Trump's Scenes Under the Summer Sun
September 16, 2026
"Dead space is taking over our public gathering places here in a beloved city the president plainly hates. Yes, he hates many people and places, but we are at ground zero of his vengeance."

Trump, the Un-American President
August 20, 2025
“Donald Trump is the same greedy blowhard he ever was, with a double dose of rage and revenge.”

The Three Women of San Francisco
Jan 18, 2023
“So, what city gave America the only woman House speaker, the most senior senator and the first woman vice president? San Francisco, of course, that fair city.”

The Kindness of Women Who Made You Feel at Home
May 4, 2022
“My mother calls me every morning from Santa Monica, sounding like a lark, ever since the pandemic. A professor into her 80s, she has a subversive streak and went places all over the world, once to a civil war with a United Nations peacekeeping team. She sees her three daughters as a bit ‘unadventurous.’"

Two Californias Clash in a Divided House: Pelosi Versus McCarthy
(for Mark Shields)
Aug 7, 2021
“It's a first in American history: The speaker of the House and the minority leader hail from the same state. But they barely speak.”

Selected Pieces

My kingdom for another golf course!
The Cap Times, October 15, 2026
"Once the trees are axed and lying on the ground like murder victims, no judge or demonstration can bring them back to life."

Hands down, Trump is the worst president
The Cap Times, October 1, 2026
"Donald Trump is not just a bad president. 'King' is too good a word for the likes of him. What Trump truly is shall be written in the end."

Mobs have attacked U.S. temples of freedom before
The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 9, 2026
"I was a firsthand witness to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Inside the House chamber, we heard shouts, footsteps, and gunshots. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was rushed off the floor. The rest of us, representatives and journalists, stayed as frozen as the Rotunda statues."

Democracy under fire: A first-person account inside the Capitol
San Francisco Chronicle, January 10, 2021
“Then there were footsteps, shouting, broken glass, tear gas inside. The clamor became an onslaught. Members and reporters donned escape hoods, to kneel and head for locked doors and a secret staircase. Nobody could take their eyes off a gun standoff at the chamber door. That was when I called my family.”

Capitol siege: An eyewitness account from inside the House chamber (condensed interview)
BBC News, January 7, 2021
“Many of us are hardened journalists - I've seen my share of violence covering homicides in Baltimore - but this was very unpredictable. The police didn't seem to know what was happening. They weren't coordinated. They locked the chamber doors but at the same time, they told us we would have to evacuate. So there was a sense of panic.”

Another Kennedy Family Tragedy
American Heritage, July/August 2020
“I know the place where they were lost. I kept thinking of lovely Shady Side on the shore of the Bay while we were celebrating the life of that remarkable woman during an online memorial service.”

Trump's Plot to Take Out the Post Office
Creators Syndicate, April 29, 2020
“The United States Postal Service is under silent siege, just as the American people are, in the coronavirus crisis. Trump views the pandemic as an opportunity to choke the post office, to strangle a precious part of democracy.”

A tale of two cities on the streets: from D.C. to Santa Monica
San Francisco Chronicle, June 4, 2020
“It was the worst of times. But the best of times are far from here. President Trump is veering toward martial law, as announced in the Rose Garden the very moment peaceful resisters were forced out of nearby Lafayette Square.”

2020 may be historic for women in more ways than one
Washington Post, February 10, 2019
“The recent shift to the Senate as the proving ground for a presidential run serves women well. It was once an article of faith among pundits that governors made the best candidates. Women have more opportunities to enter political careers and rise on the national stage as as lawmakers than as governors.”

It’s easier to have a boyfriend from the past than in messy real life
The Washington Post, February 2018
“Historical boyfriends never let you down. They never leave. You don’t have to worry about whether they’ll call or text. They are always in your heart.”

Public Talks

Civil War Series - The New York Times

Lincoln on Stage
April 13, 2015
“The enthralling young Lincoln thrived on his rough stages in Springfield, Ill., much as an Elizabethan actor might at the uproarious, open-air Globe. As best we know, Lincoln’s voice was not a rumbling bass, but a tenor with a drawl, a trained instrument for penetrating across rooms, lyceum halls and distances.”

Whitman in Washington
December 28, 2012
“When Whitman arrived at the field hospital set up in a mansion, he found a scene from hell, watched over by an imposing angel: Clara Barton moved amid screams of surgery, ministering to youths, bandaging the bleeding and soothing the dying with low-spoken words and water.”

Compassion Under Fire
December 9, 2011
“From the first day blood was spilled in 1861 — some of her old Massachusetts schoolmates were among the Yankee soldiers besieged in Baltimore by a mob of Southern sympathizers — the Civil War was what [Clara Barton] lived for. She left a job in Washington as a Patent Office copyist for scenes of mass misery that broke all the record books.”

The War Comes Home for Lee
July 30, 2011
“Orchards on the vast expanse of Arlington acres were clear-cut to make room for roads and telegraph poles. Union soldiers drilled on land that had been tilled by enslaved people for generations. A nameless number who died at the First Battle of Bull Run were later buried on the grounds in a not-so-subtle message that their blood was on Lee’s hands.”

Parallel Lives from the Eastern Shore
June 24, 2011
“Twenty miles away, Tubman’s family lived in still deeper isolation, in a hardscrabble part of the world with few fine indoor things. But she had the luck to know and live with most of her close-knit family; Douglass was separated from his mother and grandmother as a child, a cut that never healed.”

With Friends Like These…
April 8, 2011
“Lucretia Mott, the Philadelphia Quaker famous for her work in the abolition and women’s rights movements, never met Abraham Lincoln. But Mott and many of her faith thought they knew him well enough to be wary: though the South was up in arms over his antislavery statements, he was nowhere near radical enough for Mott’s small but influential religious community.”

Stiehm’s work has also been published in a spectrum of newspapers, magazines and online news organizations: 

• American Heritage

• Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

• The Baltimore Sun 

• The Boston Globe

• The Capital Times (Madison) 

• The Christian Science Monitor

• Columbia Journalism Review

• The Commercial Appeal (Memphis) 

• Daily Herald (Chicago)

• Dallas Morning News 

• The Hartford Courant 

• History News Network

• Houston Chronicle 

• Huffington Post 

• International Herald Tribune

• The Miami Herald 

• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 

• The Nation

• The National Memo 

• News Chief (Winter Park, Fla.) 

• The New York Times

• Noozhawk (Santa Barbara, Ca.)

• Orange County Register

• The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 

• POLITICO

• Providence Sunday Journal 

• RealClearPolitics 

• The Star Tribune (Minneapolis) 

• San Jose Mercury News 

• The Times-Picayune (New Orleans) 

• Tuscaloosa News (Ala.)

• U.S. News & World Report (Opinion Page contributor) 

• The Washington Monthly 

• The Washington Post

• The Week (U.K. edition) quoted as one of the week’s best columns 

• Wisconsin State Journal

• Zocalo Public Square