Thomas Jefferson

In 'What It Took to Win,' Michael Kazin traces the history over the past two centuries of what he calls ‘the oldest mass party in the world’.

Why our politics are growing ever more extreme — and democracy itself is under siege.

What connection does the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson have to the party of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris?

In "A Nation of Descendants," Francesca Morgan traces the American use and abuse of genealogy from the Daughters of the American Revolution to Roots.

Exponentially more enslaved Africans were forced to the lands that now make up Latin America rather than the United States. Where is their story?

An interview with Woody Holton on his new book, "Liberty is Sweet."

Woody Holton’s "Liberty is Sweet" charts not only the contest with Great Britain over “home rule” but also the internal struggle over who should rule at home. 

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

An American conservatism which subtly or directly marginalizes the Founding is on a fast track to a conservatism at odds with America’s roots itself.

The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

The story of President Andrew Jackson's 1,400-pound block of cheese.

The proliferation of antebellum print is analogous to our own tectonic shifts in how people communicate and what they communicate about.

Recent books by Woody Holton and Alan Taylor offer fresh perspectives on early US history but overstate the importance of white supremacy as its driving force.

Extending that compassion today could reverse past wrongs.

A century of tax avoidance later, the dynasties created in the 1900s are going strong.

A review of how Dennis Rasmussen understands America's Founding Fathers and their disillusions with the American experiment.

Popular religious iconography and art in the decades preceding the Revolution offer a fuller narrative arc of the development of revolutionary ideas within American society.

In 1741, Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences held an essay contest searching for the origin of “blackness.” The results help us see how Enlightenment thinkers justified slavery.

How a story told by a fugitive from slavery became a parable of American banking gone bad.

The American yam is not the food it says it is. How that came to be is a story of robbery, reinvention, and identity.