Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Politicians are suddenly eager to disown failed policies on American prisons, but they have failed to reckon with the history.

The president is right to release the Kennedy files.

The U.S., Nicaragua, and the International Court of Justice in the 1980s.

Americans have been isolated at the U.N. on Israel for a half century — but that used to prompt fierce debate.

How a landmark Supreme Court decision was shaped by the racist idea that poor children can’t learn.

If Trump was the end of the “party of ideas,” the rise of Reagan was its start. But what were those “ideas” in the first place, and were they really as new as people said?

A review of "Great Society: A New History," by Amity Shlaes.

As first lady, Clinton rejected the ways of Washington and paid a price.

The conclusions of the 1968 Kerner Report portrayed race relations like no other report in history.

The Erie Canal, dug by human muscle, aided by improvised cleverness, helped build a nation.

A street-level view of Rudy Giuliani’s transformation of the Big Apple.

U.S.-Iran diplomacy, intelligence on South Korea's nuclear program, and fears that a reactor given to India would become a “do-it-yourself bomb kit.”

Washington’s policy-makers showed themselves more wicked and feckless than their Vietnam- and Iraq-era predecessors.

Hard thinking on difficult and uncomfortable questions about how to keep everything from falling apart.

Forty years ago, the exiled South African activist dared to teach Zionism critically. A furious backlash ensued.

Far from spelling the end of anti-market politics, basic income proposals are one place where it can and has flourished.

As liberation movements bloomed, they offered a vision of reproductive justice that was about equality, not just “choice.”

A decade or two ago, opposing NATO expansion to Ukraine was a position espoused by pillars of the American establishment. What happened?

Racial blamelessness and the politics of forgetting.

Repeated failures by both political parties to get a decent policy through our 18th-century constitutional structure led to the Affordable Care Act.