John Milton

From white supremacists to black activists, readers have sought moral legitimacy in Milton’s epic poem.

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

The political preacher who made the religion look bad.

After the English Revolution—and an island’s experiment with republicanism—a genuine restoration was never in the cards.

How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante.

They were not the nation's first settlers, but they were the most fractious.