Benjamin Franklin

An overlooked corner of the Constitution hints at a right to be protected from infection.

But it’s one historians know all too well.

The document counted my great-great-grandfather as 3/5 of a free person. But the Framers don’t own the version we live by today. We do.

Richard J. Werther discusses how being outmanned by the best army in the world led American revolutionaries to look overseas for the help they needed.

It’s not obsolete, and it’s not a business.

The role of almanacs in nineteenth-century popular medicine.

Places of memory up and down the East Coast also witnessed acts of resistance and oppression.

A new book details how the young nation regarded its recent and more ancient pasts.

Why are Americans so obsessed with tornadoes? A brief tour of twister culture has the answer.

In the past two centuries, the evolution of the U.S. Census has tracked the country’s social tensions and reflected its political controversies.

How mesmerism threatened early 19th-century gendered constructs of virtue and honor.

Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that Imperial expansion over stolen Indian land shaped and deepened the American Revolution’s relationship to slavery.

The Comte de Buffon's thirty-six volume Natural History claimed that America was a land of degeneracy. That enraged Thomas Jefferson.

From religious liberty to religious violence, it helps to get our facts straight.

The pitfalls and the potential of cryptocurrency are explored in three recent publications.

If the British had won the Revolutionary War, things might be very different for Native Americans.

Executive power and the Constitution.

Michael Kimmage considers "The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History" by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.

Materials themselves, like shoes reflected and shaped political cultures around the revolutionary Atlantic and World.

A visual exploration of how a critical piece of social infrastructure came to be.