Sean Wilentz

The ‘Dred Scott’ of Our Time

In ruling in favor of Donald Trump’s claims of immunity from prosecution for his official acts, the Supreme Court has invested the presidency with quasi-monarchial powers, paving the way for MAGA authoritarianism.

The Immunity Con

For the first time in American history, the supreme judicial authority is parsing how much criminality to permit the chief executive. 

Trump’s Delayed Reckoning

The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to grant Donald Trump criminal immunity—but its handling of the case has already worked in his favor.

The Constitution Turned Upside Down

Any account of Trump v. Anderson should lead with the fact that the Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that an insurrectionist will remain on the presidential ballot. 

A Historic Abdication

If the Supreme Court decides not to rule on whether Trump should be disqualified, it could set off precisely the crisis it hopes to avoid.

The Case for Disqualification

The Supreme Court must decide if it will honor the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and bar Donald Trump from holding public office or trash the constitutional defense of democracy against insurrections.

The Revolution Within the American Revolution

Supported and largely led by slaveholders, the American Revolution was also, paradoxically, a profound antislavery event.

American Carnage

Jeffrey Toobin’s book about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing traces the path from Ronald Reagan’s antigovernment ideology to today’s radicalized right.

The Emancipators’ Vision

Was abolition intended as a perpetuation of slavery by other means?

The Constitution & the Slave Trade

The Paradox of the American Revolution

Recent books by Woody Holton and Alan Taylor offer fresh perspectives on early US history but overemphasize the importance of white supremacy as its driving force.

Slavery vs. White Supremacy

Bob Dylan, Historian

Across the six decades of his career, the singer-songwriter has mined America’s past for images, characters, and events that speak to the nation’s turbulent present.

Forging an Early Black Politics

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

Lincoln’s Rowdy America

A new biography captures the cultural jumble of great literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the self-making of the foremost self-made American.

The Lost World of the Jazz Club

It was an era when this milieu of popular music seemed to herald a now-distant promise of what American life might be.

Senator Cotton’s Distortions on Slavery

As far as a Union founded on the “necessary evil” of slavery is concerned, Senator Cotton appears unaware of how profoundly the Constitution of the United States of America differed from that of the Confederate States of America.

Abolition’s First Wave

Say It Is So: Baseball’s Disgrace

The Houston Astros’ exploitation of a high-tech version of the 1951 Giants’ sign-stealing conspiracy is, even before all the facts have come in, by far the worst disgrace ever to hit the game and could well cripple it.

American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’

Against slavery’s millennia, the struggle to abolish it came abruptly. By the end of the succeeding century, against slavery’s immense and unyielding power, it had largely succeeded.