speeches

Pence invoked them at the Republican debates, but a true reckoning with their history provides a different vision of the nation’s future.

King offered Americans the choice between acting in accordance with the Constitution and resistance to change.  In many ways, we face the same choice today.

The Post interviewed March on Washington participants and voices from younger generations to tell the story of Aug. 28, 1963 and what it means now.

Civil rights activists failed to expel an all-white, segregationist delegation. But their efforts foreshadowed later milestones in the fight for equality

This is the story of how a visit by Frederick Douglass to south-central Massachusetts, epitomizes the movement’s ability to spread in the region.

Carter’s austerity was part of a bigger project. It didn’t really have much to do with environmentalism.

Women’s rights activism has shaped America for the better throughout our history, so why should colleges be banned from teaching it?

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.

Meet the duo who helped achieve the most important labor and civil rights victories of their age.

In his undelivered final speech, Kennedy warned the world against ‘voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality.’

Seating was segregated, and the ceremony's only Black speaker was forced to drastically revise his speech to avoid spreading "propaganda."

Harry Emerson Fosdick's ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’

Revisiting MLK Jr.’s sermon against the Vietnam War.

On Martin Luther King's use of radical ideas to create an understanding of the history of America.

Why do the Transcendentalists still have an outsize influence on American culture?

A conversation with presidential biographers Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird.

The last from-the-top critique of American overconsumption generated a massive backlash.

The inspiration for the 1964 “Extremism in the defense of liberty” speech he wrote for Barry Goldwater.

A favorite icon of critical race theory proponents doesn’t say what they want him to say.

When the U.S. first encountered the “Aesthetic Apostle."