Thomas Paine

We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be.

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

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

Despite its failures and limitations, the American Revolution unleashed popular aspirations to throw off tyranny of all kinds.

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.

Like the 1619 Project, two new books on the Constitution reflect a vigorous debate about what has changed in the American past—and what hasn’t.

How the secular movement underestimated the endurance of religion.

In her new book, Colley shows how written constitutions developed both as a way to further justify rulers and to turn rebellions into legitimate governments.

The story of the democratic movements that the framers of the U.S. Constitution feared and sought to suppress.

On the beginnings of our stories—and the history of who owns them.

The problem with progressive intellectuals looking to the nation's founders for progressive models.

America's sense of religious nationalism was forged in the same fires that ignited the profoundly secular French Revolution.

The intended audience for the document could be found in the royal houses of France and Spain.

At the founding of America, leaders predicted that a concentration of wealth would weaken the republic.

On the robust influence of labor reform and antislavery ideas and movements on each other from the early National period to the Civil War.

Tax resistance has long opposed war and empire in North America, and could be a way to resist U.S. funding of violence in Gaza today.

America’s only successful insurrection.

The Founders didn’t believe the Constitution had a fixed meaning. So why do so many of the justices?

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s book can guide us through turbulent conversations about revolution, social change, and the founding of America.

One of the country’s greatest rhetorical traditions still has the power to remind us of our founding principles.