Not since Reconstruction has there been such an opportunity for the advancement of racial justice.

U.S. democracy and the U.S. postal service share a long, entangled history. An attack against one signals an attack against the other.

How a legacy of violent nationalism haunts the republic in the age of Trump.

Eugene Debs’s unswerving commitment to democracy and internationalism was born out of his revulsion at the tyranny of industrial capitalism.

The story of the democratic movements that the framers of the U.S. Constitution feared and sought to suppress.

For close to a century, conservatives have seen all government programs as the road to socialism.

How two competing definitions of the idea evolved over 250 years—and why they remain largely irreconcilable.

Eric Foner sees parallels with our own time but warns that yesterday’s solution would be a disaster.

On the need to rethink the U.S. immigration and refugee policy, which was shaped as part of Cold War strategy.

Reform was framed as a way of removing “politics” from postal affairs and giving more autonomy to postal management. In time, it would prove to do neither.

Why secession, separatism, and disunion are the most American of values.

Behind the friendship was a more complicated relationship, which now drives the former vice president to prove his partner wrong.

Using the word incorrectly oversimplifies history—and won't help us address our current political crisis.

In 1952, the newspaper publisher and activist joined a long-shot bid by the Progressive Party, paving the way for politicians like Harris.

Have historians of the conservative movement focused too much on its intellectuals?

Radio Diaries tells the story behind those infamous words, and the man who delivered them.

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.