The Forgotten Precedent for Our ‘Unprecedented’ Political Insanity - POLITICO

The decades after the Civil War saw mass participation and mass outrage, followed by a period of orderly reform. What can we learn from that era today? Photos via the Collections of the Division of Political and Military History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. By JON GRINSPAN 04/24/2021 07:00 AM EDT Link Copied Jon Grinspan is curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. His new book is The Age of Acrimony How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915. American democracy has had a rough few years. We seem to have worn out the word “unprecedented.” Even if the pace of the news out of Washington has slowed in the Biden era, the respite still feels precarious. But if you look back further in history, American democracy has seen some crazy before. In fact, in the years between the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century, U.S. politics was far more unruly, violent and corrupt than it’s been before or since,

The decades after the Civil War saw mass participation and mass outrage, followed by a period of orderly reform. What can we learn from that era today? Photos via the Collections of the Division of Political and Military History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. By JON GRINSPAN 04/24/2021 07:00 AM EDT Link Copied Jon Grinspan is curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. His new book is The Age of Acrimony How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915. American democracy has had a rough few years. We seem to have