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Slavery, Democracy, and the Racialized Roots of the Electoral College

The Electoral College was created to help white Southerners maintain their disproportionate influence in national governance.

Freedom vs. Liberty: Why Religious Conservatives Have Begun to Chose One Over the Other

Religious "freedom" and "liberty" have always had different connotations.

The Strange Career of Free Exercise

How efforts to bolster religious liberty set off a chain of unintended consequences.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Going Negative

Judicial dissent in the Supreme Court has a long history.
Crowds of people surrounding the General Land Office and accompanying tents

Hail to the Pencil Pusher

American bureaucracy's long and useful history.
Full text of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, etched in stone.

What Does It Mean To Make America "Christian?"

The "Christian Amendment" and the push for Christianity to be established as the national religion of the United States.

The Missing Right: A Constitutional Right to Vote

In the era of the voting wars, the right to vote is itself a subject of continued partisan, regional, and racial conflict.
Civil War rifles mounted on wall
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Straight Shot: Guns in America

On who has had access to guns in the U.S., and what those guns have meant to the people who have owned them.

Founding Fathers, Founding Villains

A review of a handful of new books that embody the new liberal originalism.
Lithograph of James Madison from Portrait and Biographical Album of Washtenaw County, Michigan, 1891, Wikimedia.

The Founders’ Muddled Legacy on the Right to Bear Arms Is Killing Us

A case of 18th-century politicking has stymied our ability to deal with a 21st-century crisis.
Poster for U.S. Census reading "Have your papers ready," featuring Uncle Sam writing in book
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Beyond Numbers: A History of the U.S. Census

To mark the culmination of Census 2010, we explore the fascinating story of how Americans have counted themselves.
Signing of the Declaration of Independence

Prior Convictions

Did the Founders want us to be faithful to their faith?

Dead or Alive: Originalism as Popular Constitutionalism in Heller

Was the 2008 Heller decision a victory for originalism or a living Constitution?

Don’t Despair About the Supreme Court

In 2005, Howard Zinn explained why it was naive to depend on the Court to defend the rights of marginalized Americans.
Caricature drawing of Charles Black

Pursuing the Pursuit of Happiness

Traditional Supreme Court precedent may depend too much on substantive due process to safeguard human rights.

To Keep and Bear Arms

A challenge to the "Standard Model" scholars who hold that the Second Amendment protects individual gun rights.
Painting of Abraham Lincoln

The Election in November

The Atlantic’s editor endorsed Abraham Lincoln for presidency in the 1860 election, correctly predicting it would prove to be “a turning-point in our history.”
"Home in the Woods," an 1847 painting by Thomas Cole.

A Republican Excursion

As a new book on their travels together shows, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's friendship went beyond politics.
Constitutional convention painting blurred as if being spun in circles.

Remake America

If we want democracy to survive, we need a vision that’s going to be more compelling than the one the authoritarians are offering.
Cartographic depiction of the Union armies Anaconda plan shows a snake wrapping around the American South.

The President's Awesome War Powers

Where they come from, how they've evolved, and how they could change.
Engraving of Founding Fathers reading the Declaration of Independence while onlookers rally.

Does America Have a Founding Philosophy?

It depends on how you read the Declaration’s “self-evident” truths.
US National Guard troops block off Beale Street as Civil Rights marchers wearing placards reading, "I AM A MAN"

The Classical Liberal Foundation of Civil Rights

The progress we have seen toward civil rights for all Americans is inseparable from the history of classical liberalism.
A hand holds a US flag and a pride flag in front of the Supreme Court building in a crowd celebrating the Obergefell v. Hodges decision.
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How the Supreme Court Ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges Legalized Same-Sex Marriage

When Jim Obergefell and his partner John Arthur decided to marry after more than 20 years together, their home state refused to recognize same-sex marriages.
Broadside about the Fugitive Slave law.
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The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: Annotated

The Fugitive Slave Act erased the most basic of constitutional rights for enslaved people and incentivized US Commissioners to support kidnappers.
Woodrow Wilson and a panel of red stars.

Surviving Bad Presidents

What the Constitution asks of us.
A group of men in a bar watching Oliver North testify before Congress.
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How the Iran-Contra Scandal Impacts American Politics Today

The Iran-Contra affair exposed how government officials can ignore democratic norms and practices.
Donald Trump and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

When Presidents Sought a Third (and Fourth) Term

Winning more than two elections was unthinkable. Then came FDR.
Clark Mills’s statue of Andrew Jackson, Lafayette Park, Washington D.C., circa 1910–1925

Vance’s Junk History

When Donald Trump and his followers go in search of historical forerunners to justify their regime, they turn with striking regularity to the presidency.
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.
Grave of John Quincy Adams.

From Son of the Revolution to Old Man Eloquent

A new Library of America edition of John Quincy Adams’s writings demonstrates the enduring appeal—and real shortcomings—of his revolutionary conservatism.

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