Author: Heather Cox Richardson

On August 19, 1920, the Tennessee legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by the narrow vote of 50 to 49. A mirror of the Fifteenth Amendment protecting the right of Black men to vote, the new amendment read: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Like the momentum for the Fifteenth Amendment, the push for rights for women had taken root during the Civil...

Early in the morning on June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard at the Watergate Office Building in Washington DC, noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but when he went on the next round, he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building. And so it began. The U.S. president, Richard M. Nixon, was obsessed with the idea that opponents were trying to sink his campaign for reelection. The...

The July 21 public hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol brought to its logical conclusion the story of Trump’s attempt to overturn our democracy. After four years of destroying democratic norms and gathering power into his own hands, the former president tried to overturn the will of the voters. Trump was attacking the fundamental concept on which this nation rests: that we have a right to consent to the government under which we live. Far from rejecting the idea of minority rule after seeing where it led, Republican Party...

Summer 1964 was known as the “Freedom Summer.” Americans, Black and White, southern and northern, eager to defend the right of all Americans to vote, planned to register Black people for the upcoming election. Because only 6.7% of Black Mississippians were registered, Mississippi became a focal point. Under Bob Moses, a New York City teacher who began voting work in Mississippi in 1961, volunteers set out. Just as they were getting underway, on June 21, three voting rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. No one knew where they had gone, but although...

Defenders of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade insist that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health does not outlaw abortion but simply returns the decision about reproductive rights to the states. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote. He quoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote: “The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.” This, Alito wrote, “is what the...

The June 28 testimony before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol was explosive. It tied former president Donald Trump and his chief of staff Mark Meadows directly to a plot to overturn the U.S. government. The witness was Cassidy Hutchinson, a 25-year-old aide to Meadows and congressional liaison who was well known on Capitol Hill. She was a staunch Republican who had worked for Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA), the second highest Republican in the House, and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). An aide to former House speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), Brendan Buck,...