Author: Heather Cox Richardson

The tone for the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States at noon on January 20 was set on January 17, when Trump, who once trashed cryptocurrency as “based on thin air,” launched his own cryptocurrency. By January 19 it had made more than $50 billion on paper. Felix Salmon of Axios reported that “a financial asset that didn’t exist two days ago — now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth.” As Salmon noted, “The emoluments clause of the Constitution,” which prohibits any person holding a government office from accepting...

In 1883, the Republican Party moved into full-throated support for the industrialists who were concentrating the nation’s wealth into their own hands while factory workers stayed above the poverty line only by working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It was Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner who responded to those worried about the extremes of wealth and poverty in the country with his book “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other.” Sumner concluded it was unfair that “worthy, industrious, independent, and self-supporting” men should be taxed to support those he claimed were lazy. Worse, he said, such...

It is starting to seem like the best way to interpret social media posts from President-elect Donald Trump is through the lens of professional wrestling. Never a true athletic competition, although it certainly required athletic training until the 1980s, professional wrestling depended on “kayfabe,” the shared agreement among audience and actors that they would pretend the carefully constructed script and act were real. But as Abraham Josephine Reisman explained in “The New York Times,” Vince and Linda McMahon pushed to move professional wrestling into entertainment to avoid health regulations and the taxes imposed on actual sporting events. That shift...

The House of Representatives passed a measure to fund the government for three months in the late hours of December 20. The measure will fund the government at current levels halfway through March. It also appropriates $100 billion in disaster aid for regions hit by the storms and fires of the summer and fall, as well as $10 billion for farmers. Getting to this agreement has exposed the power vacuum in the Republican Party and thus a crisis in the government of the United States. This fight over funding has been brewing since Republicans took over the House of...

On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship. In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning...