Charles Sumner

The untold story of the Wide Awakes, the young Americans who took up the torch for their antislavery cause and stirred the nation.

For as long as Americans have been subjected to lousy candidates, they’ve been told to suck it up and vote for one of them.

In early America, the soaring ideals behind establishing a new democracy were marked by cycles of progress and backlash.

Kevin McCarthy's struggling bid to win the speakership has nothing on the epic 1856 contest that pitted abolitionists against proslavery members of Congress.

A Washington Post investigation of more than 400 artworks in the U.S. Capitol building found that one-third honor enslavers or Confederates.

Smith's influence on American politics, and the misunderstanding at the heart of our idea of the "champion of capitalism."

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

On the terror that filled the void left by the retreat of federal authority in the South.

In the mid-19th century, a pro-slavery minority used violence to stifle a growing anti-slavery majority, spurring their opposition to respond in kind.

Two centuries of New England intellectual history through the lives and ideas of people who are memorialized there.

Caribbean islands as U.S. territories within an American empire has since the start sparked fierce debates.

Addressing systemic racism and state violence is not enough.

The proliferation of antebellum print is analogous to our own tectonic shifts in how people communicate and what they communicate about.

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.

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

How the self-proclaimed "First Widow" used her celebrity to influence public opinion.

The United States has a terrible habit of letting white supremacy get away with repeated attempts to murder American democracy.

How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante.

Yale's John Fabian Witt pens a review of Samuel Moyn's new book, Humane.

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.