individual rights

The modern conception of freedom emerged as an antidemocratic reaction by elites who wanted to curtail state power.

Since the invention of the automobile, police have used the dangers of America's roads to justify their growing oversight of motorists.

Can the social contract be protected from a measles outbreak?

The beginnings of the end of private life in the late nineteenth century.

How is it that the era of neoliberalism coincides almost perfectly with the triumphant rise of a discourse of human rights?

To make a more perfect union, don’t look to the Founding Fathers.

Banning them would gut the concept of an armed citizenry as a final, emergency bulwark against tyranny.

A new book argues that the fetishization of the first ten amendments is a recent thing – and that it comes at a cost.

The real history of the Second Amendment.

What is the greatest libertarian accomplishment of all time? The abolition of slavery.

John Adams would not be happy to see what Independence Day has become.

People continue to interpret the U.S. Constitution in different ways. One way is an originalist framework that favors the Founding Father's intent in 1787.

At the prodding of John and Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren took on a massive project: writing a comprehensive history of the Revolutionary War.

How the Southern Strategy of the late 20th century gave rise to the modern GOP.

He was one of the world’s most celebrated and beloved stars. Then his adopted country turned against him.

Government, wrote Alexander Hamilton, should substitute “the mild influence” of the law for “the violent and sanguinary agency of the sword.”

The Florida governor’s long-ignored 2011 work, "Dreams From Our Founding Fathers," reveals a distinct vision of American history.

Jedediah Purdy's new book examines why the U.S. has continuously failed to qualify as a system defined by popular rule.

Francis Fukuyama pines for that old-time liberalism.

Is the American conception of constitutional rights too absolute?