For the People can be profitably read as a sympathetic exposition of the various ways critics of American politics and society and adherents to popular sovereignty have been a mainstay of our political culture.

Though it would take weeks to sort through the wreckage, it was immediately clear that the fire had caused casualties on a scale previously unimaginable.

During the course of the project, students began narrowing their research to topics that could be answered through the database. What was the racial and gender composition of the members of the various abolitionist groups? To what extent had both slavery and the slave trade flourished in Massachusetts?

As students write and perform toasts, they attempt to speak the (often combative) language of 1790’s politics.

The challenge facing New Yorkers in Columbia County was how to make the political order legitimate in the eyes of those Americans who either lacked the vote or lacked the right to own the land they labored.

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.

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.

Common-place talks with Jessica Choppin Roney, author of Governed by a Spirit of Opposition.

Government by Dissent is an engaging meditation on one of America’s founding fantasies—the fantasy of democratic self-government. In 1776 Thomas […]

The SPGNA, American Indians, and the Turn to Foreign Missions in the Early Republic Hazelnuts. That’s what the girl at […]

What happens if we pair “post” and “transbellum”?

In the Great Hall, there is such a sense of sameness in the men’s appearances that it does not take much effort to see that personality has been deliberately tamed for the sake of assembling an artificial society, a seamless superstructure open to being expanded, contracted, and reconfigured by house fiat.

The central theme in the study of Brook Farm, [Delano] emphasizes, should not be explanation for its collapse but appreciation of its achievements.

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.

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