Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
Donald Trump
What does history tell us about presidents who have tried to push the limits of the system?
Editor’s Note: Todd Belt is a Professor and Director of the Political Management Master's Program at George Washington University.
What happened at the U.S. Capitol is not surprising. It's sad, disgusting and appalling, but not surprising.
Republican senators who have conveniently forgotten the events of January 6 should be made to watch to videos of every moment of the attack on the Capitol.
Trump is the most transformative one-term President in 175 years, but historians will not be kind.
What happened at the Capitol on January 8th was decidedly not a peaceful demonstration gone wrong but a planned assault on democracy by a lame duck President determined to reverse the outcome of an election that he clearly had lost.
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.
What is this latest impeachment gambit really about? Of course, it is meant to discredit President Trump’s supporters and perhaps stop him from running for president again.
Donald Trump was impeached again, a week before leaving office, in one of the great travesties of modern politics.
When Abraham Lincoln became president, America was even more divided than it is today. But he refused to inflame passions by playing to a political base.
The attack on the Capitol was not a true coup d’etat, but a poorly organized and ill-thought-out attempt to strongarm Congress.
The attack on the Capitol was not a true coup d’etat, which ordinarily involves applying concentrated force and the determined pursuit of a goal. Rather, it was a poorly organized and ill-thought-out attempt to strongarm Congress into refusing to accept the results of the election, an action tha
What happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was a pathetic low for a country that has lost its way with an utterly corrupted political class.
The Capitol riot seemed hauntingly familiar to the author, who as a student at Ole Miss watched demagogues incite a deadly riot to prevent integration.
The cause of Donald Trump’s poor behavior may be “a severe case of bad manners,” says the author.
It is probably lost to mind who first said that “in the American presidency, character is destiny.” But whoever coined the adage must have been thinking of Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, in whom the salience of personal qualities was so great as to be historically determinative – Was
The daughter of a Gaelic-speaking fisherman on a remote Scottish island emigrated to New York, worked as a maid in the Carnegie Mansion, and married Fred Trump. Her son would become a tycoon like his father and then the president.
Editor's Note: Nina Burleigh was National Political Correspondent for Newsweek and has written for numerous publications including Time, The New York Times, New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. She is the author of seven books includin
Featured Authors
