Thaddeus Stevens

On the terror that filled the void left by the retreat of federal authority in the South.

An alternative tradition in our politics has long helped convince Americans that tax enforcement is good.

The second section of the Fourteenth Amendment offers severe penalties for menacing the right to vote—if anyone can figure out how to enforce it.

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.

A new book aims to recover the Constitution’s pivotal role in shaping claims of justice and equality.

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

Each time political minorities advocate for and achieve greater equality, conservatives rebel, trying to force a reinstatement of the status quo.

In the six decades of his career, Bob Dylan has mined America’s past for images, characters, and events that speak to the nation’s turbulent present.

How a satirical song mocking uneducated Confederates came to be embraced as an anthem of white Southern pride.

Not since Reconstruction has there been such an opportunity for the advancement of racial justice.

A review of Eric Foner's The Second Founding.

What the president understood that the zealous Republican reformers in Congress didn’t.

A new history of Andrew Johnson’s trial reminds us the impeachment is a tool to constrain executive abuse of power and publicize dissent on matters of policy.

Betrayal. Paranoia. Cowardice. We've been here before.

Eric Foner has helped us better understand the ambiguous consequences of what were almost always only partial victories.

Was the impeachment of Andrew Johnson a matter of national principles? Or an affair of pragmatic politics?

Johnson’s impeachment was driven by his refusal to rid the country of the lingering effects of slavery.

It’s Andrew Johnson, not Andrew Jackson, who provides the best model for Trump’s collapsing presidency.

Despite what Steve King says, the U.S. was never a Christian nation.