Power

Arabness, Blackness, and the figure of terror.

It was motivated in part by white Southerners' concerns about taxes, but ended up being all about maintaining their political power.

Meet Boston Corbett, the self-castrated hatmaker who was John Wilkes Booth's Jack Ruby.

A graphic retelling of Robert E. Lee surrender at Appomattox Court House.

Inside a famous Cold War deception.

A detailed look at when and where the U.S. Army was able to enforce the new rule of law in the years following the Civil War.

Futuristic control rooms with endless screens of blinking data are proliferating in cities across the globe. Welcome to the age of Dashboard Governance.

The Texan newspaperman who was born into slavery and helped shape the history of civil rights.

A visualization of who came from where, when.

The passage of Medicare and Medicaid, nearly fifty years ago, was no less contentious than recent debates about Obamacare.

The longest-running party in America has seen significant shifts in its ideological and geographic makeup.

The role of "big government" in American history.

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.”