Author: Heather Cox Richardson

Today is the federal holiday honoring Juneteenth, the celebration of the announcement on June 19th, 1865, in Texas that enslaved Americans were free. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army, but it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico. Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived on Galveston Island with...

A gunman murdered at least 19 children and 2 adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 24. For years now, after one massacre or another, I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority. The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others,...

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol filed a motion on April 22 asking a judge to put an end to the attempts of Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows to stonewall the committee. Meadows has tried to avoid talking to the committee or providing it with documents, using a number of different arguments that essentially try to establish that the U.S. president cannot be held accountable by Congress. The committee’s motion carefully explains why those arguments are wrong. To support their belief that the Congress has the right and responsibility to...

An 18-year-old White man murdered 10 people and wounded three others with an AR-15 on May 14. The shooter traveled more than 200 miles to get to a predominantly Black neighborhood, where he put on heavy body armor and live streamed his attack as he gunned down people grocery shopping. Eleven of those he shot were Black. The Buffalo Police Commissioner, Joseph Gramaglia, said, “The evidence that we have uncovered so far makes no mistake that this is an absolute racist hate crime. It will be prosecuted as a hate crime. This is someone who has hate in their...