Margaret Thatcher had the smooth surface of a porcelain figurine, but her decisiveness made her England's most formidable woman since Elizabeth I.

Careful writers will not want to skip anything in William Zinsser's essays for brains whose circuitry has not been shaped by 140-character tweets.

Government is failing at core functions such as budgeting, yet it still empowers protectors who panic over Pop-Tart pistols and Hello Kitty bubble guns.

A book by the late Robert Bork, Richard Nixon's solicitor general, reminds us of Washington days that were darker than most people today can imagine.

The agenda of Barack Obama, whose approval rating scores lower than that of the National Rifle Association, will stimulate a conservative revival.

At the end of this year in which election results reinserted immigration into the political conversation, remember that 2012 is the 150th anniversary of “the first comprehensive immigration law.” This is how the Homestead Act of 1862 is described by Blake Bell, historian at ...

In 2007, Keith John Sampson, a middle-aged student working his way through Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis as a janitor, was declared guilty of racial harassment. Without granting Sampson a hearing, the university administration — acting as prosecutor, judge and jury — convicted him of ...

In every year divisible by four, the dominant superstition of American politics — faith in the magic of presidential words and deeds — reaches an apogee that feeds national narcissism: Everything that happens anywhere is about us, is a response to something America did ...

Elaine Huguenin, who with her husband operates Elane Photography in New Mexico, asks only to be let alone. But instead of being allowed a reasonable zone of sovereignty in which to live her life in accordance with her beliefs, she is being bullied by ...

Conventions are the seventh-inning stretch of presidential politics, a pause to consider the interminable prelude and the coming climax. Republicans gathering in Tampa face an unusual election in which they do not have a substantial advantage concerning the most presidential subject, foreign policy. This ...

When, in his speech accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Barry Goldwater said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” a media wit at the convention supposedly exclaimed, “Good God, Goldwater is ...

Are you ready for some American football? First, however, are you ready for some autopsies? The opening of the NFL training camps coincided with the closing of the investigation into the April suicide by gunshot of Ray Easterling, 62, an eight-season NFL safety in ...