John Quincy Adams

The absence of robust transportation infrastructure hurts us — and not only at the gas pump.

The senator from Massachusetts and the birth of the Republican Party.

Dreams of Central America in the era of the Erie Canal.

The radicalization of a congressional clerk in the 1800s and the introduction of the telegraph set a young country on a new trajectory.

West Ford’s descendants want to prove his parentage—and save the freedmen’s village he founded.

The transcendentalists thought all human inspiration was divine, all nature a miracle.

The life of Judah Benjamin, a Southern Jew who served in the Confederate government, can tell us only so much about the American Jewish encounter with slavery.

Our country's legal history renders the teen's case familiar if not inevitable.

In his new book, The Crooked Path to Abolition, James Oakes argues that the Constitution was an antislavery document.

John C. Calhoun knew what a strong federal government might do.

As convenient as it might be to blame the filibuster on the famous defender of slavery, the historical record is much messier.

Elkison v. Deliesseline presented a federal court with the question of whether a state could incarcerate and enslave a free subject of a foreign government.

Joe Biden has met with scholars to discuss his presidency and likely legacy—but what are we to make of his special relationship with historian Jon Meacham?

Family blessings are a curse, or they can be. The life of Henry Adams explained in his book Education.

In becoming the party of Trump, the G.O.P. confronts the kind of existential crisis that has destroyed American parties in the past.

A review of Robert Elder's new biography of John C. Calhoun.

A cat named Miss Pussy! A racist parrot! Benjamin Harrison’s possums, which he later ate!

David O. Stewart discusses the relationship between William Costin and the Washington bloodline.

James Shapiro’s recent book looks at why Shakespeare has been a mainstay of the cultural and political conflicts of the country since its founding.

He devoted a lifetime to studying America’s foundation, witnessed its near-dissolution, and uncannily anticipated its evolution.