Like today, passions were strong and political discourse was inflamed in late 18th-century America. Angry mobs torched buildings. Virginians drank a toast to George Washington’s speedy death.
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Articles on George Washington
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Donald Trump’s lawsuit to stop the release to Congress of potentially embarrassing or incriminating documents puts the National Archives in the middle of an old legal conflict.
The Founding Fathers were unrelenting in their commitment to the idea that circumstances can arise that require public officials to take actions abridging individual freedoms.
Democracies degenerate because of cunning leaders. Democracies also crumble because of the people themselves – and the US founders believed education would be crucial to maintaining democracy.
Only one president has done so – Franklin Delano Roosevelt – but others considered it, and even tried.
A president’s persona is always a public act. In that way, Trump’s shtick – vulgar man of the people – was not exceptional. And every president has had to invent his version of the role.
‘Mind your manners’ isn’t just something your mother told you. Manners – and civility – are an essential component of how things get done in government, and the Founding Fathers knew it.
History shows that attorneys general who are picked by – and serve at the pleasure of – the president are not as independent as they may be expected to be.
For decades, presidents routinely replaced large swaths of the government workforce, often requiring them to pay fees to political parties in exchange for their jobs.
In the early years of the United States, several American presidents were in favour of public health inoculation and vaccination strategies.
The term can be traced back to the Founding Fathers.
For his first presidential Thanksgiving, George Washington aimed to pull his country together in the face of the many internal divisions that could yank it apart.
‘Mind your manners’ isn’t just something your mother told you. Manners – and civility – are an essential component of how things get done in government, and the Founding Fathers knew it.
The framers of the Constitution were very clear that presidential terms have time limits. Not four years and a day. Not three years and 364 days. Four years.
Many Supreme Court nomination battles depended on whether the president’s party also had control of the US Senate.
The technical qualifications for presidential candidates are the same, but how people seek the nation’s highest office has shifted over the centuries.
The United States Postal Service plays a vital role in US civic life, one that helped shape American society more than 250 years ago and continues to characterize it today.
No one involved in local government wants to see federal law enforcement agents take over their policing. But a mayor who’s also a legal scholar says there’s history and precedent for it.
Political conventions used to pick presidential nominees in private. Now the public picks the nominee and then the party has a big party at the convention, writes a scholar of US elections.
The Insurrection Act of 1807 was not intended to be a national call to war against the American people.
Top contributors
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Professor of American History, Università di Torino
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Assistant Professor of Political Science, Clarkson University
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Professor of the History of Art, Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT)
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Commonwealth Fund Professor of American History, UCL
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Global Scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC and Hopkins P Breazeale Professor, Manship School of Mass Communications, Louisiana State University
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Masters degree student, Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University
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Reader in Diplomacy and International Studies, SOAS, University of London
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Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University
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Reader in US History, Northumbria University, Newcastle
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Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, Associate Research Professor, Political Science, Co-host of Democracy Works Podcast, Penn State
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Professor of History and Law Faculty, The Ohio State University
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Senior Lecturer in Government, Texas A&M University
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Professor of Urban Studies and Planning, Emeritus, Portland State University
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Reader in Modern Political History, Loughborough University
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Professor of American Politics, Fairleigh Dickinson University
