Power

Putting Trump's approval rating in historical context.

And anyway, agreement between the two parties has often masked serious problems.

A new book about the My Lai massacre raises the question: how much of an aberration was the infamous wartime episode?

Keeping the Irish poor out of America helped shape our restrictive immigration policies.

As King’s attention drifted to the problems of the urban north, his critiques came to focus on the economic system itself.

President Trump is the embodiment of over 50 years of resistance to the policies Martin Luther King Jr. fought to enact.

But it’s seriously dated. And there's another tradition he could draw on.

Fifty years ago, the January 1968 battle laid bare the way U.S. leaders had misled the public about the war in Vietnam.

On Haiti, Donald Trump sounds a lot like Thomas Jefferson.

The designers of the quota system at least tried to hide their racism.

Today’s populist resurgence has us rethinking the role these movements play in U.S. politics.

Trump's language might be uniquely vulgar but his ideas are part of a long trend.

And some other things about the country that Donald Trump doesn’t know and doesn’t care to know.

An explanation of the provision that allows for the removal of a president who is deemed by others to be unable to serve.

Champions of states' rights love federal power when it suits their goals — like Sessions's anti-marijuana crusade.

“When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Protests, populism, and progressivism all clashed in a battle royal. But what really drives election results?

Despite his reputation as a liberal, Dewey's staunch commitment to democracy put him on a collision course with capitalism.

This past year has shown that the U.S. is far from immune to the forces shaping the rest of the world.

Since the Mexican-American War, Army regulars haven't always been treated as heroes.

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.