It is well known, that when one side only of a story is heard, and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it, insensibly.
In psychological terms, he was neurotic and she was uncommonly sane. His inevitable eruptions would not threaten the marriage, because she was the center who would always hold.
Madison’s experience at both the state and the federal level had convinced him that the people was not some benevolent, harmonious collective but rather a smoldering and ever-shifting gathering of fac...
In Madison’s formulation, the right to bear arms was not inherent but derivative, depending on service in the militia. The recent Supreme Court decision (Heller v. District of Columbia, 2008) that fou...
I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting a command under such Circumstances, I should have taken my musket upon my Shoulder & entered the Ranks or … had retir’...
I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever. . . . Such an addiction is the last degredation of a free and moral agent. I...
Taking on Washington was the fastest way to commit political suicide in the revolutionary era.
Perhaps, in that eerily instinctive way in which he always grasped the difference between the essential and the peripheral, he literally felt in his bones that another term as president meant that he...
Pitt and Burke were two of the most eloquent and respected members of Parliament, and taken together, by early 1775, they were warning the British ministry that it was headed toward a war that was unw...
All well and good, but for our purposes these otherwise-valuable insights are mere subplots almost designed to carry us down side trails while blithely humming a tune about the rough equivalence of fo...
[T]he revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argument or dialogue that was eventually institutionalized and rendered safe by the...
The delegates from the southern states insisted that slaves were property, like horses and sheep, and therefore should not be counted as Inhabitants. Franklin countered this claim with an edgy joke, o...
When Jefferson visited Adams in England in the spring of 1786, the two former revolutionaries were presented at court and George III ostentatiously turned his back on them both. Neither man ever forgo...
Upon learning that Washington intended to reject the mantle of emperor, no less an authority than George III allegedly observed, If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world. True to his...
Unquestionably, New York enjoyed enormous strategic significance. As Adams had already apprised Washington, it was the nexus of the Northern and Southern colonies … the key to the whole Continent, as...
Throughout most of his life, Washington’s physical vigor had been one of his most priceless assets. A notch below six feet four and slightly above two hundred pounds, he was a full head taller than hi...
In time to come be shaped by the human mind. Asked
Lamentations about the tribulations of public life, followed by celebrations of the bucolic splendor of retirement to rural solitude, had become a familiar, even formulaic, posture within the leadersh...
One of the petitioners, an infamous do-gooder of uncertain sanity named Warner Mifflin, had actually acknowledged that his antislavery vision came to him after he was struck by lightning in a thunders...
I am not a Federalist, he declared in 1789, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever.… If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would...
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