Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Politicians are suddenly eager to disown failed policies on American prisons, but they have failed to reckon with the history.

Americans have been isolated at the U.N. on Israel for a half century — but that used to prompt fierce debate.

How a landmark Supreme Court decision was shaped by the racist idea that poor children can’t learn.

If Trump was the end of the “party of ideas,” the rise of Reagan was its start. But what were those “ideas” in the first place, and were they really as new as people said?

A review of "Great Society: A New History," by Amity Shlaes.

As first lady, Clinton rejected the ways of Washington and paid a price.

The conclusions of the 1968 Kerner Report portrayed race relations like no other report in history.

Forty years ago, the exiled South African activist dared to teach Zionism critically. A furious backlash ensued.

Far from spelling the end of anti-market politics, basic income proposals are one place where it can and has flourished.

As liberation movements bloomed, they offered a vision of reproductive justice that was about equality, not just “choice.”

A decade or two ago, opposing NATO expansion to Ukraine was a position espoused by pillars of the American establishment. What happened?

Racial blamelessness and the politics of forgetting.

Repeated failures by both political parties to get a decent policy through our 18th-century constitutional structure led to the Affordable Care Act.

If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed nothing.

Characterized throughout American history as symbols of crisis, trauma, and grief, these women reject those narratives through world-making of their own.

America did exactly what the Kerner Commission on the urban riots of the mid-1960s advised against, and fifty years later reaped the consequences it predicted.

How statistics were used in the urban North to condemn Blackness as inherently criminal.

The Combahee River Collective and E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie agree that the wealthy and powerful will hijack activist energies for their own ends.

The US carceral state is a monstrosity with few parallels in history. But most accounts fail to understand how it was created, and how we can dismantle it.

Well before Watergate broke, John Ashbrook waged a primary campaign that the Right took very seriously.