Historians change their views of presidents over time, often because of the country’s changing views on race and moral leadership.
Academic rigor, journalistic flair
Articles on Abraham Lincoln
Displaying 1 - 20 of 44 articles
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.
Virtue signaling is designed to communicate specifically to one partisan tribe and to affirm its moral superiority. A scholar of ethics and politics explains why that is unwelcome in a divided US.
Known as Juneteenth in Texas, Emancipation Days symbolized America’s attempt to free the enslaved across the nation. But those days were unable to prevent new forms of economic slavery.
The Civil War – the second-most-deadly event in US history, just behind COVID-19 –contributed to lasting changes in how Americans care for the dead.
A political philosopher argues that while all American presidents may lie, those who appear to lie for the public good are often celebrated.
With a few notable exceptions, public monuments across the United States are overwhelmingly white and male. A movement is slowly growing to tell a more inclusive history of the American experience.
MLK’s vision for nonviolence included abolishing what he called triple evils – racism, poverty and militarism.
To the famous composer, the gun serves not as a tool of self-defense, but as an instrument of self-expression and self-realization.
The pandemic changed people’s dining-out experience, with takeout becoming more common. But since dining out became fashionable in the 18th century, how and where people go to eat has been evolving.
Former enslaved persons never got ‘forty acres and a mule,’ and their descendants have been denied reparations for the legacy of slavery. Will Joe Biden be the president to change that?
History is full of examples of nations paying out to compensate for slavery. But the money never went to those who suffered under the system, only those who profited.
President Lincoln was a statesman. John Brown was a radical. That’s the traditional view of how each one fought slavery, but it fails to capture the full measure of their devotion.
Much as the South rejected President Lincoln’s election with a massive armed uprising, could President Trump’s many supporters rise up and overthrow a Biden-led government?
On Nov. 7, when President-elect Joe Biden urged in his address that we “give each other a chance,” his words summoned Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address of 1865.
Every election triggers distress for some people. Here are some ways to possibly cope.
The U.S. presidential election is again serving as a symptom and a symbol of a troubled society. Whatever the outcome, history suggests anything but a quick resolution to deeply rooted problems.
Some presidents have lied for honorable reasons, while for others the lies have been simply self-serving.
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.
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.
Top contributors
-
Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, Associate Research Professor, Political Science, Co-host of Democracy Works Podcast, Penn State
-
Professor of Philosophy, Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington
-
Honorary Professor of International Relations, University of the Witwatersrand
-
Professor of History, Arizona State University
-
Commonwealth Fund Professor of American History, UCL
-
Reader in Diplomacy and International Studies, SOAS, University of London
-
Global Scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC and Hopkins P Breazeale Professor, Manship School of Mass Communications, Louisiana State University
-
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
-
Masters degree student, Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University
-
Professor of History, Emory University
-
Reader in US History, Northumbria University, Newcastle
-
Goodrich C White Professor of Religion, Emory University
-
Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, Binghamton University, State University of New York
-
Professor of History, City University of New York
-
Williams Memorial Professor of Law, Northwestern University
