Today’s Eerie Echoes of the Civil War by Manisha Sinha We would do well to pay heed to the old enmities bubbling up in our politics: it is not that we are on the verge of another civil war, but that the Civil War never truly ended.

There are echoes of the Fugitive Slave Act in today's immigration debate by Harold Meyerson Just as the slave catchers argued, speciously, that freed Negroes imperiled the antebellum North, today's anti-immigrant forces, beginning with Trump, argue that immigrants pose a threat to public safety, though crime has fallen precipitously during the past quarter-century.

America has been in an abusive relationship with the GOP since 1980 by Heather Cox Richardson The GOP moved so far into a fantasy world that a TV reality show host, a conman, became its leader.

Even the Wild West Embraced Gun Control by Gil Troy The Wild West wasn't so wild that it—and the Stormy South—couldn’t include gun control.

How the Kerner Commission unmade American liberalism by Steven M. Gillon Instead of revitalizing the Democratic coalition, the commission's report exposed the fractures in American society.

‘Trade wars are good’? by Marc-William Palen Three past conflicts tell a very different story.

James Madison Would Like a Few Words on Trade Wars by Noah Feldman The fourth president tried all kinds of sanctions to open markets, but still ended up in the War of 1812.

Boycotts won't weaken the NRA's bottom line – but that's not the point by Lawrence Glickman The ethical point boycotters have tried to raise from that time to our own is that, in an interconnected national and international market economy, there are no innocent bystanders.

Will the United States ever get back on a bipartisan 'Middle Way?' by Louis Galambos History provides a lesson about how the United States can return to bipartisanship and more civil political discourse.

Who Does She Stand For? by Paul A. Kramer As the Statue of Liberty turned 100, our long battle over immigration was having its moment in Reagan’s America.

'Corporations Are People' Is Built on an Incredible 19th-Century Lie by Adam Winkler How a farcical series of events in the 1880s produced an enduring and controversial legal precedent.