Women of color and their allies truly won the right to vote for all American women not in 1920, but in 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
The behavior of belligerent patriots in our times has made it clear that the type of allegiance they value most--and their image of America--leaves little room for an ethic of mutualism or compassion.
The diary of a German Social Democrat and local official who observed and opposed the Third Reich offers a warning about today's unleashed online anger.
Joe Biden's efforts to run an effective campaign under COVID lockdown echo the innovations forced on James Garfield. If Biden succeeds, the "Basement Campaign" may prove as influential as the "Front Porch Campaign" of 1880.
Franklin Roosevelt recognized that the concentrated economic power of big businesses was a threat to democratic society and a step on the road to fascism, and wasn't afraid to say it.
In a moment in which Confederate monuments are finally coming down and we are re-thinking how we tell our history, Hamilton is a sign of hope. It's a sign that while history is something we can never resign from, we can always enter the narrative and, like Eliza, construct a history of our own.
Evangelical leaders have bent and twisted their proclaimed moral precepts so far to embrace Donald Trump that they risk forfeiting any claim to moral authority and becoming a mere reactionary identitarian group in a society leaving them behind.
One thing that John Adams never did was to voice a word of regret about leaving the presidency at his term's end. None of his successors has ever violated or dishonored the precedent he established. And, if we are fortunate, none ever will.
With unification, a fundamental break with the values of the East German Communist Party was necessary. Former East German soldiers would now belong to an army of a democracy, rooted in the concept of the "citizen in uniform."
A comparison between Trump and Charles I of England suggests not only that the coming election will be rocky, but that it may take a long time to bridge the divisions in American society.
The Trump presidency is a stern test of James Madison's design for a government that could govern without becoming tyrannical. The people and the ballot may be the last of Madison's checks and balances left.
The late Congressman John Lewis and Donald Trump offer two starkly divergent versions of the American Dream--a choice between nurturing community and freedom and acquisitive materialism.
Japan's surrender was hastened by imminent invasion by the Soviet Red Army, a crippling US naval blockade and conventional bombing, and a diplomatic promise to protect the Japanese Emperor from execution, argues Paul Ham. Granting undue credit to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki excuses atrocity.
Author Steve Olson makes sense of the complexities of the nuclear age by telling the story of plutonium processing in Hanford, Washington, arguably the key site in the history of nuclear weapons.
The terms on which the United States pressed Japan for surrender were shaped by American domestic politics; New Deal Democrats and their liberal allies succeeded in convincing Harry Truman that it was necessary to dramatically rebuild Japan's society along more social-democratic lines.
Historians have much to add to the social science theory on crowds and can help advance understanding past simplistic and mechanistic understandings of today's public unrest.
When we reflect on the monuments we need to ask: does the statue memorialize a person or event that was a force for creating a more perfect union or a force that sought to demolish the United States?
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