Thomas Jefferson

George III was a model monarch, whose reputation finally deserves rehabilitation a quarter of a millennium later.

The plant explorers of the USDA succeeded in bringing the world’s fruits to American supermarkets. But at what human, ecological, and gustatory cost?

Are the truths in the Declaration of Independence really self-evident?

Georgia enacted the Citizen's Arrest Law in an attempt to maintain control of enslaved people.

What gets lost when we view the American past as primarily a story about capitalism? 

Black people own just 2 percent of farmland in the United States. A decades-long history of loan denials at the USDA is a major reason why.

The U.S. Constitution was the reason for Madison and Hamilton's breakup.

How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante.

The author of ‘Founding Brothers’ tries to capture the breadth of the War for Independence in a single narrative.

The Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee, and other political formations generally separated military and civil leadership and guarded certain personal freedoms.

The little-known story of Robert Carter III.

On the ways that people have conflated freedom with whiteness but pays too little attention to the force of freedom as a concept.

What role should the federal government play in building our infrastructure?

Which personality of the American Revolution or the founding era is remembered for the wrong reasons, and why?

We ascribe too much meaning to the early years of the republic.

Vaccines against smallpox during the Revolutionary War are one example of how mandates have protected the health of Americans for more than two centuries.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition offered him a chance to present the dramatic gains made by Black Americans since the end of slavery.

On Akhil Reed Amar’s “The Words That Made Us,” a new history of America’s constitutional conversation.

The Left once tried to own the legacy of America’s Bicentennial, but ran into ideological and structural roadblocks all too familiar today.

Pulitzer-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed reflects on the battle for the past and the fragile state of American democracy.