Intellectual activity in a culture is not a one-way flow between the great minds and passive recipients; it is a discourse, a complex marketplace-like conglomeration of intellectual exchanges involvin...
[John Adams] is vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can possibly be said of him.
In monarchies, each man's desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by beer, or force, by patronage, or by honor, and by professional standing armies. By contrast, republics had...
In the decades following the Revolution, America changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change, but came to expected and prize it.
Virtue became less the harsh and martial self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the modern willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity.
The idea of labor, of hard work, leading to increased productivity was so novel, so radical, in the overall span of Western history that most ordinary people, most of those who labored, could scarcely...
In 1812 the U.S. Army consisted of fewer than seven thousand regular troops.
Hamilton used the sinking fund to maintain the confidence of creditors in the government’s securities; he had no intention of paying off the outstanding principal of the debt. Retiring the debt would...
Once the Constitution became a legal rather than a political document, judicial review, although not judicial supremacy, became inevitable.
Academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should be simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.
Do not give to persons able to work for a living, declared a critic of the traditional paternalistic charity in 1807. Do not support widows who refuse to put out their children. Do not let the means o...
Republics required sufficient virtue in the character of their citizens to prevent corruption and eventual decay.
Both Jefferson and Madison remained convinced to the end of their lives that all parts of America’s government had equal authority to interpret the fundamental law of the Constitution—all departments...
THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION of 1787 was designed in part to solve the problems created by the presence in the state legislatures of these middling men. In addition to correcting the deficiencies of the A...
James Wilkinson, an ex–Revolutionary War officer, and tried to convince them that the future of Americans in the West belonged to Spain. Spain offered trading licenses to Kentucky settlers, negotiated...
Unlike in the Northern states, the only elected officials in Virginia were federal congressmen and state legislators; all the rest were either selected by the legislature or appointed by the governor...
General Harmar led a force of some three hundred regulars and twelve hundred militia northward from Fort Washington (present-day Cincinnati) to attack Indian villages in the area of what is now Fort W...
When Elbridge Gerry proposed in the Convention that no standing army exceed three thousand men, Washington is supposed to have made a countermotion that no foreign enemy should invade the United State...
Nevertheless, some Southerners like James Monroe still had serious reservations about the compromise, believing that assumption would reduce the necessity for State taxation and thus would undoubtedly...
As Oliver Ellsworth, the third chief justice of the United States, declared, As population increases, poor labourers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck...
