Power

A review of Zephyr Teachout's "Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United."

A glimpse inside the Alabama State House suggests that the civil rights movement may have reached its end.

America is best understood not as the first post-colonial republic, but as an expansionist nation built on slavery and native expropriation.

The 1776 Declaration was only the first. What we learn from the long history of splinter constitutions, manifestos, and secessions that followed.

On factional strife in the Early Republic, and why parties themselves were universally despised.

How did a firearm safety and training organization turn into one of America's largest and most influential lobbying groups?

Polarization in Congress began in the 1970s, and its only been getting worse since.

The Founders never intended to create an unregulated individual right to a gun.

Lyndon B. Johnson's visionary set of legislation turns 50 years old.

George Kennan's diaries reveal just how much he hated America.

Why Washington needs more honest graft.

Who were Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the rest of the first 16 US presidents, what did they do, and what do they hope history has forgotten?

Dorothea Dix and Franklin Pierce were in many ways ideological soulmates, but he would not help her effort to improve conditions for the mentally ill.

How Stanley Kubrick’s film “Dr. Strangelove” exposed dangers inherent in nuclear command-and-control systems.

Three years ago, a Supreme Court case, the U.S. Census, and anti-Obama backlash set the course for the assault on women's fundamental freedoms.

In 1979, Carter's "malaise speech," shaped by sociological insights, sought national unity but clashed with Reagan's appeal to individualism.

Our horror of chemical agents is one of the great success stories of modern diplomacy.

US intelligence agencies seem to have adopted Orwell’s idea of doublethink—“to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.”

In the era of the voting wars, the right to vote is itself a subject of continued partisan, regional, and racial conflict.

What has gone wrong with the modern environmental movement and its political organizing.

An hour of stories about a few high-stakes inaugurations from the past.

One of the great pieces of unfinished business for the Democratic Party.

The dramatic story of the abolitionist mail crisis of 1835.

Ulysses S. Grant was overlooked by historians and underestimated by contemporaries. H.W. Brands reevaluates Grant’s presidency.

A review of a handful of new books that embody the new liberal originalism.

Do successful presidents make sound knife-wielders?

A case of 18th-century politicking has stymied our ability to deal with a 21st-century crisis.

Fisher Ames’s philosophy can be summed up as follows: the “power of the people, if uncontroverted, is licentious and mobbish.”

Why do politicians reverse their positions?

Political funerals and the tour of Henry Clay's corpse.