President Woodrow Wilson told Black leaders, ‘Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.’ He was one in a long line of racist American presidents.
Political conventions used to pick presidential nominees in private. Now the public picks the nominee and then the party has a big party at the convention, writes a scholar of US elections.
The absence of trust in a nation’s leader and government jeopardizes an effective response to a health crisis. It also creates a political crisis, a loss of faith in democracy.
Similarities between the 1930s and today are hard to ignore, but Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal teaches us that several developments have to coincide to generate a lasting social safety net.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s personal battle with polio, and his steady hand while overseeing a national eradication campaign, highlights decisive leadership against a virus that terrified America.
This isn’t the first time sports have been put on hold. But in the past, the reprieve was brief, and sports went on to act as a way to bring Americans together. This time’s different.
The ‘tough guy’ is a cultural archetype that political leaders have long adopted. But during crises, Americans tend to look for a different kind of hero.
Polio was nearly eradicated with the Salk vaccine in 1955. At the time, little was known about this mysterious disease that paralyzed and sometimes killed young children.
On March 12, 1933, President Roosevelt addressed the nation from the Oval Office during a time of great crisis. That ‘fireside chat’ proved broadcasting’s power as nothing before or since.
The T-Mobile-Sprint merger is the latest example of weakened enforcement of antitrust laws, which reduces competition and exacerbates already-record levels of inequality.
The very first scientific horse race poll, which took place 85 years ago, was shrouded in secrecy and may have changed history – even though it was faulty.
Francis Townsend had a similar if less ambitious idea in the 1930s that never got through Congress but ended up making Social Security a lot more generous.
John M. Murphy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Difficult to pronounce, synecdoche is the form of rhetoric used by President Trump when he told four Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to the “corrupt” countries they came from.
A presidential visit to Kingston, Ont. – like the one FDR paid in 1938 – could once again play a role in bridging relations between Canada and the United States.
Global Scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC and Hopkins P Breazeale Professor, Manship School of Mass Communications, Louisiana State University