The 5th president's policies helped create an “Era of Good Feelings,” a prosperous time never seen before or since in American history.
Fierce debate among early political factions led to many allegations of misdeeds and abuse of power in Washington's administration, but there was no serious misconduct.
Important new information on the central figure in the early American republic has surfaced with the publication of new volumes of Jefferson's journals and correspondence.
Important new information on the central figure in the early American republic has surfaced with the publication of new volumes of Jefferson's journals and correspondence.
A thoughtful discussion of the men who contributed the most to what is now the dominant political pattern
A diminutive, persuasive Virginian hijacked the Constitutional Convention and forced the moderates to accept a national government with vastly expanded powers
Without major compromises by all involved and the agreement to avoid the contentious issue of slavery, the framers would never have written and ratified the Constitution
The Founding Fathers’ belief in the “law of the land” derived from a 13th-century document recently donated to the National Archives
Alexander Hamilton conceived an America that encouraged huge successes like his own
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson stood together in America’s perilous dawn, but politics soon drove them apart. Then in their last years the two old enemies began a remarkable correspondence that is both testimony to the power of friendship and an eloquent summary of the dialogue that went on within the Revolutionary generation—and that continues within our own.
Two hundred years ago the United States was a weakling republic prostrate beneath a ruinous national debt. Then Alexander Hamilton worked the miracle of fiscal imagination that made America a healthy young economic giant. How did he do it?
Every one of the Founding Fathers was a historian—a historian who believed that only history could protect us from tyranny and coercion. In their reactions to the long, bloody pageant of the English past, we can see mirrored the framers’ intent.
After a summer of debate, three of the delegates in Philadelphia could not bring themselves to put their names to the document they had worked so hard to create
James Wilson was an important but now obscure draftsman of the Constitution. Carry Wills is a journalist and historian fascinated by what went on in the minds of our founders. The two men meet in an imaginary dialogue across the centuries.
Here is the federal government’s own picture history of our times—and it tells us more than you might think
The Unknown Alexander Hamilton
OR DON’T PUT OFF UNTIL TOMORROW WHAT YOU CAN RAM THROUGH TODAY
Jefferson and Madison led a revolutionary fight for complete separation of church and state. Their reasons probed the basic relation between religion and democracy
A leading American historian challenges the long-entrenched interpretation originated by the late Charles A. Beard