Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Elections (Presidential)
From Henry Clay to Barry Goldwater and Shirley Chisholm, our failed presidential contenders can still inspire us with their legacies.
There was widespread fraud, especially in the swing state of Florida. We are talking, of course, about 1876.
Editor’s Note: Roy Morris Jr.
Lincoln came out a victor in the 1860 presidential election despite winning only 2 percent of the Southern vote
Just six months before the presidential election of November 1860 and only days after winning his party’s nomination, Abraham Lincoln received some stunning advice from one of his chief supporters, William Cullen Bryant.
As we approach the bicentennial of his birth, leading historians look at the man and his achievements
In their surprisingly short history, presidential debates have never lived up to our expectations—yet they’ve always proved invaluable
It was never designed to actually elect a President, it’s awkward, cumbersome, and confusing, and almost no one likes it. Americans have been trying to get rid of it for more than two centuries. Yet it’s still here. Now we are seeing renewed efforts to reform or eliminate the Electoral College. Will they succeed? Don’t bet on it.
When John Adams was elected President, and Thomas Jefferson Vice President, each came to see the other as a traitor. Out of their enmity grew our modern political system.
When the two parties gather to select their candidates, the proceedings will be empty glitz, with none of the import of old-time conventions. Or will they?
… or why in America campaign-finance reform never succeeds
In the summer of 1787 a sweaty group of politicians was debating the clauses of a proposed constitution in humid Philadelphia.
The two-party system, undreamt of by the founders of the Republic, has been one of its basic shaping forces ever since their time
Most of our Presidents have been avid athletes, even Taft. Could a party safely nominate an overweight and unabashed couch potato who scorned exercise?
Right now, of course, it is the coming election that provides most of the material on which this column casts its regular history-conscious eye. But not this time. September is the month of pennant races, and I’ve got baseball as well as Presidents on my mind.
Seeking the truth of an event in the memories of the people who lived it can be a maddening task—and an exhilarating one
The chords of memory may be mystic, as Abraham Lincoln described them, but how accurate and reliable they are as evidence is a dilemma every historian must face.
The disputed election of "His Fraudulency" Rutherford B. Hayes ended the era of Reconstruction.
Last February the White House was jubilant over the outcome of the election held in Nicaragua, where voters turned out the governing Sandinista National Liberation Front, which has run the country since 1979, as well as its president, Daniel Ortega.
A year ago we were in the midst of a presidential campaign most memorable for charges by both sides that the opponent was not hard enough, tough enough, masculine enough. That he was, in fact, a sissy. Both sides also admitted this sort of rhetoric was deplorable. But it’s been going on since the beginning of the Republic.
Just before George Bush announced his running mate in 1988, a one-liner going the rounds was that he should choose Jeane Kirkpatrick to add some machismo to the ticket.
Every presidential election is exciting when it happens. Then the passing of time usually makes the outcome seem less than crucial. But after more than a century and a quarter, the election of 1860 retains its terrible urgency.
In the crowded months between the beginning of the 1860 presidential campaign and the attack on Fort Sumter, it is easy now to see the emergence of Abraham Lincoln as something preordained, as though the issues had manufactured a figure commensurate with their importance.
To keep Upton Sinclair from becoming governor of California in 1934, his opponents invented a whole new kind of campaign
The American political campaign as we know it today was born on August 28, 1934, when Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author and lifelong socialist, won the Democratic primary for governor of California.
The distasteful questions we ask our presidential hopefuls serve a real purpose
Has the press gone too far?” is a question that has been asked more frequently in this presidential campaign than any other.
It took place in 1948, and it was orchestrated—with difficulty—by the program director of a faltering Portland, Oregon, radio station. He persuaded two Republican candidates to argue formally about an actual issue with no intervening moderator.
In October 1984 President Ronald Reagan and Sen. Walter F. Mondale came together on the same platform in Louisville, Kentucky, and again in Kansas City, Missouri. Correspondents tossed questions at them; each answered.
Here is how political cartoonists have sized up the candidates over a tumultuous half-century.
AMERICANS HAVE BEEN turning out political cartoons since the dawn of the Republic, but in the nineteenth century the drawings tended to be verbose and cluttered, their characters trailing long ribbons of speech balloons as they stumbled ov
The ground rules have changed drastically since 1789. Abigail Adams, stifled in her time, would have loved being First Lady today.
ONCE AGAIN the candidates gear up for a national election; not only the candidates but their wives too. And pity the ladies!
A noted historian argues that television, a relative newcomer, has nearly destroyed old—and valuable—political traditions
TELEVISION HAS BEEN accused of many things: vulgarizing tastes; trivializing public affairs; sensationalizing news; corrupting the young; pandering to profits; undermining traditional values.
Presidential candidates stayed above the battle until William Jennings Bryan stumped the nation in 1896; they’ve been in the thick of it ever since
The most confident prediction that can be made about the 1980 presidential campaign is that the nominees will invest enormous energy, time, and money in stumping the country.
A former British ambassador and noted historian explains why "hard-headed self-possessed Americans go so wild with excitement at election times"
“…largely a matter of booming”
United States policy, Henry Wallace said in his spirited challenge to Truman and Dewey in 1948, should be
It was a one-man campaign from the start. Without Henry Agard Wallace there would have been no Progressive Party in 1948. He made it almost a religious revival.
In the aftermath of the 1972 election we believe professional politicians might find the thoughtful essay that follows worth a little study; it might save them time and money in 1976. The author, Mr.
It isn’t every day that one can see a man pushing a peanut with his nose along the main street of an American town.
What strange vehicle could accommodate a crew as disparate as this? Hint: In any election year they’re all
Within the last year or so the New York Times correspondent C. L.
Grover Cleveland had seduced a widow; James G. Blaine had peddled influence lied about it. In 1884, voters had to choose between two tarnished champions
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