Charles Sumner

The senator from Massachusetts and the birth of the Republican Party.

When Charles Sumner died in 1874, a bill he had sponsored two years earlier threatened to overshadow his legacy.

Charles Sumner and the fight for equal naturalization rights.

The violence on Capitol Hill that foreshadowed a bloody war.

The secret, often missing ingredient to building a majoritarian progressive coalition.

A new history of American politics examines the past and future of political realignments.

This isn’t the first time a House committee has investigated political violence in the Capitol.

Absent social media, the artists of the past shaped public knowledge of historical events through illustrations.

An image from the Capitol captures the distance between who we purport to be and who we have actually been.

We may not be in the midst of a war today, but the progress of democracy in this country is still tied to the rights of its most vulnerable citizens.

In the 1840s and 1850s, it was all too common.

Preston Brooks, Greg Gianforte, and the American tradition of disguising cowardice as bravery.

The 1850s were a turning point for globalization, from telegraphs to colonization.

A new history argues that illiberalism is not a backlash but a central feature from the founding to today.

The untold story of the Wide Awakes, the young Americans who took up the torch for their antislavery cause and stirred the nation.

For as long as Americans have been subjected to lousy candidates, they’ve been told to suck it up and vote for one of them.

In early America, the soaring ideals behind establishing a new democracy were marked by cycles of progress and backlash.

Kevin McCarthy's struggling bid to win the speakership has nothing on the epic 1856 contest that pitted abolitionists against proslavery members of Congress.

A Washington Post investigation of more than 400 artworks in the U.S. Capitol building found that one-third honor enslavers or Confederates.

Smith's influence on American politics, and the misunderstanding at the heart of our idea of the "champion of capitalism."