An important issue that the Congressional delegates faced when drafting the Constitution was how to create an equitable balance in voting rights between the…
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Today’s Americans revere the Founding Fathers as egalitarian exceptions within the eighteenth century’s hierarchical world. Yet, these men were neither uniform nor wholly democratic…
Scholars typically cast the outcome of the second presidential election as either a forgone conclusion or a non-event.[1] After all, George Washington ran unchallenged…
Every ten years the United States engages in the process of re-apportionment, wherein each state with more than one House seat redraws their Congressional…
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There was much discussion over the impeachment process during the Constitution’s ratifying debates. Federalists argued that the ability to impeach an individual gave disproportionate…
William Goforth played significant roles in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio in the age of the American Revolution and the Early Republic and he…
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Jefferson’s views on rebellion and revolution, when they are addressed, are often largely misapprehended in the secondary literature. One reason for the confusion is…
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A separation of powers is a defining structural feature of the federal government established by the United States Constitution, yet an explicit statement of…
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In 1790, when Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, it triggered lots of backlash from people like Thomas Paine, Richard…
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews author Chris Coelho on the life and influence of Timothy Matlack, famed for being the scribe…
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The scribe of the Declaration of Independence—and perhaps the first man to read it in public—was born on March 28, 1736 in Haddonfield, New…
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews political scientist and JAR contributor Haimo Li on how the Maryland declaration of rights outlawed ex…
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Scholars generally view that the Framers of the United States Constitution “recalled the historical tyrannies of Great Britain and France in establishing the prohibitions…
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On November 21, 1789, the people of the state of North Carolina ratified the United States Constitution. On May 29, 1790, the people of…
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Following the Constitutional Convention’s completion of the United States Constitution in the Fall of 1787, many of those involved in its creation embarked on…
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews Pulitzer-prize winning historian Thomas E. Ricks on his new book, First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from…
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First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned From the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country by Thomas E. Ricks (New York, NY: Harper…
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This month we asked our contributors: If George Washington had not run for President in 1789, who would you like to have had as…
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Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, in the first half of the eighteenth century, and John Taylor of Caroline in the 1790s, both feared that…
Celebrated for his stirring words in the Declaration of Independence, and having profited upon the popularity since, Thomas Jefferson was now America’s chief magistrate—and…
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What most Americans know about the Revolutionary War they learned when they were in elementary or middle school. The curricular timing is fortunate in…
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A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution by David Head (New York: Pegasus Books, 2019)…
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Author’s Note: Selections from all resolutions and working drafts are italicized. Most of what we know about the framers’ discussions comes from James Madison’s…
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Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution by Jeff Broadwater (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019) Before getting into the…
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In 1793, a widely circulated American editorial observed, “A few years ago, to say of any man that he was ‘a friend to toleration,’…
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In a country in which one of the main constitutional principles is separation of church and state, it is counter-intuitive to find that there…
Speaking at South Carolina’s ratification convention in 1788, Charles Pinckney derided the Articles of Confederation as a “miserable, feeble mockery of government.” Pinckney was…
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This month, we asked our contributors to consider the many changes of fortune that occurred over the tumultuous four decades that transformed thirteen British…
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When the Second Continental Congress met in June 1775, they were not prepared for what they found. Several months earlier on April 19 the…
As the Revolutionary War was coming to an end, financial problems came to the forefront: to name a few, the country’s debts to France,…
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Through four months in the summer of 1787, passionate arguments over political principles filled the Pennsylvania State House while hard-nosed political horse-trading buzzed in…
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The charge was leveled often in his own time, as it has been ever since: James Madison is and was a hypocrite—a man inconstant…
Thomas Jefferson, that American Sphinx,[1] is perhaps Alexander Hamilton’s only rival within the high pantheon of the founding generation for enigma. Hamilton’s character recalls…
As Tidewater lands played out, exhausted from repeated tobacco plantings, or were encumbered by inheritance, the established church moved with young planters like Peter…
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Book Review: James Madison and the Making of America by Kevin R. C. Gutzman (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) In James Madison and the Making…
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Myth: The Federalist Nos. 10 and 51, written by James Madison, provided the closing case in the ratification debates. Opponents of the proposed federal…