federal power

The federal government has long controlled immigration law—and for very good reason.

The newly empowered federal state created during Reconstruction could restrict immigration much more comprehensively than any state—as Chinese laborers soon discovered.

Interposition was a claim that American federalism needed to preserve some balance between state and national authority.

A new book traces the long history of cloaking racism in the language of resistance to an overbearing federal government.

Fights over fugitive slave laws pitted states against each other and showcased the risks of the federal government not supporting liberty.

The more sons a Founding Father had, the more supportive he was of a strong centralized government.

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

From the 1880s to the 1940s, New York City was transformed—and so too was the New York City Police Department.

Even before the United States regulated migration, states did. Here’s why.

Kevin Cook and Jeff Guinn on David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and the 1993 siege of Waco.

David Beito has penned one of the most damning scholarly histories of FDR to date.

As director of the FBI for decades, J. Edgar Hoover helped build a massive, professionalized national security state and hounded leftists out of public life.

From the outset of the American Revolution, a lingering problem that plagued the minds of the Continental Congress dealt with its financing.

A history as intertwined with race as with partisanship.

These 1870s laws to protect Black voters, ignored for decades, now being used against Trump.

The inventor of the atomic bomb, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s new film, was the chief celebrity victim of the national trauma known as McCarthyism.

A new book seeks to explain why many Americans, especially but not exclusively in the South, have understood freedom as an entitlement for white people.

A careful examination of the Privileges or Immunities Clause shows what we lost 150 years ago.

Examining slavery, Indian removal, and state policies regulating mobility to trace the constitutional origins of immigration restriction in the 1800s.

America’s classification crisis.