Abraham Lincoln

The annual American holiday called Thanksgiving formally began with a 1863 proclamation from Abraham Lincoln declaring the last Thursday in November a day of “thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens,” as well as “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience.”

We now have, as we would expect, a tsunami of commentary regarding the horrible assassination attempt on Donald Trump. It is not trivial to observe that at least the good news is that just about everyone agrees what happened is very bad and not an encouraging sign about the state of our nation. After that point of agreement, we have many different and diverging opinions about who or what is to…

It is remarkable that CNN News Central host Pamela Brown managed to avoid setting the studio on fire from all the straw men she torched during a Tuesday interview with Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters over his plan to put the Bible back in schools as part of an effort to give Oklahoman children an accurate sense of American history. Instead, Brown kept…

On Morning Joe, Al Sharpton, discussing Juneteenth, says that people who get their news from the "wrong source" are like the slaves in Texas who didn't realize until two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation that they were free.

President Joe Biden makes no speech without mentioning the importance of democracy in our nation. We would like to believe this comes from deep ideals about human liberty lodged within our president. But more accurate is that Biden, a politician all his adult life, is defined by just that — politics. No word, no act emanates from our president that does not emerge from some political…

Presidential historian and frequent MSNBC talking head Jon Meacham traveled to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday to wax poetic about “there is a patriotic duty” to vote for Joe Biden and that any Republican who votes for Donald Trump needs to stop and heed the words of George Washington.

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Sen. Mitt Romney regarding the demise of the No Labels political party initiative tells us as much about Romney, and why he failed to ever become a national leader, as it does about the failure of the No Labels effort. No Labels defined its mission “to support centrism and bipartisanship.” Romney defines this effort as seeking out the “sensible…

The calendar might say 2024, but for MSNBC’s Joy Reid, it is still 2012. On Tuesday’s installment of The ReidOut, the eponymous host declared that it was “grotesque” for pro-lifers to quote Abraham Lincoln while also demanding women “wake up” because “the Republican Party has openly declared war on women.”

I have written in the past about the similarities of the stress and tensions in our country today to the stress and tensions that were taking place in the years before the Civil War. A free country will always have debate and differences of opinion. But that debate becomes dangerous and destructive when the differences strike at the core premises that define the very existence of the nation.…

Few politicians say things that immortalize their words. Abraham Lincoln was a notable exception. The 16th president’s comment about fooling voters resonates today: “ You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” That wise statement is becoming increasingly evident as we head into the 2024…

MSNBC presidential historian Michael Beschloss joined Thursday’s Alex Wagner Tonight to recap what the chyron described as President Biden’s “fourth address on saving democracy” and the previous night’s GOP debate. Naturally, Beschloss thought Biden was comparable to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt preparing the nation for World War II while lamenting Republicans were talking…

WASHINGTON -- With all the talk about the discovery of mass burial graves in faraway Ukraine, there is little thought of such graves being discovered here in America. Yet in recent weeks in bucolic Williamsburg, Virginia, archeologists have found their own mass grave. It is a graveyard that they believe is associated with the Civil War’s Battle of Williamsburg, fought in 1862. There in the…

CBS’s Stephen Colbert and NBC’s Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers all spent part of their Tuesday shows falsely claiming Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seeks to ban the teaching of history in the state as they reacted to different parts of the DeSantis-driven news cycle.

Morning Joe turns the gush meter to 11 over Pres. Biden's trip to Ukraine, calling it "incredible, staggering, historic," and comparing Biden's bravery to that of Lincoln during the Civil War.