Power

A little-remembered president's most notorious act.

It's the transatlantic commentariat’s favorite political put-down. It’s also historically illiterate.

Ryan Zinke isn’t the first Interior secretary to attract controversy.

The president's unilateral nuclear authority comes from decisions made at the start of the Atomic Age.

Black athletes didn’t “politicize” American sports. They’ve been a battleground from the very beginning.

An excerpt from a novel by Todd Gitlin that reimagines the violence outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

New York City’s first planning commissioner lost a bigger battle against Robert Moses than the fight Jane Jacobs won.

The biggest show in Washington 150 years ago was the trial against the President of the United States.

An interview with a historian of Hamilton. That is, an “interview” in the modern sense of questions and answers and not in the Hamilton-Burr sense of pistols at dawn.

Trump has revived an age-old debate about why some people choose race over class—and how far they will go to protect the system.

The #MeToo movement is not the first time women have publicly stood up to sexual harassment.

Linda Gordon’s new book captures how white supremacy has long been part of our political mainstream.

Using maps to visualize the first five U.S. Congressional elections.

To the framers, working in secret was meant to deliver enlightened legislation.

The long road from FDR to Trump.

Now all but forgotten, a group of New York socialites was instrumental to the success of the suffrage movement.

John Locke took part in administering the slave-owning colonies. Does that make him, and liberalism itself, hypocritical?

A new history argues that the Second Amendment was intended to perpetuate white settlers' violence toward Native Americans.

During the Cold War, US propagandists worked to provide a counterweight to Communist media, but truth eluded them all.

The Trump administration signals a game of chicken with Russia, which could mean the death of arms control.

What does the Klan of the 1920s have to teach us about the resurgence of organized bigotry in the Trump era?

Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party, the most successful labor party in US history, is rich in lessons for challenging the two-party system.

If you look hard enough, you can almost find ideological consistency in the Republicans’ breathtaking tax bill.

The congressman who Alabamians later complained "made them the laughing stock of the Union."

Hill revisits the infamous Clarence Thomas hearings with five of the congressional women who supported her.

How the U.S. Army's antebellum camel experimentation paved the way for the illicit trafficking of enslaved Africans.

Trumpism emerged from a haze of delusion, denial, pride, and cruelty—not as a historical anomaly, but as a profoundly American phenomenon.

The notion that a government’s chief obligation is getting stuff done is a fairly recent arrival on the historical scene.

For decades, the GOP has used tax cuts to achieve its political goals. So why do Dems keep treating "supply-side" as an economic strategy?

On this episode of BackStory, Brian sits down with Ed to talk about a project of his that’s been twenty-five years in the making.