Nearly six years ago, in the terrible summer of 2020, I published an article titled “A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor.” In the first paragraph, I wrote that my family and I had “sat around the festive table” a few days before, on the Fourth of July, and “read the Declaration [of Independence] aloud in celebration.” Hardly the...

　　In the end, it wasn’t even close. Andy Burnham, popular mayor of Greater Manchester, won the Wigan-based constituency of Makerfield in a landslide, taking 55 percent of the vote and—crucially—outpolling Reform, Restore, and Tory combined (along with everyone else). Conservatives, LibDems, and Greens all lost their deposits. He not only increased Labour’s vote but increased its vote share by dint...

　　On August 20, 2001, I arrived in the United States with my family after leaving Brazil, the country in which I had been born, educated, and built my professional life. Three weeks later, I watched in horror as terrorists attacked New York and Washington on September 11. Like millions of Americans, I experienced a mixture of grief, shock, and disbelief....

　　Historical illiteracy has become a real problem in our time. The downsides of this have become rather glaring lately, as for instance in Tucker Carlson’s 2024 interview with Daryl Cooper, whom Carlson called “the most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper claimed that Americans’ understanding of WWII was deeply flawed and that the true villain was Winston Churchill....

　　It has become received wisdom by the legal intelligentsia that the Supreme Court is illegitimate. They charge that the conservative justices are engaging in politicized decisions that advance Republican causes, which have no grounding in law. Critics blast the Court for not following procedural regularity and deciding important issues on the so-called “shadow” docket. This mantra is repeated so often...

　　In daily personal market transactions, the dynamics of mutual gain were once readily apparent. A buyer of meat from a butcher could readily see that he valued the meat more than the money he paid for it. The seller earned his living from the transaction. Each could recognize the other as a partner in mutual advantage. 　　Contrast this process with...

　　The Presidential Records Act (PRA) has lately been a source of controversy. The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) published an opinion at the beginning of April that concluded the PRA is unconstitutional because it “exceeds Congress’s enumerated and implied powers” and “aggrandizes the Legislative Branch at the expense of the constitutional independence and autonomy of the Executive.”...

　　Years ago, I attended a college graduation ceremony in Missouri. The graduates and faculty wore black gowns. During the procession, the university chorus sang “Guadeamus Igitur” (Latin for “Therefore let us rejoice”). The degrees—bachelor of arts, master of arts, and doctorates—were the same as those awarded centuries ago at Oxford and the Sorbonne. Thus, I thought, did the European Middle...

　　On June 12, 1776, Virginia’s Fifth Revolutionary Convention unanimously passed the Virginia Declaration of Rights. A trenchant, post-colonial statement affirming humankind’s inherent rights, limited government, and republican principles, the Declaration is arguably the nation’s most imitated founding document and a pillar of American founding principles. George Mason, the Declaration’s principal draftsman, boasted that it was the first of its kind...

　　Americans today are filled with angst about the state of “our democracy.” A March 2024 Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service poll found that 81 percent of Americans believe democracy in the United States is threatened. A November 2025 survey conducted by the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute found that “84% say democracy is either in crisis or facing...

　　On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee rose in the Continental Congress and offered the resolution that would set the colonies irreversibly upon the path to independence. Not all the delegates were ready. Several colonies had yet to authorize so decisive a step, and Congress postponed the final vote. Yet even as it delayed declaring independence, it prepared to justify...

　　The celebrations of the 250th anniversary of independence will be a bit dimmer now with the sudden passing of the greatest historian of the American founding, Gordon S. Wood. Since the 1960s, Wood stood at the pinnacle of the historical profession. The list of awards and accolades he received over his sixty-year career, including the National Medal of the Humanities,...