BOOK REVIEW: Atlas of Independence: John Adams and the American Revolution by Chris Mackowski, (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, LLC, 2026) $16.95 Paperback Chris Mackowski’s Atlas of Independence positions John Adams as just that, a self-sacrificing man who attempts to direct his “reluctant colleagues” towards America’s independence. Mackowski is pretty plain in his argument […]
Understanding the important role played by the Dutch Republic[1] in the American Revolution is challenging. Few scholarly books and articles provide substantive details, and the role of the Dutch Republic is rarely adequately addressed in general histories of the period.[2] Nonetheless, the Dutch did play an important role—albeit a reluctant one—in aiding the united American […]
Richard Cranch was born on October 26, 1726, in Kingsbridge, Devon, England, the youngest of seven children.[1] The Cranch family had lived in Devon for centuries and had been involved in woolen manufacture for many years. Cranch was apprenticed as a wool-card maker, and emigrated to Boston on the ship Wilmington, arriving on November 2, […]
For all the flaws of the framers, Americans can still look to the founding era for wisdom and guidance. That deeply learned collection of statesmen, whatever its shortcomings, committed itself to advancing the public good and securing the long-term survival of the nascent nation.[1] And when the first members of congress, justices of the bench […]
The American Declaration of Independence boldly proclaims “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” These words encouraged Americans to fight for freedom and have inspired disadvantaged groups though out the world. Historian Joseph Ellis called the phrase “the most potent and consequential words in American […]
To the extent that historians give Thomas Paine credit for playing a significant role in the American Revolutionary Cause, it was his rousing call for independence in his widely read tract Common Sense, published January 9, 1776, that most agree was his chief contribution to America’s decision to separate from British rule. Paine turned up […]
During his time in England prior to the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin often wrote letters to The Public Advertiser, a London newspaper. In one of them, published on August 22, 1766, Franklin mentioned in passing that among his old friends he counts Lemuel Gulliver.[1] Gulliver was renowned for his voyages around the world, in which […]
George Washington was famously taciturn, often a man of few words in public gatherings. And though his published works are sparse in comparison to many of his fellow founders, he nevertheless left a voluminous written record of correspondence and diary entries that is still being parsed today.[1] It was while commanding the Continental Army that […]
BOOK REVIEW: Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic by Lindsay M. Chervinsky (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024) $34.99 hardcover It was the January term of my final year at Pacific Lutheran University. Thoroughly over the college experience (man cannot live on Hot Pockets and Diet Mountain Dew alone), […]
As the American Revolution morphed into a world war with the entrance of France and Spain, the diplomatic attempts to settle it became more complex. Europe became a hotbed of diplomatic activity, conducted by both state-sanctioned negotiators and freelancers of various sorts, all with their own agendas for negotiations. There was a series of third-party […]
America will celebrate the Semiquincentennial anniversary of its independence from Great Britain in 2026. The causes of that world-changing event were many and complexly intertwined, so new conjectures unsurprisingly continue to emerge from the archival mists. Because disputed taxes were objectively light, the current consensus stresses a narrative rooted in ideas to explain why many […]
It is not often that one comes across inspiration for research from a trading card. But sure enough, when this author came across a card produced by Topps featuring John Adams, he was inspired. The card, part of a set commemorating Presidential connections to the game of baseball, mentioned how Adams had mentioned playing a […]
Most stories have a chief villain. The story of the American Revolution is no different. One man stands out amongst all the rest in the minds of Massachusetts revolutionary leaders. James Otis, Samuel Adams, and especially John Adams accused Thomas Hutchinson as being the architect of all the oppressive laws that were being passed by […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor Geoff Smock on how in 1798, with tensions rising with France, John Adams advised young citizens that, “science and morals are the great pillars on which this country has been raised to its present population, opulence, and prosperity, and that these alone can advance, support, […]
It is in those first frenzied moments of war fever when declarations of patriotism are their most ardent. So it was for the “Young Men of the City of Philadelphia” in the spring of 1798, when the United States stood within a hair’s breadth of war with France. These young Americans, “anxious to preserve the […]
The idea that no one is above the law is a long-held and repeated precept of American constitutionalism. Its roots go back to the philosophical and historical foundations of western political thought. Holding a prominent place in this history is the thirteenth-century English Magna Carta. Although it does not explicitly use the phrase, the document—a […]
John Clark Ridpath wrote in 1898, The pre-revolutionists are the Titans of human history; the revolutionists proper are only heroes; and the post revolutionists are too frequently dwarfs and weaklings. This signifies that civilization advances by revolutionary stages, and that history sends out her tallest and best sons to explore the line of march and […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Unexpected Abigail Adams: A Woman “Not Apt to Be Intimidated” by John L. Smith, Jr. (Westholme, 2024, $32.50 hardcover) “I will never consent to have our sex considered an inferior point of light. Let each planet shine in their own orbit, God and nature intended it so—if man is Lord, woman is […]
Did Thomas Paine actively write against the American cause after emigrating from England in late 1774 and only opportunistically pretend to support the cause? When Paine was nominated for a Congressional position in April 1777, did delegate John Witherspoon hurl those accusations against Paine?[1] As other delegates were undoubtedly well aware, Witherspoon knew Paine personally. […]
John Marshall’s life (1755-1835) has been the subject of many authors over the nearly 190 years since his death. Albert Beveridge, Charles Hobson, and Leonard Baker immediately come to mind. There are others, of course; and there are those works which look at the life of Marshall’s wife, Mary (Polly). Their home of nearly fifty […]
The “whole of [President John] Adams’s single term was absorbed, to a degree unequaled in any other American presidency, with a single problem”: a diplomatic crisis with France.[1] Some Federalists must have been surprised that France, the United States’s greatest ally during the Revolution, became its greatest enemy within a generation. Not Adams: As a […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor Novia Liuon her examination of John Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, a response to Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot’s letter criticizing the US state constitutions. New episodes of Dispatchesare available for free every Saturday evening(Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, […]
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 in their opinions. Among them, John Adams stands out as a particularly clear deviation, continuing to espouse support for the Old World’s system of natural hierarchy long after the American Revolution. […]
Nathanael Greene is rightly remembered as one of the great combat leaders of the American Revolution. But he was also a deep political thinker, a Rhode Island politician before the war who did not hesitate to discuss the broader ramifications of the American Revolution with a wide range of Patriot notables, some of whom never […]
We often remember the controversy surrounding the Hutchinson Letters, which inspired many colonists to oppose the provincial government in Massachusetts, by talking about Benjamin Franklin (who found and sent the letters) and Samuel Adams (who helped publish them). Our memory of the letters’ author, Thomas Hutchinson, is often colored by a 1774 print by Paul Revere, […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews author, historian, and JAR Editorial Board member Ray Raphael on the memories of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas McKean about the Declaration of Independence and when it was actually signed. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon […]
John Adams was making his way from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania for a convening of the delegates tasked to craft a response to the Coercive Acts when he and his entourage arrived in Manhattan on the morning of Saturday August 20, 1774. He met that day with numerous dignitaries and dined late into the evening at […]
Thomas Jefferson has a Thucydidean, or fact-based, approach to the praxis of history. Evidence of that approach appeared early in his life, in his Literary Commonplace Book. There, Jefferson, quoted Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751), who wrote of history, rightly practiced. For history to be authentic, Jefferson, continuing to copy Bolingbroke, added that “these […]
“I, A. B.do promise and declare that I will remain in a peaceable Obedience to His Majesty, and will not take up Arms, nor encourage Others to take up Arms, in Opposition to His Authority, shall and may obtain a full and free Pardon of all Treason and misprisions of Treason, by him heretofore committed […]
It would be hard to find a more strident, vocal supporter of popular government during America’s founding period than Thomas Paine. The proposals put forth in his January 1776 pamphlet Common Sense for an “unmixed” and unchecked democratic scheme for America, designed to replace the British arrangement of balanced and mixed powers of King, Lords […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor David Otersen on the influence of political philosopher Alergnon Sidney on Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatches can now be […]
Georgia did not send a delegation to the first Continental Congress in 1774. The least populous colony of the thirteen British colonies in North America, Georgia was originally settled in 1663 by a group of men on land given to them by Charles I, King of England. They settled the land with the poorer people […]
Algernon Sidney was a seventeenth-century British political theorist, Member of Parliament, and Whig politician who was executed for treason on December 7, 1683, during the reign of Charles II. At his trial, the most incriminating evidence presented by the prosecution was a series of anti-monarchical passages from a seized manuscript of Sidney’s reformist treatise, Discourses […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews historian and JAR contributor Shawn David McGhee explains how a plot was devised to unseat Vice President John Adams on partisan lines during the 1792 election. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and […]
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 and once again received unanimous support from the Electoral College.[2] Shifting academic focus from the first magistrate to the second, however, reframes the 1792 contest as a struggle for the soul […]
As a collateral descendant of Daniel Hitchcock (first cousin, nine times removed), I have always been fascinated by the short but important life of this colonel from Providence, Rhode Island, who was taken by illness following the Battle of Princeton at the young age of thirty-seven. Likely because there is neither an existing house nor […]
In the Spring of 1776, as the American Revolution was underway the movement of the Colonies towards independence was just starting to gain steam. In the Second Continental Congress, John Adams, with an eye towards the future, championed a resolution that would allow each of the “united colonies” to assume the powers of government and […]
The American Revolution spurred the world’s first significant movement to abolish slavery and the African slave trade.[1] Before then, there was virtually no antislavery activity in any of the thirteen colonies of North America, or for that matter, anywhere else in the world. There was some limited antislavery dialogue in England, but its abolitionist movement […]
Alexander Hamilton penned most of the famous series of essays called the Federalist Papers. In Federalist 71, published in March 1788, he wrote this notable paragraph: It is a just observation, that the people commonly INTEND the PUBLIC GOOD. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who […]