Thomas Jefferson

“John Marshall...exhibited a subservience to the executive branch that continues to haunt us.”

Some historical sites have struggled to reconcile founding-era exceptionalism with the true story of America’s original sin.

In navigating lives of privation and brutality, enslaved people haggled, often daily, for liberties small and large.

Even America's founding document isn't immune to the powers of polarization.

The War of 1812 holds lessons about the costly error of tariffs — not the threat of Canadians.

How solid is the wall between church and state?

Women have always come to the aid of men in power, but the costs of such actions have not always been immediately apparent.

Islam in America dates to the founding fathers, says Smithsonian’s religion curator Peter Manseau.

On Haiti, Donald Trump sounds a lot like Thomas Jefferson.

Why the slope from toppling Confederate monuments to shunning the Founders is so slippery.

Kristine K. Ronan describes her discovery of two Native American statues at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.

How memory plays tricks with history.

How profit motives have driven two centuries of American gun laws.

The president's stand on the Confederate hero represents the kind of moral relativism that conservatives usually decry.

Today's Christian nationalists and liberal secularists both oversimplify the history of the nation's founding.

Our Founding Fathers—particularly those of a Southern persuasion—gambled not only on horses but pretty much everything else.

How "enlightened" leaders of the early US ignored an Independence Day speech and set in motion indigenous peoples' brutalization.

The document we celebrate today wasn't just the work of Thomas Jefferson's individual genius. Everyone was doing it.

The intended audience for the document could be found in the royal houses of France and Spain.

The U.S. Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, but the fight for religious equality was only just beginning.