In the United States Constitution, the Founding Fathers safeguarded the rights of the accused by limiting the power of the state. The Terry Williams case illustrates all too clearly what happens when prosecutors disregard Constitutional rules and principles. Unfairness in the criminal justice system is a major concern of our time. In the United States […]

Bringing Aristocracy in America into dialogue with Tocqueville’s Democracy in America can help historians to better understand the nature of the conflict between “aristocracy” and “democracy”—an issue that may be more relevant even in our own time than many had thought. When Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his Democracy in America in […]

Whatever one may think of President Trump, perhaps the greatest hope for Making America Great Again is not found in a particular president but in the American people’s own charter of government: The Constitution of the United States. H.L. Mencken famously defined democracy as “the theory that the common people know what they want, and […]

Recognizing, and acting, on the reality of student life as it is currently lived means imagining a world without books—broadly construed—as a means toward preventing their disappearance. “I cannot live without books,” Thomas Jefferson famously wrote John Adams in 1815. Jefferson did not believe the American republic could survive without books—or without people to read […]

On February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County, Kentucky; and Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England. The coincidence of their being born on the same day might lead us to think about the points of similarity in their lives. William Herndon was Lincoln’s friend and law partner, and he wrote one […]