John Adams

Touring the palimpsests of cities.

How family political dynasties in America came to be.

More than an artful calligrapher, John Hancock forswore the austerity of his fellow Bostonians, and their extremism.

Alexander Hamilton always believed that the providential protection that kept the small Jewish world alive would embrace his own extraordinary nation.

Writing under ancient veneers allowed partisans to politicize and weaponize ancient history during the turbulent start of the Federal Republic.

The Founding Fathers made startlingly progressive statements that didn’t make it into popular history.

The presence of Federalist judges frustrated Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party, bring justice Samuel Chase under fire.

Interposition was a claim that American federalism needed to preserve some balance between state and national authority.

Americans have long nurtured mixed feelings about age and aged leaders. Yet during the country’s founding, a young America admired venerable old sages.

How conservatives made him their icon and distorted his ideas.

How should a republic honor its leaders?

Americans disparaged the British as arsonists. But the rebels fought with fire too.

The shadow of Samuel Adams, a crafty and government-wary revolutionary, lingers over the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

"We have lost sight of some essential aspects of happiness that the founders clearly had in mind."

The march toward revolution in America coincided with a smallpox epidemic. True freedom now meant freedom from disease as well.

Governors Ron DeSantis and Gretchen Whitmer took opposite approaches to covid in swing states — but each sailed to reelection.

The senators, like the grand jurors, knew their man, and probably conceded that Temple had given him the hiding he had been asking for. 

Is Jefferson's Bible evidence that the Founding Fathers engaged with scripture to birth a Christian nation? Or that they sought to foster a new secular order?

A virtuoso of the eighteenth-century version of viral memes and fake news, he had a sense of political theatre that helped create a radical new reality.

The Broadway revival of the musical means less to reanimate the nation’s founding than to talk back to it.