A crowd greets Sen. John F. Kennedy at Logan Airport in Boston on July 17, 1960, after he became the Democratic nominee for president.
John M. Hurley/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Though air travel has boosted presidential campaigns for decades, the 2020 pandemic has underlined the importance of aircraft as the quickest and safest way to campaign.
President Nixon at a White House news conference in March 1973.
AP Photo/Charles Tasnadi, File
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.
Delegates after Donald Trump accepted the GOP presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio on Thursday, July 21, 2016.
Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/via Getty
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.
President Donald Trump at the Tulsa campaign rally, where he said he had slowed down COVID-19 testing to keep the numbers low.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
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.
Franklin Roosevelt and other administration officials visit a Civilian Conservation Corps Camp during the New Deal.
Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images
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 D Roosevelt signs bill that will lead to Gold Reserve Act 1934.
Wikimedia Commons
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.
The Capital One Arena, home of the Washington Capitals, sits empty.
AP Photo/Nick Wass
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.
You can’t threaten or humiliate a virus.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
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.
An emergency polio ward in Boston in 1955 equipped with iron lungs. These pressurized respirators acted as breathing muscles for polio victims, often children, who were paralyzed.
www.apimages.com
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.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt broadcasting his first fireside chat, March 12, 1933.
National Archives
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 lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James and 13 colleagues was the last roadblock to the merger.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
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.
Senator Huey Long at the Capitol in 1935.
Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com
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.
Andrew Yang wants to give Americans $1,000 a month.
AP Photo/Nati Harnik
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.
Marchers celebrate the first Indigenous Peoples Day in Berkeley, Calif. on Oct. 10, 1992.
AP Photo/Paul Sakuma
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.
Congress was once the seat of all power on U.S. trade policy.
AP Photo
President Trump has unilaterally raised tariffs and sparked trade wars, all without consulting Congress. A century ago, the roles were reversed.
In this June 2018 photo, U.S. President Donald Trump talks with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a G-7 Summit welcome ceremony in Charlevoix, Québec.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
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