George Washington

William Barr’s long struggle against congressional oversight.

It’s doubtful even Alexander Hamilton believed what he was selling in “Federalist No. 68.”

America won its freedom thanks to strong alliances.

1776 began as a petty squabble among odious and powerful elites. It soon became the lodestar of emancipatory movements everywhere.

How was the Fourth of July celebrated during the Revolutionary War?

Executive power and the Constitution.

"Inevitably, the age of national bootblacks and national oyster houses and national blacksmiths produced national history books."

Is Trump's power as president becoming just what the Founders feared?

The Lee and Jackson statues were erected not to mourn their deaths, but to glorify their character.

An anti-imperialist network made his warning possible.

Greg Grandin’s new book charts the past and present of American expansionism and its high human costs.

A new history of the early republic explores the origins of originalism.

Slavery and the legacy of white supremacy.

Thomas Paine, the most radical of American revolutionaries, perhaps most fully understood the millennial potential of the new Republic.

“John Marshall...exhibited a subservience to the executive branch that continues to haunt us.”

I was raised to venerate Lee the principled patriot—but I want no association with Lee the defender of slavery.

Why is there still no memorial to Paine, the immigrant whose writing galvanized the American Revolution?

A review of Jill Lepore's new book, which she has called the most ambitious single-volume American history written in generations.

Though Donald Trump has made it into a catchphrase, he didn’t come up with the metaphor “drain the swamp.”

Some historical sites have struggled to reconcile founding-era exceptionalism with the true story of America’s original sin.