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John Adams
After his father's death in 1848, Charles Francis Adams, Sr. became the last great hope of America's first—and, at the time, only—political dynasty.
Excerpted from the George Washington Book Prize finalist Heirs of an Honored Name: The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America, by Douglas R. Egerton (Basic Books).
Our greatest Chief Justice defined the Constitution and ensured that the rule of law prevailed at a time of Presidential overreach and bitter political factionalism.
Sixteen historic sites in Boston remind Americans of the events that led to our nation’s birth, from the Boston Massacre to Bunker Hill and the USS Constitution.
Editor's Note: Brent Glass is Director Emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the author of 50 Great American Places: Essential Historic Sites Across the U.S., from which this essay is adapted.
Rush was a visionary writer and reformer, confidant to John Adams, Washington's surgeon general, and opponent of slavery and prejudice - and yet a lesser-known Founding Father.
Excerpted from the George Washington Book Prize finalist Rush: Revolution, M
Critical decisions by the Chief Justice saved the Supreme Court’s independence—and made possible its wide-ranging role today
Most jurists and constitutional scholars today would probably contend that the most controlling precedent to be set in the early republic was laid down in the 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision. While a formidable ruling, it was not, however, the decisive moment—at least not to people at the time.
America’s first civil war took place during the Revolution, an ultra violent, family-splitting, and often vindictive conflict between patriots and loyalists
On April 22, 1775, three days after a British column marched out of Boston and clashed with militiamen at Lexington and Concord, the news—and the cry of Revolution!—reached Danbury, Connecticut, where 18-year-old Stephen Maples Jarvis was working on the family farm.
The 70-year-old statesman lived the high life in Paris and pulled off a diplomatic miracle
As the 2000 election made very clear, we are torn between revering judges and despising them. It’s in the nature of the job.
A judge, the old saw goes, is a lawyer who knew a governor (or a President or a senator). In most states, a judge is a lawyer who knows how to attract voters.
When John Adams was elected President, and Thomas Jefferson Vice President, each came to see the other as a traitor. Out of their enmity grew our modern political system.
The DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE is not what Thomas Jefferson thought it was when he wrote it—and that is why we celebrate it
Is trial by jury the essential underpinning of our system of justice or—as more and more critics charge—a relic so flawed it should perhaps even be abolished? An experienced trial judge examines the historical evidence in the case.
The distinguished lawyer could not restrain himself. Even in the somber pages of the American Bar Association’s Tort & Insurance Law Journal late last year, his rage blazed and fulminated.
The ambassador from an infant republic spent five enchanted years in the French capital at a time when monarchy was giving way to revolution. Walking the city streets today, you can still feel the extravagant spirit of the city and the era he knew.
Paris is every day enlarging and beautifying,” Thomas Jefferson noted with satisfaction during his residence there as minister to France. The city under construction was a delight to Jefferson, the art patron and amateur architect.
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.
For years people have argued that France had the real revolution and that ours was mild by comparison. But now a powerful new book says the American Revolution was the most sweeping in all history. It alone established a pure commercial culture—a culture that makes America the universal society we are today.
The French Revolution followed American independence by six years, but it was the later event that went into the books as “the Great Revolution” and became the revolutionary archetype.
They’ve all had things to say about their fellow Executives. Once in a great while one was even flattering.
John Adams said Thomas Jefferson’s mind was “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” Ulysses S.
The courtship and fifty-four-year marriage of John and Abigail Adams was, despite separation and war and tragedy, a moving and highly literate love feast between two "Dearest Friends"
On a cool Massachusetts morning in April, 1764, a girl named Abigail Smith watched anxiously as a servant held a bundle of letters in a fire tongs over a smouldering flame. “Did you never rob a Birds nest?” she wrote her correspondent.
Even the worst offender, even the most unpopular cause, deserves a good lawyer. Our example is a passionate moment in Boston on the eve of the Revolution, when John Adams undertook to defend the hatred British soldiers who had fired into a Boston mob and created some “martyrs.” There are echoes of our own times in the trial that followed
Eighteenth-century equivalents of “Yankee go home!” greeted the Adams family when, in 1785, they arrived in London. Nevertheless, there were certain delightful compensations—especially for an eligible young lady
All that the Adamses saw they were schooled to put down and save. The result is a collection of historical records beyond price and without peer.
Without doubt they were Washington, who walked carefully within the Constitution, and Lincoln, who stretched it as far as he dared
Discreet helpers have worked on the speeches and papers of many Presidents, but a nation in a time of trial will respond best “to the Great Man himself, standing alone”
A leading American historian challenges the long-entrenched interpretation originated by the late Charles A. Beard
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