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.
A sign in a yard listing many virtues – an example of virtue signaling.
davelogan/iStock via Getty images
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.
Emancipation Day celebration, June 19, 1900, held in ‘East Woods’ on East 24th St. in Austin, Texas.
Austin History Center
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.
An art installation by Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg in remembrance of Americans who have died of COVID-19, near the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.
AP Photo/Brynn Anderson
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.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, right, talks with Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders in his White House office in Washington, D.C., Jan. 18, 1964.
AP Photo
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 dining-out experience has changed as people wear masks and are separated by plexiglass in outdoor dining.
Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
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.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is spearheading fresh efforts in Congress to address reparations.
Al Drago/Getty Images
Anne C. Bailey, Binghamton University, State University of New York
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?
No guessing who in this 1864 depiction may have been compensated after slavery ended.
API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
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.
Abolitionist John Brown, left, and President Abraham Lincoln, right, were both moral crusaders.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images & Stock Montage/Getty Images
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.
Pro-Trump supporters, including Infowars host Alex Jones, hold a ‘Stop The Steal’ protest Wednesday in Atlanta as Georgia’s recount nears the end.
Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
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?
President-elect Joe Biden speaks on Nov. 7, 2020, in Wilmington, Del.
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
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.
Feelings of grief – and depression – are common post-election emotional responses.
hocus-focus/GettyImages
Every election triggers distress for some people. Here are some ways to possibly cope.
This combination of Sept. 29, 2020, file photos show President Donald Trump, left, and former Vice President Joe Biden during the first presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio.
(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
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.
President Nixon at a White House news conference in March 1973.
AP Photo/Charles Tasnadi, File
Some presidents have lied for honorable reasons, while for others the lies have been simply self-serving.
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.
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.
Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, Associate Research Professor, Political Science, Co-host of Democracy Works Podcast, Penn State
Global Scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC and Hopkins P Breazeale Professor, Manship School of Mass Communications, Louisiana State University