Barack Obama

If you're wondering how Trump happened, all you have to do is let Pat Buchanan beguile you with a history no one else can tell.

A year-long series of photographs and stories that explain the struggle between the old South and the new.

As the new administration seeks to fill a vacancy on the Court, a look back at the forgotten mid-19th century battles over the judiciary.

In 1939, a refugee ban kept 20,000 Jewish children out of the U.S.

What America’s last major party crack-up in the 1850s tells us about the 2010s.

Could President Trump actually win over the leaders of historically black colleges and universities?

The precedents for Trump’s hyped-up immigration crackdown.

A warning about the ways we compare Donald Trump to atrocities in history.

Two historians weigh in on President Obama's move to designate a national monument to Reconstruction in South Carolina.

Why liberals have embraced our most dangerously reactionary founder.

Invoking this vague and ever-shifting nemesis has been the right's favorite tactic, and Trump’s victory is its greatest triumph.

In the 1970s, a new wave of post-Watergate liberals stopped fighting monopoly power. The result is an increasingly dangerous political system.

The outrage and press coverage was nothing compared with that surrounding Hillary Clinton's emails.

America’s devotion to the Middle East did not make much sense in 2003, Bacevich argues; but it did in 1980, and the reason was oil.

As a young woman, civil rights pioneer Pauli Murray discovered that the flag could be used as a symbol of defiance.

A new book recovers long-suppressed alternative politics.

The revival and hidden treasure of Aretha Franklin.

Remember Perot?

Dickens, Tocqueville, and the U.N. all agree about this American invention: It’s torture.

We are again caught between nationalists longing for an imagined past, and activists invoking ideals the nation has not attained.