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Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg will now attend Martin Luther King Day celebrations in Columbia, South Carolina

Buttigieg had originally planned to attend events in South Bend, Indiana, -- Buttigieg's hometown and where he formerly served as mayor

But South Carolina Democrats criticized the former mayor after the South Carolina NAACP released this year's schedule for the annual King Day at the Dome in South Carolina and Buttigieg's name was not on it.

Hallowell “was a power in Harvard athletics,” according to one of the earliest histories of football, who enlisted in the Union Army in 1861 just after graduating. But what you can be sure of is that he was a hell of a rower and a swimmer. During the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, the 22-year-old swam across the Potomac River three times through bullet-pocked water to rescue trapped and wounded comrades.

Pen Hallowell had something more than physical courage, and so did his elder brother, Edward “Ned” Needles Hallowell. “The Fighting Quakers,” as they were nicknamed, were sons of a Philadelphia abolitionist whose home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. As boys they spirited fugitive slaves to safety in the family carriage. As men they volunteered as officers with the legendary all-black 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments.

While those men were towing a locomotive by ropes, Pen Hallowell was beating in the doors of Congress trying to get them paid equal to white soldiers. The 54th and 55th were offered just $7 a month, while white soldiers got $13. Largely thanks to the brothers’ efforts, Congress finally approved equal pay for black soldiers in 1864.

The Supreme Court's solid conservative majority could soon choose to take up its first major Second Amendment case in nearly a decade, positioning the court to override state laws established to limit the availability and accessibility of some firearms and when they can be carried in public.

It's been over a decade since 2008's landmark 5-4 ruling in District of Columbia v Heller that held the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms at home for self-defense. Except for a follow-up decision two years later, the court has not weighed in significantly again.

"The Court's composition has changed considerably since Heller,

Next week brings yet another highly charged election, described by many as the "most important of our lives," with the future of the country feeling very much at stake.

But after an ugly, divisive and anxiety-inducing campaign season, Americans are also looking to the future and asking big questions: What comes next? How do we begin our political healing? And how do we restore our collective political voice, without being drowned out by those who shout loudest?

The answer is that we need to update our electoral system -- and ranked-choice voting is a promising way forward.

When I try to explain the aspirational genius of the American founding, I always refer to two documents

They’re by the famous “frenemies” of the American founding, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The second is Adams’s very short Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, dated October 11, 1798.

Also known as the Seven Years’ War, this New World conflict marked another chapter in the long imperial struggle between Britain and France.

William Pitt, the British turned the tide with victories at Louisbourg, Fort Frontenac and the French-Canadian stronghold of Quebec. At the 1763 peace conference, the British received the territories of Canada from France and Florida from Spain, opening the Mississippi Valley to westward expansion.

In the early 1750s, France’s expansion into the Ohio River valley repeatedly brought it into conflict with the claims of the British colonies, especially Virginia. In 1754, the French built Fort Duquesne where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers joined to form the Ohio River (in today’s Pittsburgh), making it a strategically important stronghold that the British repeatedly attacked. 

In 1990, Fred Romero, an N.R.A. field representative, put the case as clearly as possible: “The Second Amendment is not there to protect the interests of hunters, sport shooters and casual plinkers.” Rather, the “Second Amendment is … literally a loaded gun in the hands of the people held to the heads of government.”

how can the people’s enemy be the representatives elected by the people?

It follows from this distinction that a government elected by the majority can begin to think it can do anything it wants to, can begin to act as if we lived in a democracy rather than in a republic, and when that happens, or is in danger of happening, there is what the former Senate candidate Sharron Angle called a “Second Amendment remedy.”

ight-wing resistance to meaningful gun control is driven, in part, by a false notion that America's Founders adopted the Second Amendment because they wanted an armed population that could battle the U.S. government. The opposite is the truth, but many Americans seem to have embraced this absurd, anti-historical narrative.

The reality was that the Framers wrote the Constitution and added the Second Amendment with the goal of creating a strong central government with a citizens-based military force capable of putting down insurrections, not to enable or encourage uprisings

The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 weren't precursors to France's Robespierre or Russia's Leon Trotsky, believers in perpetual revolutions. In fact, their work on the Constitution was influenced by the experience of Shays' Rebellion in western Massachusetts in 1786, a populist uprising that the weak federal government, under the Articles of Confederation, lacked an army to defeat.

Vice President Biden famously pronounced the reform a “big something deal” — except that he didn’t use the word “something.” And he was right.

I’d suggest using this phrase to describe the Obama administration as a whole. F.D.R. had his New Deal; well, Mr. Obama has his Big Deal. He hasn’t delivered everything his supporters wanted, and at times the survival of his achievements seemed very much in doubt. But if progressives look at where we are as the second term begins, they’ll find grounds for a lot of (qualified) satisfaction.

Progressives have been trying to get some form of universal health insurance since the days of Harry Truman; they’ve finally succeeded.

Today, one in three adults is considered clinically obese, along with one in five kids, and 24 million Americans are afflicted by type 2 diabetes, often caused by poor diet, with another 79 million people having pre-diabetes. Even gout, a painful form of arthritis once known as “the rich man’s disease” for its associations with gluttony, now afflicts eight million Americans.

The public and the food companies have known for decades now — or at the very least since this meeting — that sugary, salty, fatty foods are not good for us in the quantities that we consume them. So why are the diabetes and obesity and hypertension numbers still spiraling out of control? It’s not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive

the powerful sensory force that food scientists call “mouth feel.” This is the way a product interacts with the mouth, as defined more specifically by a host of related sensations, from dryness to gumminess to moisture release.

The president was stammering and hesitant, and frequently looked out of his depth. Romney's performance wasn't brilliant, just good, but that made it brilliant relative to expectations. The greater shock, amplifying Romney's success, was that Obama was so bad.

Again and again, he missed open goals. He let Romney say that he, Romney, would take better care of entitlements than Obama would. Incredible. He watched as his attack on Romney's tax proposal kept bouncing off, until he looked feeble for repeating it. Why on earth didn't he force Romney to say which deductions would be removed to pay for the lower rates? He let Romney boast about his Massachusetts health care plan and in the same breath denounce Obamacare (to all intents and purposes, the same policy). Romney's argument about letting states be laboratories is tactically clever, and there's something to it, but surely Obama could have asked why Romney doesn't at least advocate Romneycare to the rest of the country. The president remembered to criticize insurance companies but (unless I missed it) forgot to mention that Obamacare is mainly about covering 50 million people who, you know, don't have health insurance. He let Romney attack him for failing to cut deals with the GOP, as though Republicans would have compromised if only they'd been talked to politely. In response, Obama meekly referred to Republican intransigence, but threw the comment away. That was a chance to lay the blame for paralysis in Washington on Romney's party, where it mostly belongs. And what about the 47 percent--about moochers, dependents, people whom Romney won't ever convince to be responsible, this nation of parasites? Hardly worth mentioning, I suppose.

All debates should be moderated this way. Step back and let the candidates argue with each other. It's revealing, much as Obama on this occasion may regret it.

While I don’t know how Obamacare will turn out, I’m certain that my two favorite Obama initiatives will be transformative.

His Race to the Top program in education has already set off a nationwide wave of school reform, and his Race to the Top in vehicles — raising the mileage standards for American-made car and truck fleets from 27.5 miles per gallon to 54.5 m.p.g. between now and 2025 — is already spurring a wave of innovation in auto materials, engines and software.

they are the future of progressive politics in this age of austerity: government using its limited funds and steadily rising performance standards to stimulate states and businesses to innovate better economic, educational and environmental practices.

The comparison was inflammatory, to say the least. Former Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts equated Donald J. Trump’s immigration plan with Kristallnacht, the night of horror in 1938 when rampaging Nazis smashed Jewish homes and businesses in Germany and killed scores of Jews.

Mr. Trump’s campaign has engendered impassioned debate about the nature of his appeal and warnings from critics on the left and the right about the potential rise of fascism in the United States.

In Hungary, an authoritarian government has clamped down on the news media and erected razor wire fences to keep out migrants.

The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq.

Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. “If you were to say, for instance, that we’re going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me not long ago.

Power is a partisan of the doctrine known as “responsibility to protect,” which holds that sovereignty should not be considered inviolate when a country is slaughtering its own citizens. She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he declined. Obama generally does not believe a president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States.

Jeff Miller, the NFL’s senior vice president for health and safety, was speaking at a roundtable discussion on concussions convened by the House Committee on Energy & Commerce. When asked by Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.) if a connection between football and CTE had been established, Miller replied, “The answer to that question is certainly yes.”

Miller’s admission followed comments by Dr. Anne McKee, a professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University who focuses on neurodegenerative diseases. “I unequivocally think there’s a link between playing football and CTE,” she told the panel Monday

“We’ve seen it in 90 out of 94 NFL players whose brains we’ve examined, we’ve found it in 45 out of 55 college players and 26 out of 65 high school players,” McKee continued. “No, I don’t think this represents how common this disease is in the living population, but the fact that over five years I’ve been able to accumulate this number of cases in football players, it cannot be rare. In fact, I think we are going to be surprised at how common it is.”

Kennedy faced pressure from civil-rights activists to make good on what King called a “huge promissory note” to pass meaningful civil-rights legislation.

While the passage of the Civil Rights Act helped Johnson earn support from 94 percent of black voters in 1964, there is a gulf between what black Americans hoped the legislation would achieve and what Democratic politicians actually delivered.

Democratic politicians acted more boldly on race issues in Alabama and Mississippi than in New York and Massachusetts. “There is a pressing need for a liberalism in the North which is truly liberal, a liberalism that firmly believes in integration in its own community as well as in the Deep South,”

In 1850, like the Democrats and their allies in 2016, the abolitionists took a terrible hit. They had worked for 20 years to bring down the worst institution in American history, chattel slavery. And they thought they might have been on the verge of a breakthrough, with a proposal to ban slavery in all the territories taken in the Mexican War. But in the Compromise of 1850, Congress basically handed those territories to the pro-slavery forces, and, with an updated Fugitive Slave Act, it conscripted every Northern citizen into an army of slave catchers, obliged to aid in sending black people back to the slaveholding South.

And yet, a little over a decade later, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The abolitionists’ comeback was impressive. And it offers a road map away from the election of 2016.

What would the abolitionists do? They would gather in huge numbers every time federal agents came for a Hispanic honors student. They would compel those agents to use force if they wanted to proceed. They would document every moment. And they would use the media — back then it was the penny press, the Twitter of its time — to spread the images everywhere.

“Why Nations Fail,” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, respectively, is a wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich and others don’t.

“politics.” Mr. Acemoglu and Mr. Robinson divide the world into countries governed by “inclusive” institutions and those ruled by “extractive” ones. Inclusive societies, with England and its Glorious Revolution of 1688 in the vanguard, deliver sustainable growth and technological innovation. Extractive ones can have spurts of prosperity, but because they are ruled by a narrow elite guided by its own self-interest, their economic vigor eventually fades.

“It is about societies where the elite, the rich, can do what they want and those where they cannot.”