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A national Guardsmen crosses the street, the capital rotunda in the background.

The Common Defense

The National Guard, the true descendent of the citizen-soldier militia, has become a sad and incoherent shell of itself.
by Lucas Bernard via The American Conservative on April 3, 2023
D.C. National Guard members stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
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President Trump Can Send the Military to Police Americans, but is Doing so Wise?

The history of using militarized force domestically.
by Grace Mallon via Made By History on June 3, 2020
Portrait of George Washington in his military uniform.

The Gun Guy and Illegal Militia Founder Who Became President: George Washington

Our first President understood that armed citizens are essential to American freedom.
by David Kopel via Reason on February 17, 2020

White Power

A review of two recent books about white paramilitarism in the wake of the Cold War.
by Thomas Meaney via London Review of Books on August 1, 2019

The Bloody History of Border Militias Runs Deep — and Law Enforcement Is Part of It

The West's history is full of stories of white Americans taking the law into their own hands to beat back nonwhite populations.
by Ryan Deveraux via The Intercept on May 23, 2019

Necessary to the Security of a Free State

On the history of the second amendment, white militias, and border vigilantism.
by Angelo Guisado via Current Affairs on May 8, 2019

Bang for the Buck

Three new books paint a more nuanced portrait of the American militias whose gun rights have been protected since the founding.
by Adam Hochschild via New York Review of Books on March 15, 2018

The Second Amendment Does Not Transcend All Others

Its text and context don’t ensure an unlimited individual right to bear any kind and number of weapons by anyone.
by Garrett Epps via The Atlantic on March 8, 2018

What America Gets Wrong About Three Important Words in the Second Amendment

The NRA misquotes George Mason to support its own view of "well-regulated militia."
by Robyn Pennacchia via Quartz on February 24, 2018
A newspaper drawing of St. Louis from above.
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German Radicals vs. the Slave Power

In "Memoirs of a Nobody," Henry Boernstein chronicles the militant immigrant organizing that helped keep St. Louis out of the hands of the Confederacy.
by Devin Thomas O’Shea via HNN on May 21, 2025
Cover of "Sedition" featuring smoke engulfing the Capitol dome.
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An Attempt to Defeat Constitutional Order

After the Civil War, conservatives used terrorism, cold-blooded murder, and economic coercion to fight the new state constitution in South Carolina.
by Marcus Alexander Gadson via HNN on May 13, 2025
Collage of the Battles of Lexington and Concord and patriotic imagery.

Revolution and Progress on Lexington Green

The American Revolution’s first battle is a reminder that liberty isn't the result of inevitable progress but a prize won by those willing to fight for it.
by Richard Samuelson via Law & Liberty on April 25, 2025
A monument of the Minutemen line in Concord, Massachusetts.
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The Dangerous Afterlives of Lexington and Concord

How a myth about farmers taking on the British has fueled more than two centuries of exclusionary nationalism.
by Eran A. Zelnik via HNN on April 15, 2025
Painting of Troops, an American Flag and Eagle.

Echoes of Lexington and Concord

The 250th anniversary of "the shot heard round the world" is a reminder of the rights the Patriots fought for.
by Richard Alan Ryerson via Law & Liberty on April 1, 2025
Painting titled "Repulse of Leslie at the North Bridge".

Was This Little-Known Standoff the Real Start of the American Revolution?

On February 26, 1775, residents of Salem, Massachusetts, banded together to force the British to withdraw from their town in Leslie’s Retreat.
by Robert Pushkar via Smithsonian on February 26, 2025
A painting of George Washington on horseback reviewing the Western Army at Fort Cumberland.
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Merry, Manly Militias

Levity and play — eerily combined with anxiety, terror, and deadly violence — shaped the identity and image of Early Republic militias.
by Eran A. Zelnik via HNN on January 28, 2025
A drawing of Nathanael Greene.
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An Unlikely Soldier

On Nathanael Greene’s inauspicious start.
by Alan Pell Crawford via HNN on July 2, 2024
National Guard members deploy near the White House as peaceful protests are scheduled against police brutality and the death of George Floyd, on June 6, 2020 in Washington, D.C.

The Most Dangerous Law in America

The Insurrection Act is a nuclear bomb hidden in the United States code, giving presidents unimaginable emergency power. No President has abused it. Yet.
by Joseph Nunn via Democracy Journal on June 10, 2024
A drawing of a Wide Awake march.

These Torchlit Young Marchers Helped to Save American Democracy

They called themselves the Wide Awakes. They are a lesson in building a political movement.
by Jon Grinspan via Washington Post on May 14, 2024
Gun safety advocates rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019
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What the Supreme Court Gets Wrong About the Second Amendment

Government, wrote Alexander Hamilton, should substitute “the mild influence” of the law for “the violent and sanguinary agency of the sword.”
by Dominic Erdozain via Made By History on November 7, 2023
Member of Hamas holding a flag and an automatic rifle.

How George W. Bush Helped Hamas Come to Power

In Bush’s naïveté about the magic of elections, he ignored a crucial point about democracy.
by Fred Kaplan via Slate on October 24, 2023
Illustration of a soldier in a tank battering through a fiery wooden structure.

A Fire Started in Waco. Thirty Years Later, It’s Still Burning.

Behind the Oklahoma City bombing and even the January 6th attack was a military-style assault in Texas that galvanized the far right.
by Daniel Immerwahr via The New Yorker on May 1, 2023
World War I era African American soldier.

Black Virginians and the American Revolution

Enslaved conspirators in far-flung Accomack County forced some whites to rethink any legislative efforts aiding Black Virginians.
by Adam McNeil via Black Perspectives on February 13, 2023
Texas investigators and medical examiners stand on top of the ruins of the Mount Carmel compound.

How the Right Got Waco Wrong

Militia groups have long used Waco as a rallying cry. But it was never the example of whiteness under siege that they invoke.
by Paul M. Renfro via The New Republic on January 31, 2023
George Wallace pointing to map of United States with "Wallace Country" written on it.

How the Right Turned “Freedom” Into a Dog Whistle

A new book traces the long history of cloaking racism in the language of resistance to an overbearing federal government.
by Eric Herschthal via The New Republic on December 8, 2022
"Under My Wings Every Thing Prospers" by New Orleans artist J. L. Bouqueto de Woiseri, 1803, depicting an eagle flying over a port city and agricultural fields.

Slavery's Revolutions In Louisiana

Comparing the results of two Louisiana slave rebellions 20 years apart and what that meant for the continuation of slavery within the Deep South.
by Patrick Luck via Age of Revolutions on June 27, 2022
A picture of the front of the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court’s Faux ‘Originalism’

The conservative Supreme Court's favorite judicial philosophy requires a very, very firm grasp of history — one that none of the justices seem to possess.
by Joshua Zeitz via Politico Magazine on June 26, 2022
A photograph of John Brown and scraps of his writing.

The Irrevocable Step

John Brown and the historical novel.
by Willis McCumber via The Baffler on May 2, 2022
Timothy McVeigh in a prison jumpsuit surrounded by law enforcement agents.
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Extremism in America: The Oklahoma City Bombing

Neo-Nazi propaganda, military deployment and the F.B.I. raid in Waco, Texas, radicalized Timothy McVeigh and led to the Oklahoma City attack.
via Retro Report on April 26, 2022
A picture of armed militias

What the Term “Gun Culture” Misses About White Supremacy

The rise of tactical gun culture among civilians reveals a new front in the U.S. battle against nativist authoritarianism.
by Chad Kautzer via Boston Review on December 17, 2021
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