History

William H. Seward or Salmon P. Chase?

This -- in addition to being the most arcane, nerdy question I've ever typed -- is the crucial choice Senator Clinton now faces. Seward and Chase shared the indignity of losing their party's nomination to a relatively inexperienced opponent. That opponent, a guy...

[Update: This article has been updated. I have received permission to credit the person who pointed out this coincidence, in a comment he made to another Huffington Post article, so it has been changed to add Brian Laws' name. I never cite commenters within the text of my articles, as...

Every year, as we approach the 5th of May, stores and companies begin to promote Cinco de Mayo in their storefronts and through their advertisements. There are office parties, full of festive decorations, and children at school might have the opportunity to take a swing at a piñata. This splendor...

Delivered on the House floor:

Madam Speaker, in 1993, when professional-baseball owners were deciding how to rehabilitate the reputation of baseball, after the player's strike, they debated whether to enact a wild-card rule to allow a second-place team into the playoffs. Only one owner at the time voted against this:...

This is exactly what I was afraid of. I guess my complaining about the Northern League on Facebook was all for naught, now they have 85 seats in Parliament. Between the Pope, a former Hitler Youth, and the new mayor, "a former neo-fascist youth leader," the politics in...

Passover is a time to celebrate with family, laugh and tremble with Pharoah Yul Brenner and Charlton Heston as in his pre-NRA days. It is a time for remembrance and a challenge for us to address so many injustices that disfigure our world.

The power of this holiday hits home...

The most discredited bromide in American civic life is: "Give the American people the facts, and they will make the right decisions."

But who is giving them the facts?

Fox News? Rush Limbaugh? Bill O'Reilly? Lou Dobbs? The hysterical Chris Matthews?

I don't think so. These people are...

Since the campaigns of both Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama have seemingly taken my advice earlier this week, and are both concentrating on attacking Senator John McCain rather than each other, we have the luxury of getting away from the campaign trail this week and focusing on...

I wrote a piece on Bush in Sunday's Los Angeles Times which compared him to Woodrow Wilson. A number of people have questioned the comparison, so I thought it useful to open a broader conversation. (A more detailed discussion is in my new book, The Powers to Lead.)

Wilson...

Cross-Posted at OpenLeft.com

Barack Obama's New Hampshire concession speech became one of the most important moments in this campaign. The speech was made into that powerful "yes we can" video and was downloaded and commented on a ton. What has been less commented on, but something which I think...

In their harried pursuit of Latino votes in previous and in upcoming primaries like that in Texas, candidates Obama and Clinton have added another to the still-growing string of records broken this election year: number of times the phrase "Si se puede" has been used in a U.S. presidential election

Remember Francis Fukuyama? You probably don't. He's a purely historical figure now, from the distant past. But once upon a time he was famous as someone who wasn't an historian making pronouncements about history, rather in the way that Bjorn Lomborg was famous as a non-environmentalist pronouncing on the environment.

The most interesting development out of this weekend's Nevada caucus votes had little to do with Hillary Clinton winning a large percentage of the Latino vote -- that was predictable. More fascinating was the sudden and exponential surge in the number of experts in Latino politics.

It was tragicomic to...

If two groups of peoples in violent disagreement with each other on the world's stage (be they different countries, dispossessed groups, or factions within a country) have exhausted all diplomatic options, is the inevitable result war? Or is there another way to address their vastly different viewpoints of history (and...