Abraham Lincoln

How do you diagnose the problem of racism in America without understanding its actual history?

President Obama espouses a facile faith in history bending toward perfection and morality-against evidence and reason.

The 20th century produced monuments to a false consensus—can the 21st century create a more representative commemorative sphere?

Another way to look at controversial historical figures.

160 years ago, a similarly fractured GOP took months to settle on a speaker.

On the abolitionists, Reconstruction, and winning “freedom” from the Right.

The meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it.

The internecine conflict and the institution of slavery could not and did not end neatly at Appomattox or on Galveston Island.

The menu of Emancipation Day.

On April 27, 1865, a steamboat named the Sultana exploded and an estimated 1,800 people died, but few today have heard of this disaster.

April 15 may be Tax Day, but for some, it’s the 14th of April that’s notorious.

Meet Boston Corbett, the self-castrated hatmaker who was John Wilkes Booth's Jack Ruby.

More than 150 years after Appomattox, Americans are still fighting over the great issues at the heart of the conflict.

An 1848 investigative news story that relied on heavy data analysis snared big fish, including two future presidents.

The holiday emerged not from the 17th century, but rather from concerns over immigration and urbanization in the 19th century.

The stall-in threatened to interrupt a certain imaginary of progress, democracy, and freedom with the reality of racial injustice.

Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

As the hunger for more farmland stretched west, so too did the demand for enslaved labor.

Who were Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the rest of the first 16 US presidents, what did they do, and what do they hope history has forgotten?

Companies and individuals are considered grandfathered and exempt from new sets of regulations all the time. But the term and the concept dates to a darker era.