Sublime

With its publication Wilson became, as Frederick Jackson Turner saw it, “the first southern scholar of adequate training and power who has dealt with American history as a whole.” Other reviewers shared Turner’s admiration for Wilson’s history, yet they couldn’t help but notice the author’s fondness for the Ku Klux Klan, an organization whose missi

The generations of freedom fighters in the Black Belt continue their work. And in Mississippi, they have made it the state with the most extensive Black political representation in America. It is the closest we have to a realization of full Black political citizenship. And it is the only state with a scion of Black nationalism as the executive of i

His famed Cross of Gold speech in 1896 resonated, and he ran for president several times but couldn’t win. Bryan was an advocate for the previous cycle, the one that had disappeared and was no longer relevant, even if he was still its powerful voice.

If there was a single moment in America’s history in which the slow slide of power—now in its fourth decade—from Capitol Hill to the White House suddenly became an avalanche, so that, for decades thereafter, governmental initiative came overwhelmingly from the Executive Branch, with the legislature only reacting to that initiative, it was that sess

Reagan cared more about the functions of self-government than his most ideological supporters. He knew how to persuade and when to compromise. But after he was gone, and the Soviet Union not long after him, Free America lost the narrative thread. Without Reagan’s smile and the Cold War’s clarity, its vision grew darker and more extreme. Its spirit

The federal government’s relation to private life changed in World War II. It was central to winning the war, because World War II was won or lost on the ability to utilize the industrial base.