Independent civil servants checked Richard Nixon's worst impulses to use the executive branch to punish enemies. The independence of the bureaucracy has since eroded, to Donald Trump's advantage.
A founding member of the Commission on Presidential Debates argues that the body must take stock of its rules and procedures after Tuesday's debacle or risk irrelevance.
As the new 1776 Commission begins to consider how to wield history as a weapon against indoctrination, America's educational work in Germany can serve as a guidepost for a commitment to preparing vigilant young men and women to build and defend democracy.
The South African National Party won a parliamentary victory in 1948 and consolidated power quickly to institutionalize Apartheid and focus national politics on racial issues. This surprise turned into a half-century of hard right rule and stands as a warning to Americans today.
Governments need to establish trust so that their public health announcements are credible and persuasive, but have undermined that trust by conducting ethically questionable studies. A model of apology is part of the solution.
Digitization projects have made historical newspapers much more readily accessible, but the process admits error and historians should be cautious making bold claims based on them.
Andrew Rotter extends recent work in sensory history to the study of imperialism, documenting how British and American colonialism depended on the connection between sensory experience and racial and nationalist ideology.
In practice, as we see today with Trump and company, American celebratory patriotism has often been wedded to a second and far more divisive form: exclusionary mythologizing patriotism. There are alternatives that also deserve recognition as patriotism.
If his lawyer wants to argue that Kyle Rittenhouse was acting in the spirit of those eighteenth-century militias which went outside the law and defied their state government, and especially those who did so in the interest of promoting white supremacy – his case would be historically solid. It would not, however, be an exoneration.
Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address demanded that Americans keep the memory of both the Union dead and their cause alive and "hot." The cooling of that memory has enabled backlashes against justice through history, and today.
The author of a new book on the FBI's surveillance of folk musicians argues that Woody Guthrie did join the Communist Party, though he was at odds with leadership over discipline. The affiliation is reflected in the lyrics of his most famous song.
Trump's July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore, like his attacks on historians this week, embodied an escapist nostalgia that purges injustice, conflict, and violence. Abraham Lincoln's brand of nostalgia is more worthy of embracing.
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