Author: Heather Cox Richardson

There are really two major Republican political stories dominating the news these days. The more obvious of the two is the attempt by former president Donald Trump and his followers to destroy American democracy. The other story is older, the one that led to Trump but that stands at least a bit apart from him. It is the story of a national shift away from the supply-side ideology of Reagan Republicans toward an embrace of the idea that the government should hold the playing field among all Americans level. While these two stories are related, they are not the...

Black Americans outnumbered White Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, but the city’s voting rolls were 99% White. So, in 1963, Black organizers in the Dallas County Voters League launched a drive to get Black voters in Selma registered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a prominent civil rights organization, joined them. In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, but the measure did not adequately address the problem of voter suppression. In Selma a judge had stopped the voter registration protests by issuing an injunction prohibiting public gatherings of more than two...

The theme of the third day of the Democratic National Convention, held in the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, was “A Fight for Our Freedoms.” But the speeches were less about fighting than they were about recovering the roots of American democracy. In 1974, music writer Jon Landau saw a relatively unknown musician in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and wrote for an alternative paper: “Last Thursday, at the Harvard Square theater, I saw rock’n’roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when...

At Chicago’s United Center on August 20, the delegates at the Democratic National Convention reaffirmed the recent online nomination of Kamala Harris for president. The ceremonial roll-call vote featured all the usual good-natured boasting from the delegates about their own state’s virtues, a process that reinforces the incredible diversity and history of both this land and its people. The managers reserved the final slots for Minnesota and California—the home states of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and presidential candidate Kamala Harris, respectively—to put the ticket over the top. When the votes had been counted, Harris joined the crowd...