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 […]
In the last two decades, the Electoral College has come under harsh, though derivative, criticism as a result of the presidential elections in 2000 and 2016. Comparing the Electoral College at its inception to the Electoral College of 2020 is a distortion. For one, the twelfth amendment ended the practice of affording the presidency and […]
As adopted by the Constitutional Convention, Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution mandated that the population numbers forming the basis for calculating representation in the House of Representatives would “be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding […]
This month, we asked our contributors to consider the many changes of fortune that occurred over the tumultuous four decades that transformed thirteen British colonies into the nascent United States: What was the best strategic defeat, whether political or military, of the American Revolution and the founding era (roughly 1765 thru 1805)? That is, what […]
