The technical qualifications for presidential candidates are the same, but how people seek the nation's highest office has shifted over the centuries.
John James Audubon relied on African Americans and Native Americans to collect some specimens for his ‘Birds of America’ prints (shown: Florida cormorant), but never credited them.
National Audubon Society
US ideas about conservation center on walling off land from use. That approach often means expelling Indigenous and other poor people who may be its most effective caretakers.
Theodore Roosevelt was one of many U.S. presidents who was racist.
Bettman/Getty
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.
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.
Democratic U.S. 2020 election presidential candidates during the second night of the first Democratic presidential candidates’ debate.
REUTERS/Mike Segar
The problems facing America are unrestrained capitalism and corruption, said the Democratic presidential candidates over two nights of debates. Or was that really Teddy Roosevelt speaking?
Dawn on the south rim of the Grand Canyon.
Murray Foubister/Wikimedia
The Grand Canyon, which marks 100 years as a national park on Feb. 26, 2019, is known today as an iconic natural wonder. But early European visitors weren't impressed.
President Trump stands beside Pope Francis at the Vatican on May 24, 2017. An unidentified priest looks on.
Evan Vucci/AP
The GOP was once the political home of anti-Catholicism. And the Vatican, it was believed, would use a Catholic president as a way to meddle in US politics.
James Comey testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Reuters/Kevin Lamarque
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.
Sunrise on Angel’s Window, North Rim, Grand Canyon National Park.
National Park Service/Wikimedia
A Swedish court decision means Julian Assange will remain confined to the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Like the muckrakers of old, he offends the powerful, but his journalistic cause is just.
Co-Director, Research Program on Economic and Social Rights, Human Rights Institute, and Associate Professor, Department of Political Science., University of Connecticut