Author: Heather Cox Richardson

For three hot days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, more than 150,000 soldiers from the armies of the United States of America and the Confederate States of America slashed at each other in the hills and through the fields around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. When the battered armies limped out of town after the brutal battle, they left scattered behind them more than seven thousand corpses in a town with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, the townspeople had to get the dead soldiers into the ground as quickly as they possibly...

I know people are on edge, and there is maybe one last thing I can offer before this election. Worried people ask me how I have maintained a sense of hope through the past fraught years. The answer, inevitably for me is in our history. If you had been alive in 1853, you would have thought the elite enslavers had become America’s rulers. They were only a small minority of the U.S. population, but by controlling the Democratic Party, they had managed to take control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They used that power...

At a town hall held on his social media platform X, Elon Musk told the audience on October 25 that if Trump wins, he expected to work in a Cabinet-level position to cut the federal government. He told people to expect “temporary hardship” but that cuts would “ensure long-term prosperity.” At the Trump rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, Musk said he plans to cut $2 trillion from the government. Economists point out that current discretionary spending in the budget is $1.7 trillion, meaning his promise would eliminate virtually all discretionary spending, which includes...

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) issued a joint statement on October 24 condemning Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris for “labeling [Trump] as a ‘fascist.’” They suggest she is “inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day.” Observers immediately pointed out that, in fact, it is Trump who has repeatedly called Harris a fascist — as well as a Marxist and a communist. Those calling Trump a fascist are former members of his own administration like former White House chief of staff General John...

I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way. It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight. There was never any question that this rally was going to be anything but an attempt to inflame Trump’s base. The plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden itself deliberately evoked its predecessor: a...