Author: Heather Cox Richardson

Donald J. Trump created a firestorm on August 20 when he said that the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, located mostly in Washington DC, focuses too much on “how bad slavery was.” But his objection to recognizing the horrors of human enslavement is not simply White supremacy. It is the logical outcome of the political ideology that created MAGA. It is the same ideology that leads him and his loyalists to try to rig the nation’s voting system to create a one-party state. That ideology took shape in the years immediately after the Civil...

On July 23, the X account of the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of an 1872 oil painting by John Gast, titled “American Progress.” Gast represented the American East on the right side of the painting with light skies, a rising sun, and the bustling port of New York City, full of ships. He painted the American West in darkness, through which bison and Indigenous Americans flee the people in the middle of the painting: white hunters, farmers, settlers, and stagecoach riders. Over the scene floats a giant, blonde Lady Liberty, evidently moving west, carrying a schoolbook...

Republicans in the Texas legislature are working to redistrict the state before the 2026 midterm elections. Although state legislatures normally redraw district lines every ten years after the census required by the Constitution, President Donald J. Trump has asked Texas Republicans to redistrict now, mid-decade, in order to cut up five districts that tend to vote Democratic and create districts Republicans will almost certainly win. Five additional seats will help the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives despite their growing unpopularity. Trump is urging other Republican-dominated state legislatures—those in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Ohio, for...