Author: Heather Cox Richardson

On December 5, in Chicago, former president Barack Obama gave the third in an annual series of lectures he has delivered since 2022 at his foundation’s Democracy Forum, which gathers experts, leaders, and young people to explore ways to safeguard democracy through community action. Taken together, these lectures are a historical and philosophical exploration of the weaknesses of twenty-first century democracy as well as a road map of directions, some new and some old, for democracy’s defense. In 2022, Obama explored ways to counteract the flood of disinformation swamping a shared reality for decision making. In 2023 he discussed...

On February 12, 1809, Nancy Hanks Lincoln gave birth to her second child, a son: Abraham. Abraham Lincoln grew up to become the nation’s sixteenth president, leading the country from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865, a little over a month into his second term. He piloted the country through the Civil War, preserving the concept of American democracy. It was a system that had never been fully realized but that he still saw as “the last, best hope of earth” to prove that people could govern themselves. Lincoln grew up in rural poverty as wealthy enslavers...

“NUTS!” That was the official answer Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe delivered to the four German soldiers sent on December 22, 1944, to urge him to surrender the town of Bastogne in the Belgian Ardennes. In June 1944, on D-Day, the Allies had begun an invasion of northern Europe, and Allied soldiers had advanced against the German troops more quickly than anticipated. By December the Allied troops were stretched out along a 600-mile front and were tired. General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff decided to hold the most fatigued troops in the easily defended Ardennes region over Christmas...

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...