Congressional history

Robert Mitchell | November/December 2022

Crédit Mobilier, one of the worst outrages in the history of Congress, affected national elections and gave “the Gilded Age” its name.

Wit

A History of Presidential Misdeeds

James M. Banner Jr. | February/March 2021

Distinguished historians have written extensively on the 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 the “misdeeds” in each Presidential administration.

Confederates in Congress: Heritage or Hate?

Edwin S. Grosvenor | June 2020

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.

Congress Fights the Civil War

Fergus M. Bordewich | Spring 2020

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.

Madison and the Invention of Congress

Fergus M. Bordewich | Winter 2020

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.

Filibuster: A Look at the Record

Allan L. Damon | December 1975

The filibuster has played a key role in the enactment of federal law since 1789, but is rarely used outside the U.S. Senate.

Congress

October 1974

La Follette: The Promise Unfulfilled

John A. Garraty | April 1962

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.

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.