Everyone who has seen the play Hamilton knows that the nation’s capital was moved to the present site in the District of Columbia due to a dinner-table bargain in 1790 between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton needed Jefferson’s support in…
War has the power to bring out the best in people. Incredible heroism, courage, self-sacrifice rise miraculously. In quieter times, great issues don’t seem to be at stake. We are used to getting by more easily and making easier choices….
“Cultures are held together by the stories they tell about themselves, and America is struggling to find a new national story, one that can acknowledge past injustices without becoming defined by them. The old all-or-nothing morality tale of Good America…
A statesman in modern democracies is a politician of one sort or another and is accountable in the end to the body politic he serves. He cannot ignore the will of the people. In this, he is the same as…
Thomas Jefferson, in an 1816 letter to a member of the Virginia General Assembly, made this observation: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”…
The Constitution was designed to give government only a limited range of powers. Yet, government, today, wields a seemingly endless measure of power over the people. It’s time to ask: How limited was limited government meant to be? The framers of the Constitution…
In a 1789 letter to the British philosopher Richard Price, Thomas Jefferson observed that “wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government.” By that standard, it’s no longer clear that the American electorate is…
Many see New Year’s Day as a starting point. It is a moment focused on the future. Beginning January 1, you can turn over a new leaf, making resolutions to improve yourself and your life. We often joke about how…
In “They Saved Lisa’s Brain,” Lisa Simpson joins the local Mensa chapter, whose members subsequently decide their intelligence equips them to run Springfield. A live-action version of this Simpsons episode occurs in the pages of Science, which presently lowers its…
Justice Sonia Sotomayor has emerged as the Supreme Court’s most outspoken secularist. She subscribes fervently to the left’s myths about a religiously neutral Constitution. In a recent dissent, she complained that the majority on the court “continues to dismantle the wall…