When America was young, its leaders had no trouble retiring from public service and public life. That’s not universally true now.
The practice of putting images of only deceased or allegorical people on U.S. stamps dates back to 1847.
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Hint: It’s all tied up with the country’s history with British royalty.
‘Our machines have now been running for 70. or 80. years,’ an old Thomas Jefferson, right, wrote to an even older John Adams, left.
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Americans have long nurtured mixed feelings about age and aged leaders. Yet during the country’s founding, a young America admired venerable old sages.
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.
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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.
The Unfolding is fiction: a made-up story of American politics. But just like in the real United States, the lines between truth and fantasy in this novel are perilously thin.
Neither George Washington nor Thomas Jefferson would have approved of this bacon cheeseburger.
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The celebration of generous portions, meat and fat as masculine and patriotic would have been alien to Washington and Jefferson, who advocated vegetables and moderation as American ideals.
A voter fills out his ballot at an early voting location in Massachusetts.
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The balance of US political power is at stake in the 2022 midterm elections. Voters have several ways to cast their ballots – and the majority of Americans are choosing one of them.
Andrew Yang, losing candidate for president and New York City mayor, is one of the founders of the Forward Party.
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Once owned by James Madison, the Montpelier plantation remains a model for presenting a full depiction of the life of the former president as well as the lives of those he enslaved.
There are lots of official photos of Russian President Vladimir Putin shirtless, including this one from August 2017.
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A leader’s machismo can lead to war, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has long displayed his version of hyper-masculinity. A historian says that for America’s founders, wars never fed their egos.
Protesters used violence and intimidation to prevent federal officials from collecting a whiskey tax during George Washington’s presidency.
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Like today, passions were strong and political discourse was inflamed in late 18th-century America. Angry mobs torched buildings. Virginians drank a toast to George Washington’s speedy death.
Nixon resigned after tapes he had fought making public incriminated him in the Watergate coverup.
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Shannon Bow O'Brien, The University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts
Donald Trump’s lawsuit to stop the release to Congress of potentially embarrassing or incriminating documents puts the National Archives in the middle of an old legal conflict.
Protests against mandates and quarantines get the Founding Fathers’ ideas wrong.
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The Founding Fathers were unrelenting in their commitment to the idea that circumstances can arise that require public officials to take actions abridging individual freedoms.
The founders believed education was crucial to democracy. Here, a one-room schoolhouse in Breathitt County, Ky.
Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott/Library of Congress
Democracies degenerate because of cunning leaders. Democracies also crumble because of the people themselves – and the US founders believed education would be crucial to maintaining democracy.
Global Scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC and Hopkins P Breazeale Professor, Manship School of Mass Communications, Louisiana State University
Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, Associate Research Professor, Political Science, Co-host of Democracy Works Podcast, Penn State