Congress wrote the statutes establishing the new government’s Departments of Foreign Affairs, War, and Treasury, placing them under the president’s supervision and direction. Congress even gave the ...

The U.S. Congress is a complex and subtle organization, but sometimes its changing character and mood can be understood through a single individual. The First Congress, determined to keep alive a ...

Women won the right to vote in 1920 when the 19th Amendment was ratified, but three years before that one suffragette became Congress’ first female representative. The number of women in Congress has ...

In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the anthropologist turned storyteller Zora Neale Hurston wrote that there are years that ask questions and those that answer them. Take 1972: an annum that ...

1. The first Congress began in 1789, and truth be told, it wasn’t really the first. The Confederation Congress met from 1781 ...

As Congress — the 117th Congress, to be precise — speeds toward a government shutdown, we slowed down to look back at the first Congress. Are things really all that different now than they were at the ...