"Robber Baron Tactics and Imperial Belligerence"

"Mainstream political coverage has largely overlooked the deep affinities between the McKinley and Trump models of governance, thanks in no small part to the American press's inattention to the basics of political economy, not to mention its endemic historical illiteracy. More than that, though, Trump's cultish regard for McKinley gives the lie to the corporate media's central narrative about Trump and the MAGA movement—that it's a populist insurgency aimed at toppling sinister networks of elite influence."

Chris Lehman at The Nation compares Donald Trump to William McKinley.

And Michael Tomasky at The New Republic calls Trump an 1870s Redemptionist.

"If Trump's Presidency Can Be Said to Have a Defining Quality, It Might Well Be Chaos Itself"

"But much more importantly, for many Americans—especially in Trump's base—this rule-breaking was the whole point. Trump famously said in 2016 that his admirers would stick with him if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, and it's true that his patina of scandal-repellent Teflon would make even Ronald Reagan envious. Certainly, the polarized partisanship of Washington today explains the unwillingness of so many of his fellow Republicans to cross their own voters and break with Trump; had he come to power in 1974, he probably would have been sent packing as Nixon was. But beneath it all was, for many, a true loyalty to the man, an admiration of his style, and, ultimately, a good deal of contempt for civility and decency, transparency and expertise, constitutionality and democracy. Trump may now be headed for Mar-a-Lago—no small thing—but that contempt remains. Nearly two-thirds of Republican voters, even after January 6, say Trump acted responsibly after losing the election to Biden."

At Politico, David Greenberg asks, "What Will Trump's Presidency Mean to History?"

Zack Stanton asks David Blight if "Trumpism Is Becoming America's New 'Lost Cause.'"

And Hope Yen, Christopher Rugaber, and Calvin Woodward at the Associated Press fact check Trump's final speech as president.

"Engaged in Insurrection or Rebellion Against the Same, or Given Aid or Comfort to the Enemies Thereof"

"'Nobody really had heard about this except people like me, who study this era,' said Foner, a Columbia University professor and author of numerous books on the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Abraham Lincoln. 'And then I had other historians emailing me saying, wouldn't Section Three apply here if Trump is guilty?'"

At The Seattle Times, Michael S. Rosenwald discusses using the Fourteenth Amendment to remove Donald Trump from office.

"Too-La-Loo"

"A little over a decade later, however, African Americans like Douglass began making the glorious anniversary their own. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the nation's four million newly emancipated citizens transformed Independence Day into a celebration of black freedom. The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out."

In a 2018 Atlantic article, Ethan J. Kytle and Brian write about "When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday."

"A Successful Repulse of Enlightenment Liberalism by Romantic Reaction"

But Reconstruction has proven to be a more balky and diffuse era than either the Dunningites or the New Reconstructionists supposed. The crusaders, black and white, who hoped to build a new South out of the ashes of the old plantation order had no plans for a proletarian paradise. Quite to the contrary, they were plain and eager in their demand for a thorough-going capitalist effacement of the kingdom of the thousand-bale planters. Northern republicans had, after all, waged their war on behalf of free labor (an ideology whose greatest expositor has always been no one other than Eric Foner), and what they expected to create in the defeated Confederacy was a mirror image of small-producer manufacturing and independent family farms. The Union 'represents the principles of free labor,' declared a New York pamphlet, and only when 'the victory of the Northern society of free labor over the landed monopoly of the Southern aristocracy' was complete could the Civil War be declared over. 'Reconstruction,' added Frederick Douglass, will 'cause Northern industry, Northern capital, and Northern civilization to flow into the South, and make a man from New England as much at home in Carolina as elsewhere in the Republic.'
"No one offered a more vigorous second to that motion than the freedpeople, who wanted nothing so much as to become self-interested bourgeois owners of property."

Allen Carl Guelzo at History News Network calls Reconstruction a attempted "bourgeois revolution."

The Herrenvolk President

"But there's another way to read Trump's promise—not as a commitment to economic populism but as a statement of racial solidarity. Far from acting as a president for all Americans, he's governed explicitly as a president for white Americans and the racial reactionaries among them. He's spoken to their fear and fanned their anger, making his office a rallying point for those who see decline in multiracial democracy and his administration a tool for those who would turn the clock back on racial progress. If those Americans are the 'forgotten men and women' of President Trump's inaugural address, then he's been a man of his word."

Jamelle Bouie at Slate argues that Trumpism's "simmering pursuit of racial grievance has been its defining characteristic and threatens to be its most enduring achievement.

"A Certain Daring"

"But I argue that this was really the minor story of his presidency.
"The major story was that he was the foremost president protecting the four million African-Americans who had been enslaved prior to the war, who, under the 14th Amendment, became full-fledged American citizens, and under the 15th Amendment, had the right to vote.
"This provoked the most violent backlash in the South. The Ku Klux Klan conducted a reign of terror throughout the South. Grant repeatedly sent federal troops into the South in order to rein in the Klan, and then finally brought 3,000 indictments against the Klan to crush them.
"So, as Frederick Douglass said, Ulysses S. Grant was 'the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of out race.'
"I feel it's a great unknown story about Grant."

Jeffery Brown at the PBS Newshour interviews Ron Chernow about Chernow's new book, Grant.

"And That's a Problem"

"The language we turn to in describing the war, from speaking of compromise and plantations, to characterizing the struggle as the North versus the South, or referring to Robert E. Lee as a General, can lend legitimacy to the violent, hateful and treasonous southern rebellion that tore the nation apart from 1861 to 1865; and from which we still have not recovered. Why do we often describe the struggle as between two equal entities? Why have we shown acceptance of the military rank given by an illegitimate rebellion and unrecognized political entity?"

Christopher Wilson at Smithsonian argues that "We Legitimize the 'So-Called' Confederacy With Our Vocabulary."

"There's a Mystical Aura to It"

"'When I was a kid, he was the hero,' said Philbrick. 'Because I had seen "They Died With Their Boots On," heroic portrayal. But then I think I was a freshman in high school and I saw "Little Big Man," in which Custer is the deranged maniac, a caricature almost of a Vietnam-era imperialist.'"

Mo Rocca on CBS Sunday Morning visits Montana to learn about Gen. G. A. Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

I Will Fight No More Forever

"Joseph never stopped pressing for land in the Wallowa Valley, and up to his death in 1904, the government kept reopening and reconsidering his claims. Joseph became an inspiration to generations of civil rights and human rights activists due his forceful message of universal liberty and equality. 'We only ask an even chance to live as other men live,' he famously said. 'Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself—and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.' It's a strikingly modern expression of the rights that all Americans should expect, marking a bridge from the old values of abolition, the Union, and Reconstruction to the causes of a new century. But Joseph was not simply making a plea for citizenship. He was claiming the right to participate in the contentious, if not unending, struggles built into the American way of governing—the right to speak to the state and be heard."

Slate runs an excerpt of Daniel J. Sharfstein's Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War.

"Complex, Unstandardized, and Vulnerable to Corruption"

"In the 19^th-century viva voce system, people went to local polling places and swore an oath that they were voting in good faith. Then, out loud and in front of anyone who cared to cluster around observing, the voter told the election judges his choices. The counting took place by hand; judges entered voter choices in poll books, keeping running totals of numbers of votes for each candidate. There were no paper ballots to tally.

"In other locations, 19^th-century voters used paper ballots issued by parties—a practice that became increasingly common as the century went on. Voters brought their own ballots to the polls, and although they could write their choices on pieces of paper, parties found that providing printed ballots with the names of their candidates was a convenience that nudged voters toward voting 'straight ticket.' Parties printed their tickets on colored paper, and the ballots went into glass boxes, so that anyone observing a vote could clearly see which party a voter had chosen. The atmosphere at the polls was raucous, and party members lobbied for voters’ favor right up to the moment when they arrived at the ballot box."

Rebecca Onion in Slate looks at the changing voting processes in the nineteenth century.

And she notes that the "first congratulatory telegram" between candidates was in 1896.

"She Had the Foresight Not to Accept the Way Society Was"

"As the national press tore her apart, Woodhull lashed out at allies who she believed let her down. The last straw came when she called out a former friend, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who she claimed had had dozens of affairs. When she published these allegations in her newspaper, she was arrested for violating morality laws and spent Election Day in a jail cell. Because she wasn't on any ballot in the country, there are no records of how many people might have voted for her, Frisken tells Richman and Freemark."

Danny Lewis at Smithsonian writes about the first woman nominated for the presidency, Victoria Woodhull.

The Legend of Newton Knight

"'When you grow up in the South, you hear all the time about your "heritage," like it's the greatest thing there is,' he says. 'When I hear that word, I think of grits and sweet tea, but mostly I think about slavery and racism, and it pains me. Newt Knight gives me something in my heritage, as a white Southerner, that I can feel proud about. We didn't all go along with it.'"

In anticipation of the new movie Free State of Jones, Richard Grant in Smithsonian visits Jones County, Mississippi.

The "Unfinished Revolution"

"Recall where the Constitution stood 150 years ago today—before this Second Founding. It didn't mention the word 'slavery.' And, worse, various provisions—including the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause—had increased the political power of the slave states throughout the pre-Civil War period. The Constitution was silent on the Declaration’s promise of equality and on the issue of African American voting rights. States could violate key Bill of Rights protections like free speech with impunity—and many Southern states did throughout the pre-Civil War period, banning abolitionist speech, with at least one state punishing such advocacy with death. And citizenship rights were left to the states and the courts—with Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney infamously concluding in Dred Scott that African Americans could not be citizens and that they had 'no rights which the white man was bound to respect.'
"While the American people rightly revere George Washington, James Madison, and their fellow Framers, it took the heroic efforts of Lincoln, Stevens, Frederick Douglass, John Bingham (the framer of the Fourteenth Amendment), and many others to create the 'more perfect Union' built on winning a bloody Civil War and ratifying a series of amendments that ended slavery, protected fundamental rights from state abuses, guaranteed equality for all, and expanded the right to vote. While the 1787 Framers succeeded in creating the most durable form of government in history, it's only after the Second Founding that the Constitution fully protected the liberty and equality promised in the Declaration of Independence."

In The Atlantic, Jeffrey Rosen and Tom Donnelly announce a five-year initiative to commemorate America's Second Founding.

"The Occupation Was the Consequence, Not the Cause, of Southern Resistance"

"The brilliance of Downs' argument is that he steals the central complaint of the apologists, yet reverses the conclusion: The federal government was overzealous—and that was a good thing. Congress had to impose martial law in order for blacks to gain basic freedoms. If military officers sometimes vacated racist local laws, if they removed ruthless sheriffs and judges, if they tried white supremacists in unfair military tribunals—all of which they did—they did so for necessary ends. Equality would come to the South no other way."


Eric Herschthal in Slate reviews Gregory P. Downs's After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War.


And Downs explains Reconstruction as a continuation of war in The New York Times.

"An Era of Great Hope and Brutal Disappointment"

"Of course, these changes also produced a violent reaction. As his title suggests, Egerton devotes considerable attention to the actions of homegrown 'terrorists' like the Ku Klux Klan and kindred organizations, which systematically targeted local political leaders and teachers and were probably responsible for the deaths of more Americans than Osama bin Laden. Egerton makes the important point that the old idea of the South being subject to an overbearing military occupation is a myth. The Army was rapidly demobilized after the war ended.

"'Reconstruction did not fail,' Egerton states, 'it was violently overthrown.'"

Eric Foner in The New York Times reviews Douglas R. Egerton's The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era.

"Give In to Them or They Would Starve the Government to Death"

"The riders were about troops and voting, but at issue was the very structure of American government. President Hayes and Minority leader Garfield recognized that if an extremist faction in Congress could force its will on the country by holding government finances hostage, it would erase the power of the president and destroy the basic structure of the American government’s separation of powers. Even moderate Democrats, who didn’t particularly like the idea of troops enforcing black rights, agreed that the threat was truly revolutionary and menaced the Constitution. If the extremists’ tactics worked, this would be only the first of their demands, and the country would fall, as one Democrat said, under 'the absolute despotism of an irresponsible and unrestrained partisan majority' in Congress."

Heather Cox Richardson in Salon looks back to when Southern Congressmen threatened to shut down the federal government in 1879.

"Ingersoll Dies Smiling"

"While today’s GOP is associated with public displays of faith, the Republican party of Ingersoll’s day was more likely to be the home of freethinkers, such as the churchless Abraham Lincoln. The American public wasn’t ready for overt atheism in elected or appointed office, but Ingersoll’s talent on the stump made his endorsement valuable. Jacoby persuasively argues that Ingersoll fits into the classical liberal tradition, a thread that remains visible, if controversial, in the fabric of the modern Republican party."

Katherine Mangu-Ward in The Weekly Standard reviews Susan Jacoby's The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought.

"Uncomfortable to Read Even 140 Years Later"

"Near the end of his powerful account of a largely forgotten incident in our city's history, Zesch asks whether the right lessons have been learned. He argues that the 1871 massacre may have marked the end of mob justice in Los Angeles. But Zesch attributes this milestone primarily to improved law enforcement, not to the better angels of our nature taming our impulse to scapegoat, pander and pick up a gun."

Michael Woo in the Los Angeles Times reviews Scott Zesch's The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871.

"Among Freedpeople"

"On May 1, 1865, freed slaves gathered in Charleston, South Carolina to commemorate the death of Union soldiers and the end of the American Civil War. Three years later, General John Logan issued a special order that May 30, 1868 be observed as Decoration Day, the first Memorial Day--a day set aside 'for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land.'"

Jim Downs at History News Network discusses the origins of Memorial Day.