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Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy
Washington, DC - Jefferson MemorialIn Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America historian Kevin Gutzman examines the legacy of Jefferson.
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The Reconstruction Republicans: Answering the Slaveocratic Revolution
Prisoners from the Front, Winslow Homer, 1866 (metmuseum.org)A timely reminder of the full range of anti-republican institutions that the Confederacy fought a war to try to perpetuate.
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Gordon Wood’s Reflections on the Constitution and Slavery
Everett Historical/Shutterstock.comMany historians today tell a dismal tale of woe about our Founding, but Wood sees it whole with defects that do not blot out its real virtues.
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In Empire’s Wake
British Lion in Trafalgar Square, London, UK (Marco Rubino / Shutterstock.com).We live in an age of politically shrill history: Imperial Legacies is a fine, subtle, and bracing attempt to counter this...
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Frederick Douglass’s “Plea for Freedom of Speech in Boston”
Frederick Douglass statue on January 6, 2013 in Harlem, New York. (photo by stockelements, shutterstock.com)A man’s right to speak does not depend upon where he was born or upon his color. The simple...
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An Invitation to the Land of Hope: A Conversation with Bill McClay
Bill McClay talks with Richard Reinsch about his new book, Land of Hope.
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The New York Times Resurrects the Positive Good Slavery Argument
Advertisement for "American slavery distinguished from the slavery of English theorists, and justified by the law of Nature" by Rev. Samuel Seabury, D.D. The “1619 Project” can deliver on its...
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Reclaiming 1619
"Landing Negroes at Jamestown from Dutch man-of-war, 1619" an illustration in Harper's Monthly Magazine, v. 102, 1901 Jan., p. 172. Image: Everett Historical Photos / Library of Congress Prints and...
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America’s Exceptional Guilt
Statue of William Lloyd Garrison on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, MA, USA (age fotostock / Alamy Stock Photo).For the 1619 Project, even the Garrisonian solution—of demanding that Americans open their...
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Assessing the 1619 Project: A Law & Liberty Symposium
Promotional image for 1619 Project (New York Times).What happens when our study of history becomes a casualty of identity politics?
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These Truths Were Made for You and Me
Lepore’s book reads like an effort to create a storyline that could help us to restore a lost world, but it is not history.
View ArticleNew Birth of Freedom Betrayed
The University of Missouri Press has published a major new book called From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction by Forrest A. Nabors. This is the first book by Nabors, who...
View ArticleThe Constitution: A Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery Document?
Almost from the moment Christopher Columbus made landfall in the New World, European minds began turning toward slavery. “It appeared to me that these people were very poor in everything,” Columbus...
View ArticleThomas Jefferson’s Legacy
The problem with “popular” history is that it often becomes mired in conventional narratives and familiar tropes. For example, Thomas Jefferson is most commonly remembered as the author of the...
View ArticleGordon Wood’s Reflections on the Constitution and Slavery
At Northwestern University Law School’s Lincoln Lecture, endowed by my colleague Steve Calabresi, we had the great good fortune to hear a talk by Gordon Wood, the leading historian of the early...
View ArticleIn Empire’s Wake
The totally disinterested historian who is curious about the past only for its own sake and has no axe to grind, no ideological preconceptions to reinforce by the use of selective evidence, and no...
View ArticleFrederick Douglass’s “Plea for Freedom of Speech in Boston”
Introduction by Kurt Lash On December 3, 1860, a group of abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, gathered at a public meeting hall in Boston, Massachusetts, to discuss “How Can American Slavery...
View ArticleThe New York Times Resurrects the Positive Good Slavery Argument
Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a Law & Liberty symposium on the 1619 Project. One hundred and sixty years ago citizens in the United States (or, at least as many as sufficed) rightly...
View ArticleAmerica’s Exceptional Guilt
Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a Law & Liberty symposium on the 1619 Project. In framing America’s national history as pro-slavery to its core, the Times follows, and intensifies, the...
View ArticleReclaiming 1619
Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a Law & Liberty symposium on the 1619 Project. For several years now, I’ve devoted substantial attention in my introductory university classes on “America to...
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