AP United States History Collection

In 1831, a radical third party had a new idea for selecting a presidential candidate, and it’s still in use today: the national nominating convention. 

Some issues are too fundamental for a party to withstand, and the consequences can last for a generation. 

Ida B. Wells, a journalist, civil rights activist and suffragist, dedicated her life to documenting injustices against Black Americans and calling for change. 

In early America, the soaring ideals behind establishing a new democracy were marked by cycles of progress and backlash. 

Explore the history and impact of negative campaigning in U.S. presidential elections. 

The relationship between presidents and vice presidents is unique and often personal. Sometimes, internal divisions spill out into public life. 

For American politicians, the obsession with appealing to the everyman dates back to the raucous campaign of 1840. 

Culture wars have a long and divisive history in American politics, with gender, race and religion continuing to inflame public opinion. 

Political gaffes have shaped elections from the Gilded Age to today. 

Native Americans demand accountability for a federal policy that aimed to erase Indigenous culture. 

The animosity between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt changed the primary process forever. 

Immigration has been a defining issue in a campaign before, and the consequences transformed the Democratic Party. 

The economic vision of American industrialist Andrew Mellon loomed large over the boom and bust of the 1920s. 

NFL players have been derided for injecting politics into the country’s favorite sport. But, when convenient, America has also celebrated black athletes for acting as political emissaries. 

Race-based federal lending rules from New Deal programs in the 1930s kept Black families locked out of suburban neighborhoods, a policy that continues to slow their economic mobility. 

Spurred by the pandemic, new groups of workers are pushing to form unions in activism not seen since the 1930s. 

A former park ranger is on the hunt to complete a collection of posters by artists commissioned by the government celebrating national parks. 

The U.S. government ordered 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most American citizens, imprisoned during World War II. An admission of wrongdoing and reparations payments came decades later, but a Supreme Court ruling had lasting impact. 

With the Double V campaign, Black Americans demanded fair treatment, both during and after World War II. 

Japanese survivors recall the day the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and warn of future risks. 

A conflict between labor needs and immigration laws has long shaped families, fears and today’s debates. 

A Soviet blockade around Berlin cut the divided city off from the West. But in 1948 U.S. and British pilots began to fly food, fuel and medicine to the Allied sectors. 

In the Cold War, North Korean Communists invaded South Korea. President Truman’s decision to intervene had consequences that shape the world today. 

After the Soviet Union sent the first human safely into orbit, the U.S. government doubled down on its effort to win the race to the moon. 

President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, an unexpected pivot in U.S. foreign policy, helped end the Cold War. But it left Taiwan’s fate uncertain.  

In the heat of the Cold War, Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade became a media sensation. 

Breaking with party unity can be costly. In the 1950’s, Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine faced backlash after she condemned Joseph McCarthy, a fellow Republican. 

The history of racial integration in public schools, and what happened after the buses stopped rolling. 

As America’s jazz icon, Louis Armstrong was seen as a smiling, easygoing entertainer. But in 1957, he invited controversy by speaking forcefully on behalf of his fellow African Americans, putting him in a position familiar to many Black athletes today. 

The story of the veterans who witnessed secret atomic testing and how their decades-long struggle for recognition affects soldiers today. This story is a coproduction with Reveal, from The Center for Investigative Reporting. 

In 1948, World War II aviators risked their lives in a secret operation to smuggle weapons and planes to the Israeli military. 

A 1953 C.I.A.-backed coup that ousted Iran’s Cold War leader has colored U.S.-Iran relations for decades. 

Russia’s recent nuclear threats have revived Cold War animosity with roots in the Cuban missile crisis. During ​a standoff in 1962, a tense confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union nearly resulted in a nuclear war. 

The use of the defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War continues to cast a dark shadow over both American veterans and Vietnamese citizens. 

Donald Trump’s candidacy wasn’t the first time the Republican Party was split by an outsider declaring war on the establishment elite. 

Donald Trump’s resounding 2024 victory echoes electoral shifts of the past. 

Weeks before Selma’s Bloody Sunday in 1965, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged residents of Gee’s Bend, Ala., to vote, and fed a continuing fight over a small ferry that would last for decades. 

President Trump has called on supporters, including law enforcement officers, to monitor election sites. Voter intimidation tactics have a long history. 

While abortion is often cited as the motivation behind evangelical Christians becoming politically active in the 1970s, there’s another little-known reason that involves the IRS and segregated schools. 

Has the government done enough to stop housing discrimination? 

Some cities are trying to help poor children succeed by having their families move to middle-income, so-called “opportunity areas” – an idea that was once politically impossible. 

Anger over policing and inequality boiled over in 1967 in protests and violence across the United States. A landmark report warned that without major changes, it would happen again. 

When N.F.L. players, starting with Colin Kaepernick, took a knee during the National Anthem to protest they ignited an uproar over injecting politics onto the playing field. 

African American women played a significant and sometimes overlooked role in the struggle to gain the vote. 

Even in the #MeToo era, many people don’t know that the Equal Rights Amendment never passed…because of one woman. Her name is Phyllis Schlafly. 

American Indian tribes have long used activism in their struggle for justice and the preservation of their lands and culture. 

For generations, Native American children were removed from their homes and placed with white families. A recent Supreme Court ruling affirms the rights of Native families and tribes, giving them preference in adoption and foster care placement. 

This Emmy-nominated video explores a massive protest by Mexican American high school students that became a milestone in a movement for Chicano rights. 

The 1982 attack against Vincent Chin redefined hate crimes and energized a push for today’s stronger legal protections. (Mural by Anthony Lee.) 

More than 50 years after the Stonewall uprising marked the birth of a movement for LGBTQ+ rights, transgender activists continue to push for inclusion. 

The Equal Rights Amendment, proposed in 1923, sparked debate from its very beginning, even among many of the women who had worked together for suffrage. 

There are important lessons to be learned from the Democrats’ 1968 Chicago convention. 

A silent protest led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling that defined students’ free speech rights. 

As universities face increasing legal and political pressures, free expression on campus, a right established through student activism in the 1960s, is once again capturing headlines.  

Catastrophic accidents at power plants like Three Mile Island and Fukushima Daiichi have heightened fears about the safety of nuclear energy, but environmentalists and others are giving it renewed attention as a way to fight global warming. 

Author Rachel Carson’s strike against the pesticide DDT turned her into both an environmental hero and a foil for those who believe regulation has gone too far. That fight is more relevant than ever. 

Is geo-engineering the climate an answer to global warming? Cold War science has some lessons. 

In the 1980s, rising public awareness about waste was fueled by a bizarre news story about a meandering New York City garbage barge. 

In 1978, toxic chemicals leaking from an old landfill thrust an upstate New York community called “Love Canal” into the national headlines, and made it synonymous with “environmental disaster.” 

Retro Report explores decades of conspiracy theories – from the John F. Kennedy assassination to Pizzagate – and what they can tell us about how we view the world today. 

High-stakes debates put candidates in the hot seat. But are they helpful to voters? 

S.W.A.T. teams, specially trained police teams, have been used increasingly in routine matters like serving drug warrants, sometimes with disastrous results. 

Efforts to clamp down on White House leaks to the press follow a pattern that was set during the Nixon era after the publication of the Pentagon Papers. 

The Watergate campaign finance scandals led to a landmark law designed to limit the influence of money in politics. Decades later, some say the scandal isn’t what’s illegal, it’s what’s legal. 

In 1976, Ronald Reagan found owning the soul of a party wasn’t the same as taking home its nomination. 

Long before Edward Snowden, there was the greatest heist you’ve never heard of. On March 8, 1971, a group of eight Vietnam War protestors broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of government documents that shocked a nation. 

Donald Trump has used populist politics to appeal to voters who are fed up with the status quo. We look at another politician who tapped into America’s divisions decades ago: George Wallace. 

White evangelical Christians are among President Trump’s most important supporters. But more than 40 years ago, they were on the margins of American politics. 

From time to time over the past 40 years, efforts were made to treat heroin addiction as a public health instead of a crime problem. But they were not successful. 

Can the lessons we learned from extremist cults decades ago be used to fight ISIS recruitment today? 

Nixon’s 1973 firing of a Watergate prosecutor raised questions about executive power, accountability and the limits of the law. 

In the 1980s, the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan and the shooting of his press secretary, Jim Brady, led to the Brady Bill. Decades later, are there lessons from that fight for the Parkland students? 

Rates of H.I.V. infection have fallen in many places, but the AIDS crisis persists in some parts of the country. What can be learned from history – and specifically the story of Ryan White? 

Midterm elections, often a referendum on the sitting president’s agenda, can set the stage for future policy debates. Economic and social issues with roots in the 1994 midterms are still being debated today. 

Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform was supposed to move needy families off government handouts and onto a path out of poverty. Years later, how has it turned out? 

Over the last 30 years, schools across the country have enacted tough new discipline policies. Some of those schools say they went too far. 

The defeat of Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 changed the way justices are confirmed today. 

Accusations by Professor Christine Blasey Ford against Judge Brett Kavanaugh in his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, have us looking back at Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony in the hearing of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and his invasion of Ukraine is a reminder that Russia, the U.S. and many other countries have thousands of nuclear missiles, even as safeguards once in place have fallen away. 

Normalization of deviance, the process of becoming inured to risky actions, is a useful concept that was developed to explain how the Challenger disaster happened. 

Driven by fears of the rise of communism, the United States adopted a policy of containment, intervening in the politics of countries across the globe. In Latin America, the consequences of those efforts are still unfolding. 

The murder of four American churchwomen focused attention on the United States’ involvement in El Salvador. Decades later, the case continues to take surprising turns. 

“Massacre in El Salvador,” a collaboration with Frontline and ProPublica, tells the story of El Mozote, the worst massacre in recent Latin American history, and why a final reckoning is at risk. 

Churches once led a refugee rescue effort that shapes U.S. immigration policy today. 

What obligation does the United States have toward people who are uprooted by war? 

Today’s immigration policies echo an anti-immigration movement from the 1990s in California. 

Guantanamo Bay has become a symbol of the war on terror, but its story actually begins a decade before, when it was first used to detain thousands of Haitians outside the reach of U.S. law. 

The dramatic controversy surrounding the 2000 presidential election led to sweeping voting reforms, but opened the door to a new set of problems that continue to affect elections today. 

First responders who survived 9/11 don’t want the day to be forgotten. 

Officials who drove the decades-long war in Afghanistan look back on the strategic mistakes and misjudgments that led to a 20-year quagmire. 

Six days after 9/11, the FBI’s raid on a sleeper cell signaled America’s resolve to fight terrorism. But, despite a celebrated conviction, there was one problem–they were wrong. 

Sometimes the most important speech at the convention isn’t delivered by the nominee. 

Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, and Louisiana’s troubled housing recovery has shaped the response to every major disaster since, including Hurricane Sandy. 

At the height of rush hour on August 1, 2007 a bridge carrying eight lanes of I-35W traffic over the Mississippi River suddenly collapsed, sending cars and trucks plunging into the water below. 

This 28-minute special looks at the roots and rise of hate groups in America. It is released in collaboration with WORLD Channel and The WNET Group’s reporting initiative Exploring Hate. 

Ruling in a case that challenged practices that colleges use to select a diverse student body, the Supreme Court reverses itself.