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 […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor James M. Smith on the political, legal, and philosophical influences considered by the First Continental Congress in the formulation of their Declaration of Rights, a 1774 draft that declared the American colonies independent, yet was never brought up for a full vote in that congress. […]
During the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century the political philosophers of Europe were writing and discussing some new and radical ideas on what a government should look like and how it should function. They would reshape the political landscape in the late eighteenth century and well into the twentieth. One of the most […]
If the gunfire at Lexington and Concord was the “shot heard round the world,” the phrases in the Declaration of Independence were the words read around the world. In the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson declared America an independent nation, rooting his ideas in political theory and justifying them with a list of grievances.[1] After the Declaration was […]
Despite Cicero’s significant reputation and widespread readership, little scholarship has focused upon Cicero’s reputation and oratorical practices’ influence upon the Founding Generation. Once Cicero delivered his orations at the court case of Roscius of Ameria, he was considered a prodigy of oratory. His career quickly took off, with him ascending each rank of a Roman […]
The Routledge Guide to Paine’s Rights of Man by Frances A. Chiu (London & New York: Routledge, 2020) The American Revolution, John Adams famously wrote in 1818, was begun in the “minds and hearts of the people” before the American Revolutionary War began.[1] It was a suggestion that the Revolution was unique and the result of […]
Women in all states won the universal right to vote one hundred years ago through the ratification of the United States Constitution’s 19th Amendment in 1920. Though women in Seneca Falls, New York, launched the women’s rights movement in 1848 when they claimed that the Declaration of Independence applied to women in the Declaration of […]
George Washington Dealmaker-In-Chief: The Story of How the Father of Our Country Unleashed the Entrepreneurial Spirit in America by Cyrus A. Ansary (Lambert Publications, LLC, 2019) Few writers on George Washington have examined his economic vision for the new American nation. Cyrus A. Ansary sets out to do just that. He argues that Washington, as […]
Although by 1775 hostilities between Great Britain and the American colonies had commenced, there were still those within the colonies who believed that the relationship between the two parties could be restored. Joseph Galloway’s 1775 pamphlet A Candid Examination of the Mutual Claims of Great Britain, and the Colonies: With a Plan of Accommodation on […]
