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By Lucy MaddoxFor anyone who sets out to write a history, the result of finishing such a project has to include a sense of incompleteness. There’s much the writer simply cannot know, but there’s also much the writer can’t include because it’s not sufficiently...

Some reviewers have described Defending Privilege as an explainer of the historical roots of our current political warfare. How does your book illuminate current events?These days, government leaders, cable hosts, journalists, and protestors are battling to...

How did American colonists transform British law into their own? What were the colonies' first legal institutions, and who served in them? And why did the early Americans develop a passion for litigation that continues to this day? These questions and more are...

In William Faulkner’s well-known aphorism “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner’s understanding of history forcefully applies to the story of Maryland during the Civil War. If we had forgotten his point, the recent controversy over the future...

I wrote this book because I wanted to teach how slavery infected every part of the national government. The term, the "slave power," was not just anti-southern rhetoric; it was the description of something very real. The most surprising thing I learned during...

Nat Turner realized at some point during his nine weeks and four days in hiding that what he might say if taken alive would be interesting to the public. In August of 1831, he had led the bloody uprising by forty identifiable slaves in Southampton County...

This post is part of our July “Unexpected America” blog series, focused on intriguing or surprising American history research from 1776 to today. Check back with us all month to see what new scholarship our authors have to share! (Photo Credit Nicholas Raymond...