The Latest Breaking News from the Civil War

Donald Trump is the third U.S. president to pardon a large group of insurrectionists. His clemency toward those convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection – including seditious conspiracy and assaults on police officers – was different in key ways from the two previous efforts, by Andrew…

A group studying where to put South Carolina’s first Statehouse monument to an individual African American has decided Robert Smalls’ statue should be staring down a notorious white supremacist

The popular “Yellowstone” TV series, set and filmed in Montana, taps into a lesser-known chapter of the state’s history: its settlement by Confederates and ex-Confederates during and after the Civil War.

There is nothing more dangerous than an autocrat who has managed to dupe the public into thinking that they are good at managing the economy, or are the key to maintaining security. That the Trump years saw reasonable levels of economic and job growth while inflation stayed under control, helped…

Mary Surratt, the building’s owner, would become the first woman executed by the US federal government

Political violence is hardly new to America. Since the country’s inception, gunmen have shaped its political landscape, from the Civil War to the Ku Klux Klan, to high-profile assassinations and the bombing of federal buildings. Yet the threat of political violence has deepened in recent years and intensified during the…

There’s one question I get every time I give a talk. I’m a curator of political history at the Smithsonian Institution, and when I discuss the deep history of political division in our country, someone in the audience always asserts that we can’t possibly compare past divisions to the present,…

It's the deadliest conflict that Lebanon has experienced since the end of the civil war in 1990. In the space of just a few days, Israeli air strikes have killed more than 1,000 people and left thousands wounded, with civilians making up a large part of the casualties. The violence…

Lebanon's former central bank governor, Riad Salameh, has been arrested in Beirut. Once lauded for reviving the country's economy after the civil war, Salameh's later years in office were marred by allegations of financial crimes including embezzlement and money laundering. Plus, the trial against Martin Winterkorn, the former CEO of…

Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election not only failed, but some of them also rested on a misreading of the U.S. Constitution, as our new analysis argues. The relevant constitutional provision dates back to just after the Civil War, and contemporaries recognized it as…

I first visited Lebanon in 1978, three years into the civil war and six years before Theodore Ell was born. I mention this because, despite the fact our experiences of this fascinating country were at different times, his impressions and judgements in his excellent new book Lebanon Days – which…