Thomas Paine

Amid plans to mark the nation’s semiquincentennial, many are asking whether or not the people really do rule, and whether the law is still king.

The most consequential shift that year was not one of battle lines but of ideology.

The framers of the United States Constitution envisoned economic discipline that they thought was a requirement for a republic to endure.

A Quaker abolitionist hoped to convince the Virginian Founders to end slavery by appealing to their sense of manhood. They were not persuaded.

There’s a lot more to Founding Father John Dickinson than not signing the Declaration of Independence.

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

They rejected kings and were sincerely concerned about the possibility of a dictatorship. But we need to move past founder-worship and focus on justice.

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.

While the concept stretches back centuries, it has garnered significant attention in recent decades.

Historians Rosemarie Zagarri and Holly Brewer explain the anti-monarchical origins of the Constitution and the presidency.

'All men are created equal' coexisted with the understanding that not all were meant to be treated equally in life.

American thinkers consider what the already occupied West could fund.

Far from spelling the end of anti-market politics, basic income proposals are one place where it can and has flourished.

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

They looked at France and said: “Make it make sense.”