The Future in Context

The 33-year ordeal of Salmon Rushdie came to head with a knife attack at a venerable cultural venue in upstate New York. That the onstage stabbing took place in America is a grim reminder of the need for eternal vigilance in defending the First Amendment.

This large and largely unpopulated western state with a rich history is pioneering a new future by setting aside several million acres of public and private land to serve as natural habitat for returning bison and other displaced animals. Our resident humanities scholar in resident Clay Jenkinson spent a big chunk of his summer in Montana. The state left a mark on him, as it does on the farmers an...

Our resident humanities scholar is spending July leading tour groups that retrace the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It is an annual summer ritual, and one that has him questioning where the trail actually begins.

Assessing a terribly broken system, Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute details the conflicting dynamics and possible solutions to America's illegal immigration dilemma. To him, solving the problem of illegal immigration hinges on increasing legal immigration. 

Taking a page from other countries, the United States is moving toward establishing a Native American Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the hope that reconciliation begins when the survivors are heard.   It looks as if the United States is going to begin to come to terms with the dark legacy of the Indian Boarding Schools . On May 11, 2022, the U.S. Department of Interior released volume one...

The congressional House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol held its first prime-time televised hearing on Thursday evening. Dismissed by critics as show trials, these hearings may test the medium's ability to capture the nation's attention. 20 million US households tuned in.  The question is whether the six televised hearings will make much of a difference in publ...

And so here we are again. Another school shooting. The American slaughter of innocents. Shattered lives, shattered communities. The massacres pile up — Columbine, Blacksburg, Roseburg, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde, and literally hundreds more. Aurora, Las Vegas, Orlando, El Paso, Fort Hood, San Bernardino, Sutherland Springs, Boulder. And so we ask: When's it going to stop? What can we do? Is this...

It's Primary season in America, with all the chaos, expense, and bombast that phenomenon has come to represent in our national political life. The major media now give more attention to off-year primary elections in half a dozen battleground states than they gave to the quadrennial general national election a generation ago. As if they were interpreting the Tarot or reading tea leaves or deconstru...

During his presidency, Roosevelt did more to conserve America's natural resources and its places of special beauty than any other president. He convened state executives to aid in the cause, which led him to create the National Governors Association.

Public institutions suffer reputational damage when partisan drama Is televised, streamed or leaked. What the public sees is: ill-considered legislation has to be cleaned up by the courts, confirmation processes turn dirty and selective leaking is used in an effort to flip narrow majorities. Legal scholar, historian and author John Vile points to televised (or streamed) hearings and the failure of...

We are approaching the 50th anniversary of Watergate, the effects of which are still with us today.   We have the movie All The President's Men as a popularized summary of the first draft of that history but historian and journalist Garrett Graff tells Clay that that capsule misses a lot - a weirder, zanier, bigger and different story about how Americans lost faith in the presidency, government an...

Weeks after the U.S. and the G7 countries weaponized the global financial system to impose their harshest-ever sanctions on Russia, fissures are becoming apparent. Countries impose but often backpedal on sanctions against bad actors for a simple reason — a reluctance to go to war.

This is a bonus installment in a Governing series on the history of the Supreme Court, following the Senate's historic confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson on April 7.  The elevation of Judge Jackson to the nation's highest court will not only make history but help shape America's future, one case at a time.

"All modern American literature," Ernest Hemingway once proclaimed, "comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Despite such accolades, this masterwork from Twain — the pen name used by Samuel Clemens — has been slowly disappearing from American classrooms, a development primarily driven by the novel's repeated use — 219 times in all — of that uniquely offensive term that we uneas...

This is the fourth and final installment in a Governing series in a historical look at the Supreme Court to coincide with nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation process, which continues this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee.  After a stormy confirmation process characterized by partisan recriminations in the U.S. Senate, Ketanji Brown Jackson appears to be set to take her seat on t...

This is the third in a Governing series on a historical look at the Supreme Court to coincide with nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation process, which continued this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Just 51 years old, nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, if confirmed, would join a growing list of relatively young justices who are likely to serve for much longer than was anticipated wh...

This is the first in an occasional Governing series on the Supreme Court in preparation for nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation process, which enters its next phase on March 21 when she appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee to publicly make her case for why she should win approval to sit on the nation's highest court. Our resident historian Clay Jenkinson explores three things – c...

The radicalization of a congressional clerk in the 1800s and the introduction of the telegraph set a young country on a new trajectory. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol stands as a prevailing symbol of the country's present-day polarization. But while the brutality of that day sits in the minds of many Americans as unprecedented, Yale historian Joanne Freeman reminds us that violence w...

A Centuries-Old Travel Guide Unlocks Clues to Our Future. In 1788, Thomas Jefferson hastily wrote an account of his travels in Europe for two friends. That obscure guide sent a Virginia attorney on a journey that connects past and present in unexpected ways.

Concrete, steel and turbines play an outsize role in the past and future of water in western states. The evolution of the sprawling cities of the American West is inextricably bound to America's 20th-century fascination with dam-building. But that decades-long story, rife with dammed and diverted rivers as well as political intrigue, is being reshaped by climate change, drought and overuse into a...

We lose a lot in our understanding of the Founding Fathers, says John Ragosta, an historian at the Robert H. Smith Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, when we see them only as marble statues. They were real people who made mistakes and who got mad at one another. Patrick Henry so angered fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson in 1781, Ragosta maintains, that his reputation never recovered from...

Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson and the struggle for a more perfect union. America's consciousness is indelibly shaped by the competing legacies of three distinct personalities: a fast-talking New Yorker, a quintessential Yankee, and a Virginia Squire. In his book, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding , historian Darren Staloff explores the social, intelle...

As a six-year-old, Jason Miyares helped his mother to learn the Pledge of Allegiance for her upcoming naturalization ceremony, an event that deeply affected both of their lives. More than a half century later, on January 15 of this year, he become the first Hispanic-American to hold statewide office in the Commonwealth of Virginia when he was sworn in as Attorney General. Since his swearing in, wh...