Author: Heather Cox Richardson

October 7 began with news that during Trump’s first impeachment trial, all the Republican senators believed Trump had broken the law when he tried to force President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to smear Hunter Biden before he would release the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine fight off Russia. “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one,” warned Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), according to a forthcoming book by Politico reporter Rachael Bade and Washington Post reporter Karoun Demirjian. But then–Senate majority leader...

On October 8, 1871, dry conditions and strong winds drove deadly fires through the Midwest. The Peshtigo Fire in northeastern Wisconsin and parts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula burned more than 1.2 million acres and 17 towns, claiming between 1,500 and 2,500 lives. The Great Chicago Fire burned 3.3 square miles of the city, destroying the wooden structures that made up the relatively new town, killed about 300 people, and left more than 100,000 people homeless. The Peshtigo Fire is the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history. The Chicago Fire is the one people remember. The difference is in part because...

The scandal involving Herschel Walker, the staunchly anti-abortion Georgia candidate for the Senate who appears to have paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, got worse. After he claimed he did not know the woman who said he paid for an abortion, the woman said she was the mother of one of his other, newly acknowledged, children, so of course he knows her. Just five years ago, Representative Tim Murphy (R-PA), who belonged to the Republican Pro-Life Caucus, resigned just hours after the story broke that he pressured a woman with whom he was having an affair to get...