Departments

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Founding Fathers

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    5/21/2023

    Ron DeSantis's Book on the Founders has been Disappearing Online. We Found a Copy

    by Gillian Brockell

    Written during his days as a Tea Party Congressman, DeSantis's 2011 book cherry-picks quotes from the Washington and Hamilton to argue that Barack Obama was engaged in an unconstitutional power grab that would have appalled the founders. It also makes bad arguments about the centrality of slavery to the early Republic. 

  • SOURCE: LA Times
    12/26/19

    Why demagogues were the Founding Fathers’ greatest fear

    by Eli Merritt

    Washington’s greatest fear that summer of decision in Philadelphia was that unwise, self-seeking politicians — even if fairly elected to public office — would tear down the central government and its constitutional laws for the sake of their own advancement and glorification.

  • 12/15/19

    Disaster Relief and the Founding Fathers: Original Intent?

    by Cynthia A. Kierner

    What does the appalling spectacle of the Superdome after Katrina, the disgraceful neglect of post-Maria Puerto Rico, or the far greater attention paid to wildfires in California over their equally devastating counterparts in Oklahoma, say about the politics and culture of twenty-first-century America?

  • SOURCE: NYR Daily
    12/3/19

    The Framers’ Answers to Three Myths About Impeachment

    by Garry Wills

    Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who has been overseeing the impeachment hearings, is badly misrepresenting the Constitution when he says that the Congress is a co-equal branch of government with the presidency.

  • 11/17/19

    Benjamin Franklin, Religious Revolutionary

    by J.D. Dickey

    Surprisingly, however, during America’s first major evangelical revival — the Great Awakening of the 1730s and ’40s — one of its most important figures had little use for religious conservatism. In fact, he wasn’t a preacher at all, but the reform-minded, freethinking Philadelphia printer Benjamin Franklin.

  • SOURCE: Society for US Intellectual History
    9/6/19

    Review of “The Political Thought of America’s Founding Feminists”

    by Christine Talbot

    “Lisa Pace Vetter’s book, The Political Thought of America’s Founding Feminists, examines the political theories of seven women who were central figures in American political thought, despite their exclusion from the contemporary canon."