Reinstituted rules in the U.S. House of Representatives allow members to fire federal staffers and cut programs.
Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
House Republicans have adopted a rule used periodically over the past 150 years that allows lawmakers to speed up and streamline votes to dismantle federal programs and fire federal employees.
A statue of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, sits in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Historians consistently have given Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, their highest rating because of his leadership during the Civil War.
Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Known as the military leader who saved America, Ulysses S. Grant left a legacy of fighting for the rights of enslaved people during and after the Civil War.
“Impeach and remove partisan zealots from the court,” reads one protester’s sign in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on July 9, 2022.
Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
History shows that political contests over the ideological slant of the court are nothing new.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, standing at center and facing left just above the eagle, takes the presidential oath of office for the third time in 1941.
FDR Presidential Library and Museum via Flickr
As Donald Trump prepares to address the Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC, here’s how other former presidents have occupied their time after leaving the White House.
The 9-member Chase Court in 1867, dominated by Northern Republicans.
Alexander Gardner/The U.S. Supreme Court
In the 1860’s, the Supreme Court was a ‘partisan creature’ and President Lincoln and the Republican Party remade it so that it reflected the party’s priorities.
Soldiers and African American workers standing near caskets and dead bodies covered with cloths during Grant’s Overland Campaign.
Matthew Brady/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Lincoln’s chances of reelection in 1864 were dim. He was presiding over a bloody civil war, and the public was losing confidence in him. But he steadfastly rejected pleas to postpone the election.
A Czech-born goaltender for a Canadian hockey team wears a jersey recalling the 1864 burning of Atlanta, Georgia.
AP Photo/Mark Zaleski
When fighting a lethal foe on home soil, Lincoln expertly managed leading politicians; related well with the people; and dealt clearly with the military.
What will a divided Congress do over the next two years?
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The new Congress is divided into a GOP Senate and Democratic House. History provides a glimpse of what this could mean: Democrats hold the power to investigate, if not to legislate.
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sept. 27, 2018.
AP/pool image, Michael Reynolds
Contentious or politically driven Supreme Court nominations are not new. But US history shows that many of those contested nominees who were confirmed would go on to author controversial opinions.
Could the solution to a nuclear North Korea lie in arbitration?
Reuters/Damir Sagolj
Trump and Kim are due to meet this spring. But if these talks fail could international arbitration provide - as it has in the past - an alternative way out of the North Korean crisis?
A throwback to the Clinton White House?
Jeff Christensen and Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Hillary Clinton’s candidacy has revived an old controversy in a new way: presidential third terms. It is, as one historian explains, a controversy as old as the nation itself.
All in the family.
Elephants fighting via www.shutterstock.com
In 1872, free traders split with the young Republican Party, ran a third-party candidate against Ulysses S. Grant and sparked 100 years of GOP protectionism. Is history repeating itself?
It officially ended 150 years ago on April 9 in Appomattox with General Lee’s surrender, but the deep divisions that produced the Civil War still roil our national psyche.
Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Director of the Center for Innovation and Scholarship in Teaching and Learning, and Professor of History, Indiana University
Global Scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC and Hopkins P Breazeale Professor, Manship School of Mass Communications, Louisiana State University