Can any past presidential campaign help us understand the election year now beginning? There never was a sitting president like Donald Trump. But if we widen our lens, we find timely echoes in an era when America was rapidly changing, the old political order was coming apart, and it seemed like the country was about to split at the seams.
An early version of modern-day America was already visible in June 1856. At a music hall in Philadelphia, delegates of the recently founded Republican Party gathered for their convention and chose their first-ever presidential nominee. Supporters unfurled an American flag onstage that bore his name: John C.