Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.
Mr. Obama’s election amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country. But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.



Visitors to the U.S. Capitol will now have a visible marker of the siege there on...
The executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, a mainstay at the Kennedy Center, is leaving...
Four Democratic attorneys general, sitting in their offices from New York to California with state flags...





























