Dana Milbank of The Washington Post gives it to us straight: Trump’s lawyers, in their slashing, largely fictitious defense, claimed that Trump was “horrified” by the violence, hadn’t known that Vice President Mike Pence was in danger and took “immediate steps” to...
Capitol Hill
As the insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy asked Trump to call off the rioters. Trump responded…
CNN is reporting: In an expletive-laced phone call with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy while the Capitol was under attack, then-President Donald Trump said the rioters cared more about the election results than McCarthy did.” Well, Kevin, I guess these...
Out of the Zoo: What will I teach on days like these?
Annie Thorn is senior history major from Kalamazoo, Michigan and our intern here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. As part of her internship she is writing a weekly column titled “Out of the Zoo.” It focuses on life as a...
A Confederate flag in the building built by slaves
Felicia Bell is a historian at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. In her recent piece at The Washington Post she reminds us about the people who labored to build the U.S. Capitol. Here is a taste of her...
Civil War historians remind us that anti-democratic violence has “deep roots” in the United States
Historians Gregory Downs and Kate Masur edit The Journal of the Civil War Era. In a recent piece at The Washington Post, they remind us that what we saw on January 6, 2021 was, in one sense, very American. Here...
#capitolsiegereligion
Peter Manseau, the Lilly Endowment Curator of American Religious History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, is collecting tweets documenting the use of religious rhetoric at the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Read them or share...
Free speech! Free speech! The court evangelicals process the events of the last week.
It’s been a very ugly week in America. By this time next week, Donald Trump may be the only United States president to have been impeached twice. We are getting more and more disturbing images and videos from Wednesday’s invasion...
Should a statue of Roger Sherman come down?
Here’s one to talk about over coffee. Richard Kreitner, a writer at The Nation, makes a case for why a monument to founding father Roger Sherman should be removed from the United States Capitol. His argument is two-fold: At the Constitutional...