Alexander Hamilton

The revolutionary roots of a corrosive national pastime.

“The conflicts of popular factions are the chief, if not the only inlets, of usurpation and Tyranny,” the first president wrote.

Jonathan Gienapp's attack on originalism deserves a serious response.

The founders anticipated someone like Trump partly because they’d been reading Edward Gibbon’s 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'

Trump's second term echoes 19th-century policies: tariffs and immigration limits protect workers, while deregulation risks widening inequality.

Often, the proper scope of the First Amendment can be determined only by considering both text and context.

Make one of President George Washington's favorite cocktails.

To achieve a new political settlement, she has to resolve a tension dating from the Revolution.

The Founders didn’t believe the Constitution had a fixed meaning. So why do so many of the justices?

While it is rare for foreign policy differences between the political parties to affect electoral outcomes, it has happened before.

The factionalized press was the site of campaigning in the U.S.'s first contested presidential elections.

Plus: How George Washington almost ruined his own exit from the national stage.

The signs that precede the crumbling of American political parties and the creation of new ones.

The Roberts Court has made the current crisis of American democracy perpetual.

America’s founding document is now an all-but-meaningless scrap of paper. Happy Fourth!

"I was always working on a theory of America."

One of the country’s greatest rhetorical traditions still has the power to remind us of our founding principles.

Space and place in New York City's responses to the French Revolution.

Historians Rosemarie Zagarri and Holly Brewer explain the anti-monarchical origins of the Constitution and the presidency.

Government, wrote Alexander Hamilton, should substitute “the mild influence” of the law for “the violent and sanguinary agency of the sword.”