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Charles J. Guiteau.

How Civil Service Protections Emerged After James Garfield’s Assassination

Reformers in the Republican Party had been calling for a professional, merit-based civil service since shortly after the Civil War.
Side-by-side portraits of Lincoln, Rockwell, and Garfield

This Man Was the Only Eyewitness to the Deaths of Both Lincoln and Garfield

Almon F. Rockwell's newly resurfaced journals, excerpted exclusively here, offer an incisive account of the assassinated presidents' final moments.
James Garfield

The Unexpected Impact of James Garfield's Assassination

On July 2, 1881, less than a year after President James Garfield was elected the 20th president of the United States, he was shot by Charles Guiteau.
A political cartoon of Charles Guiteau holding a pistol and a sign that reads "An Office or Your Life."

Why Are Presidential Assassins Such Sad Sacks?

What would-be killers of the US commander in chief have in common is that they aren’t fervent ideologues; they’re outcasts.
A multi-colored print of James Garfield and his family in their library

A President of Many Talents

James Garfield is known primarily for being assassinated. But his life reveals the character of nineteenth-century America.
U.S. Naval Observatory, Washington, DC, (ca. 1880-90).

Astronomy On The Flats

How the moons of Mars and the death of a president altered the late nineteenth-century Washington, DC, landscape.
Photograph of Mrs. Frank Leslie

‘Mrs. Frank Leslie’ Ran a Media Empire and Bankrolled the Suffragist Movement

A new book tells the scandalous secrets of a forgotten 19th-century tycoon, Miriam Follin Peacock Squier Leslie Wilde, also known as Mrs. Frank Leslie.

When a New York Baron Became President

In the case of Chester Arthur, the story is one of surprising redemption.
A cartoon depicting Charles Guiteau.

Echoes of Rage

Our new age of violence looks a lot like the Gilded Age.
Portrait of Roscoe Conkling taken between 1860 and 1865.

The Senator Who Said No to a Seat on the Supreme Court — Twice

Roscoe Conkling was a successful politician and an able lawyer. But the colorful and irascible senator had no desire to serve on the high court.
Vintage homepathic medicines

In the 1800s, Valentine’s Meant a Bottle of Meat Juice

An act of love in the form of a medicinal tonic.
Bob Dylan singing

Bob Dylan, Historian

In the six decades of his career, Bob Dylan has mined America’s past for images, characters, and events that speak to the nation’s turbulent present.

The Man the Presidency Changed

What a forgotten commander in chief can teach Donald Trump.
Store associate on the phone next to boxes of air conditioners.

The Moral History of Air-Conditioning

Cooling the air was once seen as sinful. Maybe the idea wasn’t entirely wrong.
A map of Mexico and border states.
partner

The Fear of “Mexicanization”

The anxiety about “Mexicanization” that ran through Reconstruction-Era politics, as Americans saw disturbing political parallels with their southern neighbor.

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