Author: Heather Cox Richardson

There has been a change afoot in the Democratic Party for a while now as its leaders shift from trying to find common ground with Republicans to standing firmly against MAGAs and articulating their own vision for the United States. That shift burst dramatically into the open last night when Democratic Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker gave a barn-burning speech to Democrats in New Hampshire. After walking out to the American Authors song “Go Big or Go Home,” Pritzker urged Democrats to stop listening to “do-nothing political types” who are calling for caution at a time when Americans are demanding...

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender did not end the war, there were still two major armies in the field, but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close. Soldiers and sailors of the United States had defeated the armies and the navy of the Confederate States of America across the country and the seas, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and almost...

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...