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…
BOOK REVIEW: His Masterly Pen: A Biography of Jefferson the Writer by Fred Kaplan (New York City, NY: HarperCollins, 2022) Thomas Jefferson was many things….
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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…
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BOOK REVIEW: Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh by Thomas S. Kidd (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022) There seems to be a…
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,…
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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…
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…
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In Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), Jefferson wrote of King George III’s unwillingness to use his “negative” to veto unjust proposals….
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After seven years of fighting in the Revolutionary War, Otho Holland Williams returned home. It was the Spring of 1782. When he left Frederick,…
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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…
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews historian M. Andrew Holowchak on interpreting the distinctions Thomas Jefferson made between rebellion, revolution, and treason. New…
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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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“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known…
When Thomas Jefferson wrote the twenty-seven grievances against the King listed in the Declaration of Independence, he did so with the intention of encapsulating…
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In the second half of the 1700s, French natural historian Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, formulated what would be dubbed the “New World degeneracy”…
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Since James Thomas Flexner’s 1974 Pulitzer recognition for his biography of George Washington, one of the axioms of the American founding is that the…
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BOOK REVIEW: Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence by Robert G. Parkinson (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early…
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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…
In the early years of the nineteenth century, the founders of the new American Republic were lurching forward from the shockingly successful outcome of…
Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy (1754–1836) was a famous French Enlightenment philosopher. Thomas Jefferson admired him, and was so impressed with his…
Jefferson scholars all knew that Thomas Jefferson often disparaged the label “Tory” in his political writings. For Jefferson, being called a Whig would signify…
Thomas Jefferson is well-known for his so-called “Frenchified” stance.[1] On the topic of the relationship between Jefferson and French Revolution, scholarly accounts often stop…
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BOOK REVIEW: Patriotism & Profit: Washington, Hamilton, Schuyler & the Rivalry for America’s Capital City by Susan Nagel (Pegasus Books, 2021). In Patriotism & Profit:…
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Speaking on Independence Day, 1821, John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the Unites States and the son of John Adams, a signer of the…
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Clemson University Professor C. Bradley Thompson is a nationally recognized historian and Revolutionary Era scholar whose most recent book, America’s Revolutionary Mind, has earned…
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If the gunfire at Lexington and Concord was the “shot heard round the world,” the phrases in the Declaration of Independence were the words…
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“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . .” Who were the first people to hear Thomas Jefferson’s memorable words spoken in…
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews educator and JAR contributor Geoff Smock on his research into the teenage years of Thomas Jefferson,…
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Within the pantheon of Founding Fathers, only George Washington was more impenetrable than was Thomas Jefferson—then and now. The man who would come to…
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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…
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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…
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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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…
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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…
During September–October 1789, two heroes of the American War of Independence, both members of the Society of Cincinnati, were in the Polish capital of…
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The Shores of Tripoli: A Strategy Game by Kevin Bertram (Fort Circle Games: Washington, DC) Recently I was fortunate to be asked to review a…
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In October 1774, in a stunning and radical move, delegates of the First Continental Congress signed a pledge for the thirteen mainland colonies not…
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The American Revolution changed the way Americans viewed one of the world’s great tragedies: the African slave trade. The long march to end the…