When we think about the founding of the United States, we often focus on the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and those first landmark elections. But how did the United States actually build its federal government, the entire apparatus of state...
On September 17, 1787, the members of the Constitutional Convention concluded their work by signing the final draft of their new proposed government. The document they signed was the United States Constitution, which is why the United States marks...
For four months during the summer of 1787, delegates from the thirteen states met in Philadelphia to craft a revised Constitution that would define the government of the United States. It took them nearly the entire time to settle on the method for...
Independence from Great Britain provided the former British American colonists the opportunity to create a new, more democratic government than they had lived under before the American Revolution. What did this new American government look like? Who...
Mercy Otis Warren wasn’t your typical early American woman. She was a woman with strong political viewpoints, which she wrote about and published for the world to see and consider. Did anyone in society take her views seriously? Did her writings...
Most histories of American abolitionism begin just before the Civil War, during the Antebellum period. But the movement to end chattel slavery in America began long before the United States was a nation. Manisha Sinha, a professor of history at the...
When politicians, lawyers, and historians discuss the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they often rely on two sources: The promotional tracts collectively known as The Federalist Papers and James Madison’s Notes of the Constitutional Convention...
Could customs collectors, the tax men of early America, be the unsung founders of the early United States? Today, we explore the creation of the United States Customs Service and its contributions to the establishment of the federal government with...