History also changes because of strange, flawed, deeply human people doing unremarkable, tedious, and often boring work.

Maine passed its first abortion statute in 1840, not long after the pardon of Dr. Call. Could there be a connection?

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.

Historians have not only underestimated the sheer number of underage soldiers who fought for the Union, they have also overlooked the significance of the legal, political, and administrative battles these youths provoked.

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.

By leading the risky but eventually successful financial operation, Elisha justified his name.

Women’s economic labor was essential to state function.

As a teacher, the Black convention movement in the 1850s has helped me to broaden my story of the origins of the Civil War, especially the pitfalls to avoid when it comes to focusing too heavily on the controversy over slavery in the territories.

The Proctor of the play was inspired by Miller’s projection of himself into events of 1692 and it is worth digging a bit deeper into the family matters between John and Elizabeth. 

“The life of a citizen,” they reminded the all-male jury, “lies in the hands of woman.” The result made prosecuting sexual assaults among acquaintances all but impossible.  

Marine insurance itself was a business that flourished during periods of war and uncertainty. It had a complex relationship with the British state.

Well, of course he was. American historical narratives have always told us so, and recent prize-winning tomes that agree on […]

“[R]everence for the document is key to how people today think of the Constitution.”

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

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Once the door was opened to popular control of government, who knew how far the people would go?

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.

In 1849, Benjamin F. Roberts, an African American shoemaker, filed suit against the Boston School Committee after they refused to […]

WERE EARLY AMERICAN ELECTIONS FOR WHITE MEN ONLY?

“But what if women indeed were mentioned? Would we have to change our interpretation of the place of women in the Constitution?”

“Impracticable the electoral college surely is. And it is precisely because of its improbable construction that today’s electoral college remains one of the least altered institutions established by the Constitution of 1787. . .”

2016 will mark not just the election of the forty-fifth president of the United States, but also the 200th anniversary of the creation of the first ever lobbying agency in the national capital, an agency that was founded by a Delaware factory manager named Isaac Briggs.

Mather, like most other Christians of the time, also believed that racial equality before God did not demand equality on Earth–and, in particular, that it was wholly compatible with the institution of slavery.

“While bringing an incident of rape to legal officials was undoubtedly challenging for all victims, ironically, the cases that might be most successfully prosecuted were often the most difficult for victims to bring to court.”

“As a result of their proximity to legal proceedings, many tavern keepers worked as common lawyers in addition to running their hostels.”

It should be said that the founders’ views on these matters have not survived strict historical scrutiny.

“Which babies born outside the U.S. count as Americans from birth? And which men and women can bestow U.S. citizenship, automatically, upon their children?”

Courtroom Drama, Constitutional Crisis and the Southern Quest to Nationalize Slavery

“Marshall remade the Court.”

Thomas Crawford’s “Statue of Freedom”

In the two decades following the Revolutionary War, one of the most critical and troubling questions facing the emerging nation was thus whether Americans would enjoy the free navigation of the Mississippi River.

An eighteenth-century novel explores how American society handles the collateral damage of capitalism—and who deserves a second chance.

…the discourse of safety pioneered by the insurance industry brought about important transformations in urban design, architecture, and public health.

The English Puritans who founded Massachusetts in 1630 formed a society as committed to religion as any in history. But for them, marriage was a civil union, a contract, not a sacred rite.

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

Rao’s story is less about federal financial policy than about how these laws worked on a daily basis. What develops is a story about the culture of Atlantic capitalism on the waterfront.

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

There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example
of how it works.

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

“I had argued that the establishment of the presidency proved to be the single most difficult and puzzling problem in institutional design that the Framers of the Constitution had confronted.”

“[L]et’s first distinguish between at least three distinct kinds of Clinton hating: conservative Clinton hating, left-liberal Clinton hating, and cosmopolitan Clinton hating.”

“Collective sovereignty is not what Americans sought. They wanted a rule of law that was consistent and fair.”

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

Why did authorities feel the need to apply police powers to sex?

Public opinion, explosive economic growth, and jealous state legislatures would not countenance the abolition of corporations.

Gone are the days of poring over microfilm for weeks to find data relevant to particular research interests. With this sleek Website, a few pointed searches can unveil hundreds of pertinent published documents for scholars interested in various topics related to early American history.

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.

The labor theory of settlement contains some conflicts with the standard liberal account.

In their law talk, Americans had to grapple with difficult questions such as the purpose of punishment, the right to judge, and the authority of lawgivers

“[I]f justice—holding the guilty accountable—is actually a social priority, is it not possible that knowledge of a defendant’s past might further that end?”

Few topics in Atlantic history elicit more debate or stronger feelings than the transatlantic slave trade.

This photograph of Abraham Lincoln and his son Thomas (Tad) was taken by Anthony Berger in Mathew Brady’s Washington, D.C. […]

New things are happening with the Stamp Act, and this volume should signal to a broad range of scholars that 1765 is a good year for deep thinking.

Nearly since the ink was drying on the Declaration of Independence, nationalistic Americans have opined that American nationhood was inevitable, […]

After the Judiciary Act of 1789, courts came to wrestle with the need to mediate between state and federal judiciaries as they operated within a single overarching polity.

The CCP is committed to making available historical Black activism because it speaks to issues that occupy today’s movements, today’s concerns, today’s changing same.

For liability purposes, it is the sea that will kill you.—Pirate Captain, The Simpsons “In the beginning was the land.” […]

Swashbucklers, rogues, and scoundrels—the legacy of early modern sea rovers in popular culture has made piracy basically synonymous with villainy. […]

Kelly A. Ryan’s work, Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700-1830, explores the intersections of patriarchal power and […]

Caleb Smith, The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. 288 pp., $35.

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Acting out of a world still organized around the tenets of mercantilism, colonial Americans invented another approach to value.

The cast of characters in Robert Love’s Warnings is astonishing. William Collier, a British veteran of the Seven Years’ War, journeyed to Boston from as far as South Carolina and East Florida in hopes of obtaining passage back to England.

U.S. citizenship and suffrage have not always been two sides of the American coin. . . . the voters who elected presidents from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln included many thousands who were not United States citizens.

or, Please Don’t Accuse Me of Being Theodore Parker Incarnate Whenever I attend panels or professional conferences that are about […]

Stowe took a fugitive black man into her home and, under the threat of very real danger, waited upon him, hid him, and allowed her children to help care for him.

How did a speech that began in Kansas end up in the Caribbean, by way of Crimea?

The backlash against these American laws and their increasingly global reach raises a question: does this regime of intellectual property law represent something intrinsic about the United States—not just its economy, but its culture and society?

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Contingency is in; inexorability is out.

The willy-nilly growth of the nation that had made its postal system a logistical marvel also required the establishment of a hub to process misdirected letters.

Since the doleful events of September 11, one of the points made by almost everyone, from the president to television […]

Common-place injects a new issue into the political campaign as the 2016 presidential race enters its final stage.

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.

Can less produce more?

Participation in a privileged culture of masculinity was an important part of achieving and maintaining political power.

How could any scholar claim to have seriously interpreted the history of the
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American state, without foregrounding the experience of those peoples who were first, most frequently, and most punishingly targeted by government policy in the United States?

When Thomas Harris’s ghost appeared to his childhood friend William Briggs across a field one March morning in 1792, he […]

History and the Found Poem Debt We may never know the mystery of sleep.We don’t want to become machines. But […]

Historians, find the pattern Assuming there is one, besides electoral fear. Any thoughts? Any other maps this resembles?   September […]

The early banks were typically established by individuals with common ties—whether political, social, or commercial in nature.

Frances Trollope, the English-born Tory, found American religious habits loathsome (in truth, she found most everything about America loathsome). But […]

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

The dollar provided Americans with a common numeraire, a uniform way of expressing economic value … Only over the course of the nineteenth century, though, did a truly national economy, with a high degree of regional specialization, emerge.

By the time of John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry, both Northerners and Southerners seemed ready to go beyond the world of a make-believe courtroom.

The achievement of the Great Awakening was the belief that religious experience is inherently subjective.

“[T]he debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment is surprisingly recent.”

Experience, personal and otherwise, has shown me that it is not just white Americans who need to grasp the full scope of Native history. Native people can also benefit from a more just and accurate depiction of their past.

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

Rarely has any figure in modern intellectual life so successfully harnessed the power of private institutions for public good, or achieved the fusion of thought and action, that Sizer did in his remarkable career.

It was the absence of slavery that allowed for fair taxation in the North. Conversely, the paranoia surrounding the future of slavery—or at least the fear that slaves might be taxed to emancipatory levels—afflicted southern polities.

“Is the American constitutional system meaningfully democratic, or is it a system that confines its democratic elements within such elaborate systems of indirect representation and checks and balances that it effectively preserves domination by established elites?”

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

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The emphasis of our special issue is two-fold: scholarly perspectives on political phenomena that connect the early American republic with the present, on the one hand; on the other […] an expansion of readers’ definition of what counts as “political history.”

This Article is Presented as part of the Special Issue: Money

Value means nothing unless it is translated into “real” money. And yet real money is no stable store of value.

Mr. Owsley: If we have skeletons that are that ancient that come out of the ground and there’s no opportunity for us to look at them, no opportunity to learn, then we will never have questions–we’ll never answer these questions of the past.
Ms. Stahl: We’re talking about our history?
Mr. Owsley: We’re talking about American history, yes.
–60 Minutes, October 25, 1998

February 29, 2008 Seems Like Old Times, I: Nationalizing the state militias One of the features I have planned for […]

“The time had come to liberate the parchment after fifty years, a step fraught with uncertainties and concerns.”

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As we find ourselves in a new era of North American free trade, will history repeat itself?

With history like this, I thought, who needs fiction?

“Yes, the Constitution is often publicly praised. But it is more often debated and argued about.”

To materiality Anderson therefore joins intertextuality: every page of his analysis is marked by an acute sense of how Bradford as reader and writer draws on and responds to an extensive archive of printed books and manuscripts.

Parent turns to Marxist theory to structure his answer to the question of the origins of the slave system with markedly mixed results.

“Would-be conquerors might hold up animal brain cases as signs of their authority, but other observers interpreted the disembodied icons according to their own assumptions about power.”

“Taverns were far more numerous than any other type of architectural space besides dwellings.”

“[S]eventeenth-century Protestants believed that the spirit of a dead person might appear in order to draw attention to “an injustice that might not be detected by other means’.”

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.”

If there is a blacklist, I have yet to see it—maybe when I make full professor.

“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.”

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

“The ‘trust’ relationship between the tribes and the federal government is at best a double-edged sword.”

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

“Too often reenactments come across as just what they are–half-hearted attempts to make history come alive in a dramatic way without using the elements that make for dramatic story-telling . . .”

Thus, the poems examine both the social structures contributing to the accusations as well as the relationships between people that were wounded or destroyed by the suspicions, convictions, and executions.

Editors’ note: as many readers may be aware, Professor Bellesiles’s research methods and scholarly standards have become the subject of considerable debate since Common-place first published this essay in September 2000, the same month that Arming America appeared in print. In October 2002, Bellesiles resigned his faculty position at Emory University. Both the report of the independent investigative committee whose findings led to his resignation, and Bellesiles’s response are available online.

Massachusetts, after all, had not executed anyone for rape in twenty-seven years . . . Yet now . . . the community took a daughter’s accusation against her father so seriously that it sent a man to the gallows. What circumstances, we wondered, led to this extraordinary outcome?

Since the ability to impregnate a woman was a crucial component of manhood in seventeenth-century America, T could be at best only a partial man by colonial standards.

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“When it comes to the United States Constitution, most historians reject the idea that its meaning can be reduced to some easy formula or series of sweeping generalizations.”

Moral Minorities tracks how vocal minorities argued for a place in American democracy.