These same banks, ironically, would shortly be hauled before the Pujo Committee as the abominable Money Trust. What the public wouldn’t know was that the Money Trust had been forged, in part, by Washi...
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and th...
The two sides projected competing nightmares of what would happen if the other side prevailed.
The tone of politics had rapidly grown very harsh. Some poison was released into the American political atmosphere that was not put back into the bottle for a generation. As after any revolution, puri...
The terror tactics worked: on Election Day in November, only two Republicans dared to vote in all of Yazoo County, only one in Tallahatchie County. In Louisiana, whites were set to
The remedy is for people to stop watching the ticker, listening to the radio, drinking bootleg gin, and dancing to jazz . . . and return to the old economics and prosperity based upon saving and worki...
The president was running out of room to maneuver as the country backed away from further federal interference in the South. The outcry over Louisiana began to ring down the final curtain on Reconstru...
The period of John Adams’s presidency declined into a time of political savagery with few parallels in American history, a season of paranoia in which the two parties surrendered all trust in each oth...
The people had registered their dismay with a long litany of unpopular Federalist actions: the Jay Treaty, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the truculent policy toward France, the vast army being formed u...
The painting also pinpointed an important quirk of Washington’s face: the lazy right eye that slid off into the corner while the left eye stared straight ahead. To prepare for the equestrian
The issue of press freedom was all the more important because the spirit of faction, that mortal poison to our land, had spread through America. He worried that a certain unnamed party might impose de...
The fifty-five delegates representing twelve states—the renegade Rhode Island boycotted the convention—scarcely constituted a cross section of America. They were white, educated males and mostly afflu...
The White Liners didn’t bother with any such pretense of civility or restraint. On October 7, John Milton Brown, the sheriff of Coahoma County, reported a perfect state of terror had seized his jurisd...
Simon Wolf wrote during Woodrow Wilson’s tenure, President Grant did more on behalf of American citizens of Jewish faith at home and abroad than all the Presidents of the United States prior thereto o...
Reared with Methodist modesty, he could never admit nakedly to the true depth of his ambition. In this way, he was strictly Hannah Grant’s son, not Jesse’s. Ethical and honorable, he wanted to receive...
Perhaps the true legacy of his boyhood was an equivocal one: he came to detest the tyranny embodied by the planters and their authoritarian rule, while also fearing the potential uprisings of the disa...
One thing that hasn’t aroused dispute is the exemplary nature of Washington’s religious tolerance. He shuddered at the notion of exploiting religion for partisan purposes or showing favoritism for cer...
One of Rockefeller’s favorite stories reveals her coolheaded response to danger: Mother had whooping cough and was staying in her room so that we should not catch it. When she heard thieves trying to...
On September 9 the tour touched its nadir in St. Louis when Johnson, in another intemperate outburst, had the gall to blame Congress for the New Orleans riot: Every drop of blood that was shed is upon...
On July 6, while Captain Hamilton wandered about trying to find a purse with money that he had lost—he sometimes had a touch of the absentminded genius—the local press announced independence.