Alexis de Tocqueville

The American foreign policy sage was driven as much by pessimism about the US as antipathy to the Soviet Union.

Jedediah Purdy's new book examines why the U.S. has continuously failed to qualify as a system defined by popular rule.

The author confronts the daunting task of writing about her childhood memory, both as a memoirist and a historian.

A new book chronicles the life of the 19th century political giant of Salmon Chase.

From origin stories to blood-purity statutes, we have long enlisted genealogy to serve our own purposes.

In "A Nation of Descendants," Francesca Morgan traces the American use and abuse of genealogy from the Daughters of the American Revolution to Roots.

David Halberstam’s title The Best and the Brightest was steeped in irony. Did these presidential advisers earn it?

The question of how to balance state and national power was perhaps the single most important and most challenging question confronting the early republic.

The fight over the American Jobs Plan reflects a long history of competing visions of public works—and, most of all, who should benefit from rebuilding.

How the late 19th century’s raucous party system gave way to a sedate and exclusionary political culture that erected more and more barriers to participation.

We say we’re for it. We’ve never truly had it. These next few years will determine its fate.

On the social and political function of political media.

Whatever the “City on a Hill” is, the phrase was not discovered by Kennedy or Reagan.

America is now ruled by a single elite class rather than by local patrician smart sets competing with each other for money and power.

James Shapiro’s recent book looks at why Shakespeare has been a mainstay of the cultural and political conflicts of the country since its founding.

Who tells our stories has always mattered.

Most recent scholarship, while supporting the view that the policy was vicious, has not addressed the question of genocide.

Inequality comes in waves. The question is when this one will break.

Seven scholars discuss the definition, nature, practice, and periodization of corruption in the United States.

The idea that democracy and billionaires are incompatible might seem radical to conservatives. But to America’s founders, it seemed like common sense.