This was now Adams’ quandary: Would he—a patriot who railed against British oppression, and whose cousin Samuel Adams ran the Sons of Liberty—defend the British soldiers?
Imagine you are a young child living in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. You are brought into a crowded meetinghouse where two magistrates—both commanding older men who serve on the council of Massachusetts Bay Colony—are waiting to interrogate you in front of an angry audience.
Jackson had been a U.S. Supreme Court Justice since 1941. But at the end of World War II, President Harry S. Truman asked Jackson to take a leave of absence from the Court to serve as chief U.S. prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders
In the late 1970s, two sociologists asked: Where had all the 1960s radical activists—the countercultural voices who clamored for a revolution—ended up in the seventies?
“I have a searing memory of a day in my childhood.”
William Leuchtenburg was a boy living with his family in New Jersey during Prohibition. His father, a postal worker, commuted into Manhattan to work at a post office near Penn Station. But Mr. Leuchtenburg’s salary was modest, so he supplemented the family income by running a small still in the basement of the family home and selling his liquor locally.
America is suffering through a crisis for which there is no easy fix. The president is frustrated: The Supreme Court keeps knocking down his initiatives, dismissing them as unconstitutional expansions of federal power.
When the Supreme Court blocked President Biden’s OSHA vaccine mandate in January, Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor joined together in a firmly worded dissent. At issue, they said, was a “single, simple question”
In 1902, William Warley was getting ready to graduate from Central High School in Louisville, Kentucky. Warley, as one of the top students at Central and a leader of his class, was a bright, charismatic young Black man looking to make his mark on a country that didn’t yet value your intellect—or your rights—if you were the wrong color.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated when the Great Depression was in full swing. Many Americans felt as if the country was months—if not days—away from breaking under the weight.
In 1942, the Los Angeles Times took to its editorial page to argue for the imprisonment of American citizens who looked a certain way. A racist editor hadn’t suddenly taken over the paper, and it wasn’t a commentary on crime or law and order. The remains of Pearl Harbor were still smoldering and anyone who looked Japanese was a suspect.
In The 1950s, massive oil reserves made Venezuela the fourth-richest country in the world. But that wealth wasn’t enough to pay for socialism’s false promise to the country.
In politician discussions, it’s important to define terminology carefully—that can be difficult when it comes to the differences between capitalism and socialism. The broad definition of capitalism is the economic, political, and social system where the means of production (e.g., businesses, factories, farms) are privately owned. The distribution and exchange of goods are coordinated primarily through the free market. But the latter term in this pairing, “socialism,” is more complex. Socialism is a broad umbrella term for a variety of political, economic, and social philosophies—all related but differing in sometimes subtle ways. The following glossary clarifies the different varieties of socialism that come up in this discussion.
Socialism is popular again. The rise of politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shows how the promises of socialism are once again influencing our political debate
In 1979, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman appeared on The Phil Donahue Show and gave his most memorable interview about the nature of greed. Today, there are over 100 clips of the interview uploaded to YouTube. Some have hundreds of thousands of views; others, millions.
Phil Donahue: When you see around the globe, the maldistribution of wealth, a desperate plight of millions of people in underdeveloped countries. When you see so few “haves” and so many “have-nots.” When you see the greed and the concentration of power. Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed is a good idea to run on?
Frederick Winslow Taylor was a business consultant obsessed with scientific precision in everything he did, whether it was a friendly game of tennis or the operation of a steel lathe.
Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, the Bill of Rights checked only the abuses of individual rights by the federal government, and even after the Civil War there were few federal restraints on state powers. Individuals could look only to state courts and their constitutions to check abuses by state legislatures.
The regulatory state began last century during the New Deal, inspired by earlier Progressives who believed that individualism, capitalism, and the Constitution were obstacles to prosperity.
If you're baffled by reports of surging enthusiasm for socialism in America and by the confusion that the term engenders, it helps to look closer at the works of socialism’s most prominent proponent: the German theorist Karl Marx.