Tag: American history
The weirdest presidential election in history
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
We are heading into a rematch that promises to be weirder than any presidential election we’ve ever experienced. Let’s review where things stand.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Where Things Stand
More than two years ago, I wrote my
The Unwitting Trump Enablers – The Atlantic
The collapse of Republican resolve in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, and Trump’s continued designs on power have together ensured that conservatives find it necessary to downplay or dismiss those events as much less than what they were: an assault on American democracy.
This much was predictable. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, my colleague David A. Graham anticipated that the events of January 6 would be “memory-holed,” and
How Liberals Lost the White Working Class
On April 29, 1954, a cross section of Cincinnati’s municipal bureaucracy—joined by dozens of representatives drawn from local employers, private charities, the religious community, and other corners of the city establishment—gathered at the behest of the mayor’s office to discuss a new problem confronting the city. Or, rather, about 50,000 new problems, give or take. That was roughly the number of Cincinnati residents who had recently migrated to the city from the poorest parts of southern Appalachia. The
Finding My Family in the Freedmen’s Bureau Archives
In all my years doing research at the National Archives, I had never cried. That day in fall 2012, I had simply planned to examine documentary material that might help determine how the yet-to-be-built National Museum of African American History and Culture would explore and present the complicated history of American slavery and freedom.
As I read through the papers of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—the Freedmen’s Bureau, as it’s usually called—I decided to see if
Will Republicans Pay a Price for Extremism?
As president, Donald Trump imposed an array of deeply divisive immigration restrictions on both Latinos and Muslims. And yet from 2016 to 2020, he increased his share of the vote among both groups. Even some Latino and Muslim voters who opposed Trump’s immigration agenda moved to support him anyway because of his record on other issues, particularly the economy and conservative social priorities.
Now Trump and several of his rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are doubling down on
Elon Musk’s Antisemitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather
In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having said. “Risk energized him.”
But
Not Everyone Who Lived the Day before Yesterday Was ‘Evil’
We like to think of morality as being set and ultimate. But norms are very much socially constructed, and morals change across eras.
source site
Why So Many Americans Have Stopped Going to Church
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Church attendance in America has been on the decline in recent decades. Are Americans losing their ability to incorporate religion—or any kind of intentional community—into their lives?
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
How American Life Works
“Take a drive
Why Did So Many People Stop Going to Church?
Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. That’s not unusual. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith
Searching for a Fortress Built by People Who Escaped Slavery
On a rainy morning in March, George Dawes Green, a seventy-year-old novelist and the founder of the storytelling nonprofit the Moth, arrived at Millstone Landing, about twenty miles north of Savannah, Georgia, on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River. He and thirteen others were preparing to look for remnants of a secret fortress built in the seventeen-eighties by Maroons—people who’d escaped slavery to live in the wilderness. (The term derives from the Spanish word “cimarrón,” which