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Everyday life for many in early America involved endless rounds of backbreaking labor, grueling travel into dense forests, across frozen rivers, or through putrid swamps, and the ever-present risk of illness, accident, and injury. How did early Americans cope...

When Andrew Benjamin Bricker watches Saturday Night Live or the Jordan Peele film Get Out, he thinks of the eighteenth century. An Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University in Belgium, Bricker recently published "After the...

The following is an excerpt from chapter nine of Gregory Dowd's latest book, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Late in the Revolutionary War, in Passy, France, [Benjamin] Franklin lifted his pen in a most extraordinary...

The following is an excerpt from chapter eight of Gregory Dowd's latest book, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Check back with us every Thursday in the month of November for more Groundless excerpts highlighting word-of...

The following is an excerpt from chapter five of Gregory Dowd's latest book, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Check back with us every Thursday in the month of November for more Groundless excerpts highlighting word-of...

The following is an excerpt from chapter one of Gregory Dowd's latest book, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Check back with us every Thursday in the month of November for more Groundless excerpts highlighting word-of...

I have been teaching a class called Liberty vs. Security about the politics of speech from Colonial America through the Civil War for a few years. In this class, we talk about when and why American governments have (or attempted) to limit speech, whether these...