Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Congressional history
Crédit Mobilier, one of the worst outrages in the history of Congress, affected national elections and gave “the Gilded Age” its name.
With so many membe Read more >>
Distinguished historians have written twenty essays on alleged misconduct in Presidential administrations since George Washington.
In 1974, a team of other historians and I assisted the impeachment investigation of Richard Nixon by documenting “misdeeds” in each Presidential administration. Read more >>
Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.
Histories written about the nation's greatest crisis focus on Lincoln and the military campaigns. But an intriguing group of characters in Congress also played a major role, advising and prodding the President.
America faced its greatest crisis in 1861 as the nation literally unraveled and the rest of the world wondered whether its experiment in self-determination would succeed. Read more >>
Members of the first Federal Congress had to create a new government almost from scratch.
The First Congress may have been the most important in American history, establishing how our new government would work based on principles that had been only broadly outlined in the Constitution. Read more >>
One day in July, 1904, Lincoln Steffens, the great muckraking reporter of McClure’s Magazine , appeared quietly in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the trail of a big story. Read more >>