The author wonders whether his great-great grandfather's commitment to justice before and after emancipation became socially inconvenient and morally demanding to later generations in white America.
Barack Obama wasn't unprepared for his first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012, but he stumbled nonetheless. Ten years later, his performance offers a warning to incumbents of the challenges they face in coming out winners from the spectacle.
The cultural divide between urban and rural America is real and politically significant. But the Kennedy administration's success in Oklahoma shows that a coalition can be built with a combination of transactional politics and committed outreach.
In another documentarian's view, the series unduly frames Roosevelt as a captive to global politics and antisemitism, not a leader with the power to change them.
The 16th President looked to the constitutional crises of his time and asked whether the document was created to serve the people or the other way around. Today he might ask the same of the Supreme Court.
At the 1943 Bermuda Conference, British and American diplomats offered a symbolic show of concern for Jewish refugees, but made no substantial commitment to help. Ken Burns's recent holocaust documentary passes over this event.
An organized and well-funded alliance of charter schools and conservative activists is leveraging the Critical Race Theory controversy in Texas to pursue the real prize: school education funding.
There is no constitutional or statutory definition of the roles of parties in American politics, but almost since the beginning presidents have been the heads of organized factions. Presidencies have been defined by whether the chief executive prized growth or loyalty.
As concern rises that the court might revoke the rights to same-sex marriage and contraception while reinstating the criminalization of gay sex, advocates for reproductive and sexual freedom need to consider how to make the equal protection argument that rights individuals enjoy in marriage can't be denied to individuals outside of them.
The willingness to share information about the toxicity of pesticides has long been compromised by the government's interest in their economic usefulness. From COVID to climate, today's crises show the need for a new balance of transparency and profitability.
Teachers of Constitutional history must push their students to understand something difficult: James Madison's vision of the "public good" is a vision of elite rule that today stands in the way of democratic solutions to society's problems.
When founding the nation, American political leaders had to both leverage Americans’ shared political culture and beliefs, and allow for Americans’ differing moral beliefs and values.
Like many other Americans, I will be watching closely to see if The U.S. and the Holocaust honestly portrays the responsibility of American leaders, or fails to confront the difficult truths that need to be faced.
After dropping out of high school to begin his Air Force career at age 15, Gil Coronado became the most influential leader in expanding the federal recognition of Hispanic heritage from a week to a month.
Although it's difficult to separate fact from fiction around his life, the famed railroad engineer had something in common with today's rail workers: being stretched to the limits of health and safety by companies' pursuit of profit.
Dismissed, derided, or even deplored by critics, and out of step with the trends, arena rock acts still pack them in in much of America. Is it the sonic key to understanding Trumpism?
Many economic histories portray the American prosperity of the century between the Civil War and the 1970s as the picking of low-hanging fruit. But the story of entrepreneurial innovation during that time is more complicated, and more relevant to the present, than we think.
This moment of peril for American democracy calls for a return to the diagnosis presented in "The Authoritarian Personality," 1950s effort to develop a social-psychological profile of the people likely to embrace fascism.
The story of the car—a story of genius and folly in equal measure—is the story of the making of the modern world. A new book weaves the threads of the automobile's influence through landscape, war and peace, mass production and individualism, and the environment.
The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) called out American health disparities, police abuse and crackdowns on protesters as key failures of the United States to address racial inequality.
