The Washington Post has this piece by the incomparable David Maraniss on the Republican Party’s roots in Ripon, Wisconsin. It begins:

The distance between Ripon 1854 and Milwaukee 2024 seems far greater than 86 miles or 170 years.

It was in this small Wisconsin town, during a raging March snowstorm seven years before the start of the Civil War, that a band of local men huddled under candlelight in a one-room schoolhouse heated by a cast-iron potbelly stove to discuss the formation of the same political party that is convening this week in the state’s largest city to reanoint Donald Trump.

The citizens who came in from the freezing cold that long-ago night were Whigs and Democrats and Free Soilers, farmers and lawyers and merchants, capitalists and Fourierite communal socialists, many of them recent arrivals into the prairie wilderness from New York, a diverse group unified by one powerful idea — that the spread of slavery in the United States was an evil that had to stop and would require a bold new party to accomplish that mission.

A replica of the Little White Schoolhouse, where that meeting took place, has been driven down from Ripon to Milwaukee for this week’s convention.