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.
When I was a teenager, I imagined that Anne Frank was at my mother’s 15th birthday party. After all, they were the same age and they were both in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. How did I arrive at such a phantastic conflation?
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 and researchers of history are under attack – sometimes literally – by regimes who seek to make history a foundational element of their legitimacy and authority.
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.
It doesn't excuse Russian aggression against Ukraine to recognize that the United States has fumbled the opportunity to forge a global order based on cooperative and mutual security in the years since the end of the Cold War.
The British constitution depends on adherence to norms and tradition commonly called the "good chap" principle. Johnson's ministry raised troubling questions about what happens when No. 10 Downing is occupied by a different sort of chap.
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.
A new book on Spanish history includes an examination of the influence of colonialism and conservative Catholicism on the authoritarian worldview and political ruthlessness of Francisco Franco.
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 combination of post-Soviet hardship, resurgent nationalism, and the destructiveness of the Ukraine war have led many Americans to embrace Russians' dim view of Mikhail Gorbachev. A historian of Russia says the leader had his faults, but his furtherance of humane values has been underrated.
Although historians are trained to think of the past in particular and disciplined ways, understanding how people en masse understand the past is also vital because these understandings—inaccurate as they often are—are vital and embody important information about their hopes and fears.
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.
