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Your reading list for the election

Essential stories from the Boston Globe on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

The stage was set ahead of the Presidential Debate. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
ASSOCIATED PRESS

The most important 30 minutes of the presidential election

When Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump take the stage for their first debate Monday night, each know they need a strong start. The polls show that Trump has momentum, but that Clinton still has the upper hand in the Electoral College. No one doubts that the stakes are high. Read the full story.

GLOBE STAFF (LEFT); AP

The presidential debate will make history. Here’s how.

Monday night’s 90-minute meeting between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is expected to be the most watched ever, with an estimated 100 million Americans viewing it on their televisions, computers, and smartphones. Read the full story.

In Maine, Clinton, Trump are in a tight race

Trump’s ascendancy in Maine is largely due to his dominance in the vast northern sector of the state — but analysts say it’s also a reflection of how Maine, like many other parts of the country, has become geographically more polarized. Its northern reaches, mostly rural, tend to be far more conservative than the southern, populous part of the state. Read the full story.

ASSOCIATED PRESS/FILE

Donald Trump’s drive to surpass his father’s success

Donald Trump rarely mentions his father on the stump. Yet the younger Trump, who enjoyed a privileged upbringing in Queens, owes his career to his father, a real-estate millionaire who not only generously staked his son with financial backing but used his own strong connections to open doors among New York’s politicians and regulators. Read the full story.

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PAM BERRY/GLOBE STAFF/FILE

Donald Trump’s airline went from opulence in the air to crash landing

Echoes of Trump Shuttle reverberate in the Donald Trump presidential campaign. He bashed his rivals with scant justification, grabbed media attention with flash and dazzle, and relied on gut instinct to pursue strategies that flouted industry norms. Read the full story.

NINA BERMAN/NOOR

The pageant of Donald Trump’s dreams

Trump’s involvement in a calendar model competition came at a time when his reputation as an eligible New York ladies’ man was at its peak. He was between his first and second marriages, and his personal life was regular fodder in the New York tabloid gossip pages. Two years earlier, he had been featured on the cover of Playboy magazine. Read the full story.

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PATRICK SEMANSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Donald Trump is full of conspiracies—and many believe him

Far from being a marginal phenomenon, conspiracy theories have always been part of the American political landscape and are believed by more than 55 percent of the public — a group that cuts across race, gender, income, and political affiliation, according to researchers and polls. Read the full story.

MIC SMITH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

In Trump, black Republicans see plenty to lose

Black Republicans have long appealed to people of color and those in urban areas — who overwhelmingly vote Democratic — by talking about the economy, access to quality schools, and the disproportionate effect of unemployment on minorities. But Trump, some said, is the messenger who essentially killed the message. Read the full story.

JONATHAN WIGGS/GLOBE STAFF

Veterans who favor GOP grapple with 2016 choice

Traditionally, veterans vote Republican — they did overwhelmingly in 2004, 2008, and 2012 — but little has been traditional about this presidential contest. Read the full story.

TRUMP HOTELS

Looking for clues at a Trump namesake

There’s no track record on what it’s like to live in a community governed by Donald Trump. But you can stay in one of the Republican presidential front-runner’s hotels. Hotels have security, borders, and walls to keep out undesirables. Surely staying in a Trump hotel might offer some insight into how he might govern a sovereign nation. Read the full story.

CHARLES REX ARBOGAST/ASSOCIATED PRESS/FILE

The Atlantic City savior that came up snake eyes

Trump’s dealings in Atlantic City have become more of an issue as he surges to the top of the polls in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. He boasts of his business acumen, but his opponents have pointed to the trail of bankruptcies by his casino operations as evidence of a less-than-stellar, if not reckless, track record. Read the full story.

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COURTESY OF DONALD TRUMP

Even in college, Donald Trump was brash

The brash, blunt, and sometimes bombastic personality that has helped Trump upend the early stages of the 2016 Republican presidential primary campaign — and which has been a hallmark of his business and reality TV entertainment careers — was already in full bloom during his college years, according to more than a dozen Wharton classmates interviewed by the Globe. Read the full story.

Associated Press

Trump is rising in the polls. How?

Look past the daily campaign scrum, though, and it makes sense that this would be a tight race. Trump may be an unusual candidate, but he’s the Republican nominee, and in a country as politically divided as modern America, that guarantees him a lot of Republican votes. Read the full story.

A plan for the Clinton Foundation, none for Trump organization

No matter who wins, the next US president will be plagued by questions about where public interest ends and personal interest begins. For Hillary Clinton, the focus will be her family foundation. For Donald Trump, his whole business empire. Read the full story.

MONICA ALMEIDA/THE NEW YORK TIMES/FILE 2014

Has the American economy hit a turning point?

After years of glacial economic growth and stagnant wages, median household income jumped 5 percent, or nearly $3,000, from 2014, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau. That’s the first meaningful increase since 2007 and the biggest bounce on record, offering fresh evidence that this economic recovery is now reaching a broader swath of American workers. Read the full story.

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JOHN M. HURLEY

Hillary: The Wellesley years

Black students and white students, conservatives, liberals, moderates, they all knew her and most had voted for her for one class office or another through the years. They knew her as a leader and campus activist; as president of Wellesley Young Republicans who, through the chaos of the late ‘60s, evolved into a liberal Democrat. Read the full story.

MATT ROURKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Is Hillary Clinton’s tuition plan doable?

Clinton’s plan, widely seen as an attempt to appeal to Bernie Sanders’ young supporters, would eliminate tuition at in-state public colleges and universities for families that earn up to $125,000 a year. The policy would cover more than 80 percent of families, according to the Clinton campaign. Read the full story.

THOMAS FARRAGHER/GLOBE STAFF

The voices Hillary Clinton didn’t hear

Near as I can tell, her trip across the Midwest was interrupted at a gas-station pit stop where she posed for some pictures. Oh, and I think she must have waved from the back seat of her shiny black van to some trucker driving an 18-wheeler somewhere because she casually mentioned that when she finally reached Iowa. So I decided to do what Hillary didn’t — stop along the way, get off I-80 here and there, and listen. Read the full story.

LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS/FILE

On the trail, Hillary Clinton finds her comfort zone

With roughly two months to go before Election Day, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is far from flawless. Yet — as the drip, drip, drip of negative headlines about her e-mails and the Clinton Foundation continues — she is quietly finding a more comfortable rhythm on the day-to-day campaign trail. Read the full story.

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FBI releases notes of its interviews with Hillary Clinton

The portrait that emerges from 58 pages of FBI documents that were released is one of secrecy, in which aides and advisers sought to prevent unfettered access to the correspondence Clinton had during her four years as the nation’s chief diplomat. Read the full story.

AARON P. BERNSTEIN/REUTERS/FILE

Clinton Foundation to limit reach in event of election win

The sprawling Clinton Foundation will stop accepting money from corporations and foreign governments if Hillary Clinton is elected president, a move designed to ease concerns about conflicts of interest in a potential Clinton administration, the foundation confirmed Thursday evening. Read the full story.

Tracing Clinton’s brief time in New Bedford

Clinton was fresh out of law school in 1973 and living in Cambridge while working in New Bedford as a 25-year-old legal advocate for the Children’s Defense Fund. With a Portuguese translator, she interviewed families in some of the poorest areas of the city, exploring the circumstances that were keeping children out of school, despite compulsory attendance laws. Read the full story.

AARON P. BERNSTEIN/REUTERS/FILE

In 1978 custody case, Hillary Clinton took the side of a father

Hillary Rodham — as she was known at the time — was building her legal case with an argument that runs counter to a central theme of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign nearly four decades later: Now billed as an unwavering advocate for women, she then argued that a father should be granted full custody of his 6-year-old-daughter over the objections of the mother. Read the full story.

EVAN WOLFSON

At Harvard Law, Tim Kaine was driven by faith

It was clear, when Tim Kaine arrived at Harvard Law School in the fall of 1979, that he was not exactly in his natural element. And it didn’t take long for him to lose faith in his chosen field on the cutthroat campus of career-minded law students. Read the full story.

AP/File

Clinton charity never provided foreign donor data

The Clinton Health Access Initiative never submitted information on any foreign donations to State Department lawyers for review during Clinton’s tenure from 2009 to 2013, Maura Daley, the organization’s spokeswoman, acknowledged. Read the full story.

ART STREIBER/NBC

We’ve seen Trump’s theatrics before — on reality TV

Donald Trump is the first candidate to employ the tenets of reality TV in a run for president of the United States, to use a savvy reality contestant’s approach to sticking around and evading elimination rounds. Read the full story.