Thomas Paine

America's sense of religious nationalism was forged in the same fires that ignited the profoundly secular French Revolution.

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

Americans must live up to “the words that made us.”

The American war reshaped Ireland’s place in the empire, sparking a radical push for independence that instead ended in union with Britain.

It's time to let them go. A critique of "Professional Smart Guy (PSG)" Charles Murray's uncritical reading of Alexander Hamilton.

Ken Burns talks about his new documentary, The American Revolution; the ongoing project of 1776; and why the war was more than a revolt of wealthy slaveholders.

The economic roots of the American Founding deserve to be understood on their own terms.

The third installment of Ken Burns's series focuses on the war's carnage, but leaves viewers confused about the role it played in the nation's founding.

Chronicling the experience of a teenage soldier during the Revolutionary War.

The Founders didn’t model us on the Six Nations, and George Washington didn’t tomahawk a Frenchman.

The most consequential shift that year was not one of battle lines but of ideology.

Amid plans to mark the nation’s semiquincentennial, many are asking whether or not the people really do rule, and whether the law is still king.

The framers of the United States Constitution envisoned economic discipline that they thought was a requirement for a republic to endure.

A Quaker abolitionist hoped to convince the Virginian Founders to end slavery by appealing to their sense of manhood. They were not persuaded.

There’s a lot more to Founding Father John Dickinson than not signing the Declaration of Independence.

At the founding of America, leaders predicted that a concentration of wealth would weaken the republic.

They rejected kings and were sincerely concerned about the possibility of a dictatorship. But we need to move past founder-worship and focus on justice.

On the robust influence of labor reform and antislavery ideas and movements on each other from the early National period to the Civil War.

Tax resistance has long opposed war and empire in North America, and could be a way to resist U.S. funding of violence in Gaza today.

America’s only successful insurrection.