Abraham Lincoln

A history of imperial forgetting.

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.

The inequitable dismissal of US soldiers following the conclusion of the Civil War.

The Bidens' new cat Willow will be the first feline in the White House since the George W. Bush years, but is part of a long tradition.

What turned Smedley Butler into a critic of American foreign policy?

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

The USDA has become an inefficient monster that often promotes products that are bad for consumers and the environment. Let’s replace it with a Department of Food.

Recent books by Woody Holton and Alan Taylor offer fresh perspectives on early US history but overstate the importance of white supremacy as its driving force.

It erases the fact that, for the first 70 years of its existence, the US was roiled by intense, escalating conflict over slavery – a conflict only resolved by civil war.

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

Aaron Sorkin's new film dramatizes three pivotal moments in the lives of comedy legends Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

The ambitious Times endeavor reveals the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires to shift a founding narrative of the past.

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

The historian Allen C. Guelzo believes that the Confederate general deserves a more compassionate reading.

The project's editor falsifies the history of American history-writing, openly embracing the privileging of “narrative” over “actual fact.”

How the self-proclaimed "First Widow" used her celebrity to influence public opinion.

Cailloux’s valor, and the Black troops he led in battle, electrified northern opinion and gave federal race policy a strong jolt.

How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante.

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

Athenian democracy in the political imagination.