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Kevin McCarthy
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What 1856 Teaches Us About the Ramifications of the House Speaker Fight

The battle is worth winning for Kevin McCarthy — and could reshape the Republican Party.
Wide view of past members in the House of Representatives.

What History Tells Us About Kevin McCarthy’s Chances

One hundred years ago, a strong leader brought House rebels to the table to elect a speaker. Can McCarthy do the same?
Kevin McCarthy looking anxious.

Back to the Future? Battling Over the Speakership on the House Floor

The history of speakership contests underscores the corner Kevin McCarthy is painted into and the corner any Republican House leader is likely to face.
Shadowy photograph of two people standing in front of statue of Lincoln in Lincoln Memorial

In Jon Meacham’s Biography, Lincoln Is a Guiding Light For Our Times

The famous historian makes the claim that the demigods of American historical mythology can help us carve paths through our forbidding 21st-century wilderness.
Painting of the drafters if the U.S. Constitution
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A Colorblind Compromise?

“Colorblindness,” an ideology that denies race as an organizing principle of the nation’s structural order, reaches back to the drafting of the US Constitution.
Members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union break open barrels of liquor seized during Prohibition, 1929.

Roe Is the New Prohibition

The pro-life movement needs to know that such culture wars result not in outright victory for one side but in reaction and compromise.
Painting of Daniel Boone escorting settlers through the Cumberland Gap by George Caleb Bingham. (Washington University, St. Louis)

The Articles of Confederation and Western Expansion

In settling a rivalry between Maryland and Virginia and preventing individual states from getting into bed with France and Spain, maybe the Articles weren't a failure after all.
Shirley Temple Black speaking at the 1969 U.N. General Assembly in New York.

Shirley Temple Black's Remarkable Second Act as a Diplomat

An unpublished memoir reveals how the world’s most famous child actress became a star of the environmental movement.
Illustration of Ken Burns

The Unbearable Whiteness of Ken Burns

The filmmaker’s new documentary on Benjamin Franklin tells an old and misleading story.
Black and white people sitting at a lunch counter.

When Rights Went Right

Is the American conception of constitutional rights too absolute?
A portrait of Abraham Lincoln hangs behind President Biden in the State Dining Room of the White House
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Activists Have Always Been Frustrated at Allies’ Insistence on Gradual Change

Why abolitionist Lydia Maria Child raged at President Lincoln’s political calculations.
African American man casting a ballot following the Fifteenth Amendment.

Echoes of 1891 in 2022

Using the congressional filibuster to prevent voting rights legislation isn't new. It has roots in the 19th century.
A bronze statue of Civil War soldiers on horseback, in front of the U.S. Capitol building.

How Twitter Explains the Civil War (and Vice Versa)

The proliferation of antebellum print is analogous to our own tectonic shifts in how people communicate and what they communicate about.
Sign reading "One World" with a picture of Earth.

Climate Change Governance: Past, Present, and (Hopefully) Future

The 2015 Paris Agreement represented a shift in the climate regime towards "new governance," expanding the roles of nation-states and non-state actors alike.
Protestors on a march, holding signs that read "Healthcare is a Human Right" and "Insulin or food should not be a choice: Medicare for All"

Health Care Reform’s History of Utter Failure

Repeated failures by both political parties to get a decent policy through our 18th-century constitutional structure led to the Affordable Care Act.
Congresswoman going on the Senate floor in Washington D.C.
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The Founders Constructed Our Government to Foster Inaction

Why Democrats have struggled to implement their agenda.
Illustration of armed men in a large mob surrounding Orleans Parish Prison

The First Columbus Day Was Born of Violence — And Political Calculation

President Benjamin Harrison promoted the holiday after a mob killed 11 Italian Americans and set off a diplomatic crisis.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito, September, 1945
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The Japanese Surrender in 1945 is Still Poorly Understood

Did the United States have no other option but to drop atomic bombs on Japan in order to get them to surrender?
The word "bipartisanship" with the "bi" scribbled out.

The Case for Partisanship

Bipartisanship might not be dead. But it is on life support. And it’s long past time we pulled the plug.
Anti-evolution books for sale in Dayton, Tenn.

Why the Culture Wars in Schools Are Worse Than Ever Before

The history of education battles — from fights over evolution to critical race theory — shows why the country’s divisions are growing sharper.
Picketers from National Women's Party

She Asked President Woodrow Wilson For 22 Suffrage "Favors." She Got 21.

Wilson became a great supporter of the 19th Amendment, but only because he worked alongside a woman who spoke his language.

The Unreconstructed Radical

Thaddeus Stevens was a fierce opponent of the “odious” compromises in the Constitution, and of the North’s compromises after the Civil War.
Joe Biden surrounded by words emanating from a book.

Can America’s Problems Be Fixed By A President Who Loves Jon Meacham?

How a pop historian shaped the soul of Biden’s presidency.
A negative from a photo of Abraham Lincoln

How Historians Say Abraham Lincoln Is Quoted and Misquoted

As Presidents' Day approaches, historians look back at the most notable recent uses and misuses of "the Great Emancipator's" words.

This Guilty Land: Every Possible Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans consider John Brown mad. Yet it was Brown’s strategy that brought slavery to an end.

The Real History of Race and the New Deal

Material benefits trumped FDR's terrible civil rights records.
A drawing of George Washington surrounded by seals representing the states.

The Constitutional Convention Debates the Electoral College

How the founders settled on the system we love to hate today.
Artistic photo with american flags

Richard Hofstadter’s Discontents

Why did the historian come to fear the very movements he once would have celebrated?
Abraham Lincoln

Why We Keep Reinventing Abraham Lincoln

Revisionist biographers have given us countless perspectives, from Honest Abe to Killer Lincoln. Is there a version that’s true to his time and attuned to ours?

The Flawed Genius of the Constitution

The document counted my great-great-grandfather as 3/5 of a free person. But the Framers don’t own the version we live by today. We do.

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