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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…
Political Thought and the Origins of the American Presidency edited by Ben Lowe (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2021) In Political Thought and the…
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In the weeks before it declared independence, the Continental Congress was already hard at work building the institutions it would need to maintain the…
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In 1796 Daniel Hylton, a wealthy Virginian farmer, brought a suit before the United States Supreme Court arguing that a federal tax on carriages…
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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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As adopted by the Constitutional Convention, Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution mandated that the population numbers forming the basis for…
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“There has been hell to pay in Philadelphia,” exclaimed Samuel Shaw, referring to the Fort Wilson Riot of October 4, 1779 in a letter…
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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…