There is a parallel between the American decision to leave the British Empire in 1776 and the British vote to leave the EU in 2016: both movements emphasized their localist credentials through a confrontational narrative that was anti-establishment, anti-corporate and anti-globalist. On June 23, 2016, the British electorate voted narrowly for “Brexit”: for Britain to […]

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 […]