Politics

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.

Southern voters, once loyal to the Democratic Party, elected Republican candidates in 1966 as the two parties began to sort themselves into distinctly partisan camps.

In Ukraine, elderly Jewish citizens threatened by the war with Russia are being evacuated. As children, they escaped the Nazi invasion. Now some are finding refuge in a most unlikely place: Germany.

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.

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.

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

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.

Both parties play the redistricting game, redrawing electoral boundaries to lock down power.

Are you a teacher? Check out our teaching resources for this video.

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

For teachers: This video is part of a collection of resources including four short films, each accompanied by a lesson plan and student activity.

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.

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

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.

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

In this Emmy Award-nominated film, top national political reporters admit mistakes in their reporting on the 2016 election campaign.

In this Emmy Award-nominated film, CEO Jeff Zucker acknowledges missteps in CNN’s 2016 campaign coverage, when many media outlets covered Donald Trump’s campaign as a spectacle.

This Emmy Award-nominated film looks at how the journalistic instinct for “balanced” reporting on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016 played out.

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.

This Emmy Award-nominated film explores tensions between the press and presidents, charges of liberal media bias and the decline in public trust in journalism. Watch the documentary.

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

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

Politics, public health and a pandemic. What we didn’t learn from HIV.

Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are the icons of an ideological split among today’s Democrats, echoing a similar split in the Republican party of 1964.

Oscar night, long a showcase for Hollywood glamour, has also become a platform for film stars to pitch a rainbow of political causes.

Political memes are being deployed to share opinions, similar to how editorial cartoons were used in the past – but with one important difference.

How can a president continue to govern with an impeachment trial looming? President Clinton and President Trump adopted very different strategies.

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.

A whistleblower case from 2010 reveals the peril faced by whistleblowers seeking to expose wrongdoing.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

In 1978, voters passed Proposition 13, lowering taxes for millions of California homeowners. Decades later, what has it meant for California?

Has the government done enough to stop housing discrimination?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

In the 2012 Republican primary, Herman Cain’s campaign produced an unusual video featuring Cain’s chief of staff, Mark Block, giving a pep talk while smoking a cigarette.

In 2007, long-shot Democratic candidate Mike Gravel released one of the strangest ads in political history.

The infamous Willie Horton ad placed a nail in the coffin of Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential run.

Future “warm and fuzzy” ads can trace their lineage to this one. For his reelection campaign, Ronald Reagan employed a team of advertising all-stars, resulting in one of the most famous catchphrases in American politics.

After a string of critical losses in the 2008 Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton’s campaign put out a hard-hitting ad that questioned Barack Obama’s readiness for the White House.

Perhaps the most famous political ad of all time, this early television spot ran on air just once, but generated enough media coverage to become a real factor in the 1964 presidential election.

Wondering what the Hillary Clinton/superpredator brouhaha is all about? Here’s the cliff notes…

The curious origin of a political metaphor.

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