"One standard story about America is rooted in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Another story concerns America's moment of reckoning after the Civil War, when it was possible to believe that the country would transcend its racist roots. Kermit Roosevelt III argues here that today, with the country increasingly riven along violent divides, we can find a path forward by shifting our benchmarks from the first story, which fostered...

"New digital technologies and traditional historical investigation suggest that James Madison did not finish his famous Notes until after the Convention. The Notes are the most important, and most misunderstood, account of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. This biography of the Notes follows Madison as he created and then repeatedly revised a remarkable manuscript of American history. Originally a diary kept in part for the absent Thomas Jefferson,...

"The evolution of the battle for true equality in America seen through the men, ideas, and politics behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments passed at the end of the Civil War. On July 4, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in front of a crowd in Rochester, New York, and asked, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" The audience had invited him to speak on the day celebrating freedom, and had expected him to offer a hopeful message about America;...