Thomas Jefferson

West Ford’s descendants want to prove his parentage—and save the freedmen’s village he founded.

An American conservatism which subtly or directly marginalizes the Founding is on a fast track to a conservatism at odds with America’s roots itself.

The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

The story of President Andrew Jackson's 1,400-pound block of cheese.

The proliferation of antebellum print is analogous to our own tectonic shifts in how people communicate and what they communicate about.

Recent books by Woody Holton and Alan Taylor offer fresh perspectives on early US history but overstate the importance of white supremacy as its driving force.

Extending that compassion today could reverse past wrongs.

A century of tax avoidance later, the dynasties created in the 1900s are going strong.

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.

How a story told by a fugitive from slavery became a parable of American banking gone bad.

The American yam is not the food it says it is. How that came to be is a story of robbery, reinvention, and identity.

In 1741, the Royal Academy of Sciences held a contest searching for the origin of “blackness.” The results show how Enlightenment thinkers justified slavery.

George III was a model monarch, whose reputation finally deserves rehabilitation a quarter of a millennium later.

The plant explorers of the USDA succeeded in bringing the world’s fruits to American supermarkets. But at what human, ecological, and gustatory cost?

Are the truths in the Declaration of Independence really self-evident?

Georgia enacted the Citizen's Arrest Law in an attempt to maintain control of enslaved people.

The history of the United States as the history of capitalism.

Black people own just 2 percent of farmland in the United States. A decades-long history of loan denials at the USDA is a major reason why.

The U.S. Constitution was the reason for Madison and Hamilton's breakup.