American History on the Banks of the Potomac

By |2024-03-13T16:45:58-05:00March 13th, 2024|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Bradley J. Birzer, History, Timeless Essays|

Across the mighty Potomac sits the capital of our once noble and humane republic, founded upon the idea that all men are created equal, endowed with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What do the women and men who occupy the innumerable office buildings on either of the Potomac think about [...]

The Articles of Confederation and State Sovereignty

By |2024-03-01T05:39:55-06:00February 29th, 2024|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Featured, Founding Document, History, Nationalism, Timeless Essays|

Article II of the Articles of Confederation codified that one of the purposes of the American Revolution was the protection of state sovereignty, by making state sovereignty a fundamental aspect of the American constitutional order. The American Revolution, State Sovereignty, and the American Constitutional Settlement, 1765-1800 by N. Coleman (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016) The [...]

“A Heart Devoted to the Welfare of Our Country”

By |2024-02-22T19:34:49-06:00February 22nd, 2024|Categories: American Republic, Constitution, John Quincy Adams, Timeless Essays|

It is a source of gratification and of encouragement to me to observe that the great result of this experiment upon the theory of human rights has, at the close of that generation by which it was formed, been crowned with success equal to the most sanguine expectations of its founders. The following is John [...]

George Washington and the “Gift of Silence”

By |2024-02-22T05:51:49-06:00February 21st, 2024|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, George Washington, Leadership, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

George Washington, the great actor, was playing his part in a great drama, not just for Americans of his day, but for you and me. Washington, the Stoic, used his “gift of silence” shrewdly, and surely it is his actions more than his words that echo down to us today. In December 2009, a letter [...]

The “Genuine Information”: A Warning About the Constitution

By |2024-02-19T18:36:59-06:00February 19th, 2024|Categories: American Founding, Constitution, Featured, Timeless Essays|

The time may come when it shall be the duty of a State, in order to preserve itself from the oppression of the general government, to have recourse to the sword—In which case the proposed form of government declares that the State and every of its citizens who act under its authority are guilty of [...]

Should We Celebrate Presidents’ Day, or Washington’s Birthday?

By |2024-02-18T16:09:00-06:00February 18th, 2024|Categories: American Republic, Constitution, George Washington, Gleaves Whitney, Presidency, Timeless Essays|

People ask why a few of us presidential junkies would like to see Presidents’ Day changed back to Washington’s Birthday. The technical explanation has to do with a misguided law called HR 15951 that was passed in 1968 to make federal holidays less complicated. The real answer is simply this: George Washington is our greatest [...]

James Otis, Then and Now

By |2024-02-05T18:35:10-06:00February 4th, 2024|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Bradley J. Birzer, History, Politics, Rights, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Going back to the first principles of the Founding, one finds that the Founders talked unceasingly about rights. Rights language became a critical part of the cultural landscape when James Otis delivered his oration on the nature of rights, the common law, and the natural law. Feel free to call me a conservative (I won’t [...]

Thomas Jefferson and “A Little Rebellion Now and Then”

By |2024-01-24T16:59:23-06:00January 24th, 2024|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Clyde Wilson, Republicanism, Thomas Jefferson, Timeless Essays|

Nowhere to be seen now are the old Jeffersonians, once a major American type, rebellious men who dared defend the rights of themselves and their communities from outside impositions. But buried somewhere deep in the American soul is a tiny ember of Jeffersonian democracy that now and then gives off an uncertain, feeble, and futile [...]

Blind Benjamin Franklin

By |2024-01-16T19:15:44-06:00January 16th, 2024|Categories: Benjamin Franklin, Christianity, Dwight Longenecker, Religion, Timeless Essays|

Even today, many Americans take an intentionally anti-intellectual stance, agreeing with the rationalists that faith and reason are incompatible. Blind Benjamin Franklin is father to them all. Apart from his rejection of wigs and the incident with the kite, the key and the lightning bolt, I’m afraid I have never been impressed or attracted to [...]

Edmund Burke: Old Whig

By |2024-01-11T18:34:15-06:00January 11th, 2024|Categories: American Founding, Classical Liberalism, Edmund Burke, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

In the Whig view to which Edmund Burke subscribed, the validity of law is independent of its source; who makes a rule, whether the people or a tyrant, is irrelevant. The Old-Whig Burke denied that the exercise of will, whether arbitrary or rational, has anything to do with the determination of law. Edmund Burke, the passionate defender [...]

History on Proper Principles: The Legacy of Forrest McDonald

By |2024-01-07T09:40:44-06:00January 6th, 2024|Categories: Alexander Hamilton, American Founding, American Republic, Featured, Federalist Papers, Forrest McDonald, History, Literature, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

Forrest McDonald demonstrated that the historian above all must be a pragmatist who looks at the reality of the past as it was, who gets his hands dirty by putting in long hours of research, who makes sense of vast quantities of data, and who then communicates what he has found in an understandable and [...]

Toast the New Year as the Founders Did

By |2023-12-31T18:47:58-06:00December 31st, 2023|Categories: American Founding, New Year's Day, Senior Contributors, Stephen Masty, Timeless Essays|

Think that Franklin and Jefferson celebrated the victory at Yorktown with a cheap jug of Wal-Mart red? Or signed the Declaration of Independence with a few six-packs (even of Sam Adams beer)? If so, you may be reading the wrong online journal. When celebrating anything important, for dinner-parties or even  just drinking with friends, it [...]

George Washington & the Patience of Power

By |2023-12-13T19:27:51-06:00December 13th, 2023|Categories: American Founding, Christianity, George Washington, History, Timeless Essays, Virtue, War|

In his courage and perseverance throughout the Revolution, George Washington revealed his reliance on patience—and feelingly used the word when referring to his men at Valley Forge. In contemporary American society, the relationship between patience and power is often wary and distant: If people have power, then they won’t have to wait. Recently, however, these two [...]

“The Empire of Liberty:” Thomas Jefferson & the Future of the American Republic

By |2023-11-21T16:31:42-06:00November 21st, 2023|Categories: American Republic, History, Mark Malvasi, Senior Contributors, Thomas Jefferson|

The irony of Jefferson's conception of a republican future for the United States was that the establishment and maintenance of a simple, peaceful, agrarian republic required an aggressive foreign policy that virtually ensured conflict with other peoples and nations. I. Like most of his contemporaries, Thomas Jefferson believed that republican government was, at best, fragile [...]

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