You’ve heard it before: we are living in divided times. Disagreement is part of being a citizen of a democracy, but in today's indisputably hot political climate, young people have stepped up into ...

In the leadup to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, historians and pundits persistently drew ominous parallels to the disastrous Democratic convention of 1968, when police brutalized ...

A look into the group instrumental to electing Abraham Lincoln president in 1860. The Wide Awakes were a Republican para-military organization distinguished from other political clubs of the 19th ...

I just finished an excellent book titled “Wide Awake’’ by Jon Grinspan about a young man’s movement that helped put Abraham Lincoln in office. James Buchanan was president, so I assume Lancaster was a ...

I had an odd flashback recently when I looked at a large axe in a display case at the Lincoln Memorial Shrine in Redlands. It brought back memories of the 1960s when young people actually got involved ...

How the most divided period in the history of U.S. democracy – the mid-1800s – coincided with a sudden boom in new communications technologies, confrontational political influencers, widespread ...

Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War; By Jon Grinspan; Bloomsbury Publishing; 352 pp., $32.00 Grinspan has written an excellent book about true believers, ...

On June 1, the Libertyville Historical Society launched the “Liberty and Union Campaign to Restore the Wide Awakes Banner,” an ambitious preservation initiative to restore a historic silk banner from ...