Denials of Black humanity, free and enslaved, coexisted with explicit acknowledgment that enslaved Black people, though legally deemed “property,” were people.

Too often, historians turn to records of constituent or legislative deliberations from the eighteenth century as a source to draw quotations from early American political figures, without questioning their accuracy.

Interposition was not a claim that state sovereignty could or should displace national authority, but a claim that American federalism needed to preserve some balance between state and national authority.

Jefferson’s system depended on shoring up the bulwarks of race and basing the law on a theory of government that withdrew the protection of government from unfavored groups.

Ultimately, books are static, material things. As historians and writers, we’re always changing, and so is the field of history.

He held multiple allegiances during the Revolution, all of which were connected or stemmed from the importance he placed on familial self-preservation.

For eight years, he skillfully combined traditional elite dining with an anti-monarchical ideology and Virginian sociability in a way that pleased his dinner guests and promoted his own agenda.

In the crested buttes and slot canyons of the Internet that comprise the academic blogosphere, pseudonymity has been controversial.

Every recent presidential election cycle, about the time a campaign goes negative, newspapers run a story like the one in the […]

[BLOGITORIAL NOTE: Just to model the true spirit of democratic pluralism, we wanted readers to know up front that today’s […]

A review of Michael Drexler and Ed White’s recent collaboration, The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr

“We the People” once had many ways of exercising their sovereignty besides those ordained and established in the Federal Constitution. […]

The Constitution’s compromises added an element of complexity to the Constitution that defies any effort to reduce it to Twitter-sized proslavery or antislavery soundbites that implicate or exonerate the founders.

So mutilated did his Notes become, concludes Bilder, that even Madison himself eventually realized that he had lost forever the original convention proceedings of 1787.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Franklin had designed his currency to nurture Americans’ fortitude and resolve.

Oral tradition, nationalism, and the invention of history

Congress sought to impose frugality and economic restraint as a means to unite a divergent people.

It turns out that, in legal terms, the mystery of who found the broadside matters a lot less than who lost it.

Carp’s Boston Sons of Liberty are not the vanguard of the revolutionary era, as we have often seen them depicted, but rather a lot of wayward republicans.

Yet it’s not at all clear what Thomas Jefferson’s political legacy, his racist writings, his slaveholding, his proclamations against slavery, his fear of miscegenation, and his (apparently) active miscegenation mean to us when taken together.

The banyan announced something about the inner mind and character of the man who wore it.

Why does any piece of the past survive?

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Now, instead of antiseptic and ahistorical entities, institutions became intensely historical and capable of dramatic and dynamic change.

“Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow […]

Jefferson used the library he sold to Congress as a self-fashioning project to shape his legacy and the way he wished to be viewed by posterity.

When it came to women being federal employees, Jefferson could not see the light for the lighthouse.

Jefferson quoted in Greek to substantiate a racial hierarchy by linking racial identity and classical learning, but the Greek in that quotation has been plagued by errors.

While other scholars have catalogued the paintings in Mount Vernon … Manca goes further to consider why Washington hung certain pictures in particular rooms or chose not to display others at all.

A meditation on early nineteenth-century Chinese portraits of George Washington.

Steven K. Green demonstrates how easily the historical inventions of one era may become the historical facts of another.

There has never been a shortage of negative depictions of Burr, but it has become a nearly two-centuries-old cliché that he “has always been out of favor,” that he has only enjoyed the reputation of “outright villain” among the founders.

For Cheney, the Imperial Presidency is a matter of personal and ideological conviction.

Each generation has contextualized the sexuality of the founders differently but ultimately came to value them as role models for their masculinity and sexuality.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

It was far less labor intensive—and therefore less expensive—for a painter or engraver to render a head than a full figure posed against an elaborate background.

It might have been old age that dimmed his memory and robbed him of a garrulousness that likely tired his grandchildren. It might have been the diffidence of a habitual loser unaccustomed to telling officialdom something good about himself. It might have been a posttraumatic reluctance to delve too deeply into old memories of terror and pain.

In September of 1776, the Continental Navy became the first American military branch to designate an official uniform. In March […]

The ribbon holds enormous potential for students of American military and political culture during the American Revolution, as well as of eighteenth-century American art history.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Many who write books about the founders focus on mythic “character” rather than the real political environment, the nasty manner of politics.

Patent trolls are of much too recent origin for Jefferson to have ever looked one in the eye.

He [Hamilton] did not trust ordinary American voters.

A Letter to Jefferson from Monticello Westward the course of empire makes its way. —Bishop George Berkeley                     I I climbed […]

It is fair to say that had the election in Virginia’s Fifth District gone the other way, the nation’s early political history would have been considerably altered.

Jefferson is the organizing spirit of a web of connections that endlessly entice the researcher and lead to continual illumination as well as further uncertainty.

How could I tell that story for people who lived and died more than a century ago?

Obsessed with status, revolutionary gentlemen aimed to strengthen their newly acquired political authority by promoting social, cultural, and economic practices and associations that emphasized hierarchy and obedience in the 1780s.

I entered the archive in Florence in June 2015 looking for one item, and I walked out with something completely unexpected, yet to which I was deeply and personally connected.

Carla Mulford’s new book examines Benjamin Franklin’s approach to empire.

Vowell has a sharp eye for paradox, contradiction, coincidence, and most especially for hypocrisy. She delights in poking her finger into the eye of American complacency.

Common-place talks with Brian Murphy about the business and politics of early New York State.

At a time when the wealth of the new nation derived from farming, importing exotic plants […] and establishing the systems of practice needed to make plants valuable were vitally important.

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg have written a monumental work, detailing the lives of two men—James Madison and Thomas Jefferson—whose […]

Paul Revere was the only major patriot who was also a founder—literally. He started a successful iron foundry in 1788, […]

In these galleries, the museum’s curators have been able to unite many of its familiar objects with less familiar ones that had formerly been relegated to storage, more than doubling what had been on view before.

In the Federalist view, “self-created” associations—that is, those operating without charters and government sanction—were illegitimate because they divided the community instead of uniting it, as the agencies of civil society should do.

Brian Murphy’s argues that the seeds of business corporations were planted during the early republic.

Ask the Author invites a group of distinguished scholars of Revolutionary America to participate in a forum on the continuing importance of The Stamp Act Crisis.

Considering figures as diverse as Bach, Jefferson, Beethoven, and Frederick Douglass, Catherine Jones explores the interaction of two major art forms over the course of a century.

Nelson’s driving argument is that the “fear of legislative tyranny” that animated royalists in the 1640s and 1650s also shaped the constitutional thought of an influential group he labels “patriot royalists.”

Matthew Garrett, Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 256 pp., $65. Matthew Garrett’s […]

In these accounts Washington did not add “So help me God” to the oath. In fact, no account of his inauguration, either contemporaneous or later, has Washington saying “So help me God”—until 1854.

So, over this past weekend I was sweating over a long-overdue article [hi, Sean!] on Philip Freneau, the so-called “poet […]

The Greeks were the cradle of the West. No others need apply.

As one of my Clemente students once said in class: “Slavery was America’s original sin, but we’re all still paying for it.”

Artists seemed to float above (or outside) the fray, but they certainly made hay in the shadow of the Revolution fixing the public memory of the event and its cast of characters.

The book extrapolates from overwhelmingly catastrophic, unsettling details to examine larger questions.

The secrecy of brotherhood made brothers; men achieved their highest emotional possibility in republican secrecy.

The View from Mount Vernon

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“How did Independence National Historical Park become the location for what may become the most powerful commemoration of the impact, achievements, and aspirations of people held in slavery ever built in the United States?”

Even as Democrats condemned powerful private institutions in the name of equality, the most prescient nineteenth-century observer of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, applauded those institutions.

Not until the end of the nineteenth century did people begin to think that Monticello, as a historical place, should be preserved in something like its “original state.”

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Does literature matter to politics and law?

In the 1820s, the idea of the traveler was in flux, a category that had come to encompass every itinerant from Joseph Banks, science officer of the Endeavour, to British lads on vacation.

With so many uses, the almanac, like an iPhone, was truly interactive.

We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be.

The difficulty of making a good American Revolution movie has something to do with the challenge of finding a plot for the Revolution that can be arranged in the form of a family drama.

The “new atheism” derives from a long-established free-thinking tradition in which Thomas Paine has a key place.

If Paine’s brand of radicalism helped mark the ideological dividing line between Republicans and Federalists in the 1790s and 1800s, his words have more recently been appropriated by politicians from across the political spectrum.

Jefferson documented his collection decisions in this manuscript—which books to retain, which ones to give away, and to whom.

What version of the past was this? Was I really getting a taste of what life would have been like for someone like Franklin during his many months at sea?

We learn how, when, and where High Federalism began to alienate Americans with its disturbing encroachments on the most basic forms of democracy and dissent.

What was Burr to do, once the path to further political advancement was barred?

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“In the end, the Old Man of the Mountain proved just as mortal as the race of creatures whose face he resembled, the race that had tried and failed to ensure that the Old Man would last forever.”

In short, free American males could have owned firearms to further their personal happiness and should have owned firearms to help protect the community.

In [Grant’s] view, offered in the form of a press release issued for the painting’s public debut, the cherry-tree story was at once too good to be true and “too good to lose.”

When you encounter evidence of kinship between owners and slaves you have, first of all, learned something new about the complexity of their world, and next you are confronted with the question: did knowledge of his or her kinship to slaves influence the actions of an owner?

If Adams had not settled the Quasi-War with France and demobilized the army, might the Federalists have attempted a coup?

The past is often portrayed in ways that celebrate the victors, and we are all familiar with versions of history that function as propaganda for those who hold power.

“As the war with Iraq loomed through the 2002-03 school year, we heard echoes from conflicts throughout U.S. history.”

In place of powdered wigs and radical ideals, Berkin shows us bloody legs and dirty shirts.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

Burstein is most provocative and imaginative, and the book is most intriguing, when he is exploring the “Jefferson-Hemings puzzle,” as he terms it.

The issue here is not one of historical merit but whether tools intended to give voice to the voiceless should be used on elites whose immense paper trails allow them to speak.

Translating John and Abigail’s correspondence into contemporary social media posts prompted students to look outward and consider the continuities and discontinuities between past and present social media.

Simple, yet significant teaching moves can result in students who can make informed decisions, who can develop reasoned arguments, and who can engage in problem solving.

“It may seem natural to us that in 1825 the children and grandchildren of minutemen would commemorate the fight at the North Bridge. It was not.”

“Plantation slavery was in decline in Louisiana when it was purchased. Thereafter, Arkansas and Missouri only came into the Union as slave states by bare majorities. Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Cause, a republic of free and independent yeoman farmers, was lost in a series of insufficiently contested choices.”

Common-place asks David Waldstreicher whether Franklin deserves his reputation as the nation’s antislavery founder.

Even into the twentieth century, I learned, Bethel’s Independence struck a nerve for some in the white community, while in the black community it remained a fiercely prideful monument of black uplift.

If John Adams recognized Winthrop as a Founding Father, and was joined in that judgment by a growing number of Americans in the nineteenth century, how and when did we manage to forget Winthrop?

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“As early-nineteenth-century Americans set out to conquer the western wilderness, this mythical creature helped them imagine themselves as new rulers of the natural world.”

“Kukla situates the purchase in the context of a fragile American union, impetuous western settlers, and calculating New England politicians.”

    Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana | Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New […]

The late-breaking beatification of John Adams and his family, soon to be a major monument, forms one of the wonders […]

“The challenging, yet glorious, differences among visitors’ expectations when they come to Independence Hall constitute a unique opportunity for learning.”

“History concerns what Napoleon did; biography concerns what it meant to him.”

“Too many historians of recent generations, according to Marwick, have been obsessed with theory and with abstractions such as discourse analysis.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The fact that everyone in the city helped to build or run the new government led to a new kind of domesticity that was literally shaped by national politics, although in ways L’Enfant and Washington could not have foreseen.”

“With respect to federalism, the twentieth century has witnessed a massive increase in the power of the national government, produced above all but not only by the New Deal.”

“The study guide, official or unofficial, is the least common denominator and the most common purchase at most of our state colleges and universities.”

“The Washington experience is one that my students never forget.”

“In their speeches in Philadelphia, their private letters [ . . . ], and their newspaper essays, the Framers made it abundantly clear that they expected the Constitution to benefit creditors and Americans who had speculated, whether in Indian land or war bonds.”

“The labor of taking notes, expanding them, and preparing himself as one of the most important participants in the debates, Madison said, nearly killed him.”

“How good is The Founders’ Constitution at what it claims to do? The answer depends in part on what you choose to look at.”

“Freeman convincingly demonstrates that the Founding Fathers of the United States not only hearkened to Old World notions like ‘rank,’ ‘character,’ and ‘fame’; they daily lived them.”

“[W]ere there not shared understandings and assumptions that shaped political decisions as profoundly as did conflicting partisan ideologies–on occasion, even more profoundly?”

“[T]hese days it seems Americans prefer their Founding Fathers warts and all: fresher, snappier, even naughty.”

While the Founders of the United States have seen their reputations downgraded in some quarters over the past few decades, […]

“What Mount Vernon Love Story offers are not steamy sex scenes, of which there’s nary a one (was it the teeth?), but countless moments spent in the throes of hot, throbbing interior decorating.

Turning journalists into heroes takes some doing.

—The Mekons

Instantly there is a strong spark and stroke, and the whole line of gold, which completes the communication, between the top and bottom of the bottle, [appears] a vivid flame, like the sharpest lightning

The reverend author of this book before us, which we are at a loss whether to denominate a biography, or a novel, founded on fact, has presented a specimen of writing, which for variety and oddity is almost an unique in the annals of literature.

Franklin figures prominently in Jon Butler’s Becoming America, a wide-ranging and spirited book that describes the emergence of the first modern culture in a way that will satisfy many readers and provoke others.

Appleby’s Americans did not fight the Revolution, nor apparently remember it, nor even spend much time celebrating or thinking about what had happened to the previous generation. Rather, they took the Revolution’s fruits–and ran toward a new future.

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