Sean Wilentz

The Supreme Court has invested the presidency with quasi-monarchial powers, repudiating the foundational principle of the rule of law.

Three years later, amid another national election, the American public is still slow to understand the enormity of January 6, 2021.

Supported and largely led by slaveholders, the American Revolution was also, paradoxically, a profound antislavery event.

A new book about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing traces the path from Ronald Reagan’s antigovernment ideology to today’s radicalized right.

Was abolition intended as a perpetuation of slavery by other means?

Recent books by Woody Holton and Alan Taylor offer fresh perspectives on early US history but overstate the importance of white supremacy as its driving force.

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.

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

A new biography details the cultural jumble of literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the making of the foremost self-made American.

History is asking only one question right now as Trump refuses to concede. Will the Republicans decide they are no longer an American political party?

An interview with Sean Wilentz on Library of America's new collection of Richard Hofstadter's works.

The case for electing "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and Pete Rose to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project launched with the best of intentions, but has been undermined by some of its claims.

What 1619 has become to the history of American slavery, 1688 is to the history of American antislavery.

Nancy Pelosi's reluctance to impeach Trump only denies the reality of his transgressions.

No, “liberal” and “progressive” aren’t synonyms. They have completely different histories—and the differences matter.

The making of “Blonde on Blonde” in Nashville, Tennessee.

The congressman is the strongest link in American politics between the early 1960s--the glory days of the civil rights movement--and the 1990s.