Benjamin Franklin

A 1763 massacre by colonial settlers exposed the the irreconcilable contradictions of conquest by people concerned with civility.

The question of how to balance state and national power was perhaps the single most important and most challenging question confronting the early republic.

Insuring against the cost of insurance itself in Revolutionary-era America.

A review of how Dennis Rasmussen understands America's Founding Fathers and their disillusions with the American experiment.

Popular religious iconography and art in the decades preceding the Revolution offer a fuller narrative arc of the development of revolutionary ideas within American society.

When George Horace Lorimer took over as editor of the Saturday Evening Post, America was a patchwork of communities. There was no sense of nation or unity.

The Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee, and other political formations generally separated military and civil leadership and guarded certain personal freedoms.

We ascribe too much meaning to the early years of the republic.

Vaccines against smallpox during the Revolutionary War are one example of how mandates have protected the health of Americans for more than two centuries.

On Akhil Reed Amar’s “The Words That Made Us,” a new history of America’s constitutional conversation.

Colonial planners saw Nova Scotia as a blank space ripe for transformation.

Maritime workers who were basically kidnapped into the British Royal Navy were a key force in the War of Independence.

Colonial America was divided over smallpox inoculation, but he championed science to skeptic.

Americans have always been deeply divided.

The drive for American independence coalesced in only a few years of rapidly accelerating political change.

We often think of the temperance movement as driven by white evangelicals set out to discipline Black Americans and immigrants. That history is wrong.

How not to learn about the American past.

The oval office looks different now that President Biden is its occupant.

What began as a protest, rally, and march ended as something altogether different—a day of anarchy that challenges the terminology of history.

Lepore’s framework insists that the “self-evident” truths of the nation’s founding were anything but.