Slavery Abolition

— For 146 years, the Barnum and Bailey Circus was known for being the greatest show on earth. None of it would have been possible if it were not for an ambitious entrepreneur named PT Barnum. While his life and career were sometimes the source of controversy, he truly was…

In Horace Greeley: Print, Politics and the Failure of American Nationhood, James M. Lundberg offers a new portrait of the nineteenth-century US public figure, Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of the New-York Tribune and an advocate for the anti-slavery North and emerging Republican Party. This rich history provides key insights into how…

Biographies of the infamous figures of history are often more interesting than biographies of acclaimed men and women.  Yes, biographies of infamous historical figures can degenerate into a sort of historical rubber-necking at the scene of havoc to which they contributed.  But there is much to learn from the lives…

Advertisement I'm sure you're familiar with Muhammad Ali, the famed American heavyweight champion boxer who coined the catch phrase "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." But there might be some things you don't know about the sporting figure nicknamed "The Greatest," who was the first fighter to capture…

Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule thinks conservatives should abandon originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation. His argument is such bad constitutional law that it is really neither constitutional nor law. It is terrible political and legal strategy. It is at odds with American constitutional history. It reflects the worst…

Altitude is a column by POLITICO founding editor John Harris, offering weekly perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption. Before Herbert Hoover earned a reputation as a tragic failure, he had a reputation for heroic success — a can-do businessman who arrived in the presidency with no previous…

President Trump praised Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as the 'greatest strategic military mind perhaps ever' in a meeting with top officials amid the Charlottesville crisis in 2017 - before taking them on a tour of the Lincoln Bedroom, a new book revealed.  In 'Front Row at the Trump Show,' ABC…

Not Fighting for Slavery There is no chain so heavy or yoke so oppressive as that which men will unwittingly place upon their own necks, or bend their necks to receive, while being beguiled and led along by liberty shriekers under their pretended banner of freedom. – William Watson On…

By Dele Sobowale NOTE 1: Ordinarily, this page would not carry tables or charts. Those belong on the Business/Economic pages. But part 2 can best be understood by summarising the message in a table. If “a picture is worth a thousand words”, then a table is worth ten thousand words.…

But in 1862, the federal government doled out the 2020 equivalent of $23 million—not to the formerly enslaved but to their white enslavers. In 1870 a black woman named Henrietta Wood sued the white deputy sheriff who, nearly two decades earlier, kidnapped her from the free state of Ohio, illegally…