My freshman year in college a professor placed in my hands G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy, and my life was never the same after.

Our Heritage series typically focuses on American writers, but every now and then I am reminded of something from the non-American past that I think interesting.

Most of our readers will know about the Philadelphia Convention in the summer of 1787 and assume that it had to replace the ineffectual Articles of Confederation.

In our enthusiasm to declare our independence from England, we Americans often forget that the American Revolution is a development of English political history and not a rejection of it.

That there are “forgotten Founders” is a truth universally acknowledged among students of the American Founding.

For many college professors, especially in the humanities, reading books is more than a habit, it’s compulsory.

As modern Americans, a resistance to monarchy is more or less bred in our bones.

In this nearly ten-year old essay, the philosopher Paul Bloom makes an argument against empathy (he subsequently published a book by the same title, but I’ve not read it).

On the 50th anniversary of our Constitution, and at the unripened age of 28, Abraham Lincoln took the stage at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield IL to address the topic “On the perpetuation of our political institutions.”

Colin Woodard in his Eleven Nations identified the deep regional differences that divide this country.

On September 17, 1787, the Constitutional Convention, after much discussion and deliberation, completed its work.

No gravestone marks the place of Phillis Wheatley’s rest. Of course, this is not unusual.

Among the many temptations that undermine democratic citizenship, getting something for nothing would have to be near the top of the list.

Many matters were debated at the Constitutional Convention, but the central issue involved the problem of political representation, which carries within itself one of the fundamental problems of social life: namely, the principal/agent problem.

Scholars have long debated the role of religion in the founding of America.

In 1790, two years before Mary Wollstonecraft published her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, an American woman with the pen name “Constantia” released her own treatise on the equality of the sexes.

In his autobiography, Gerald Ford recalls his excitement at the prospect of going to the University of Michigan.

A debate among scholars of our constitutional era concerns both the origins and background of the Constitution, and thus also America itself.

Jefferson’s belief that democracy requires a “well-informed” citizenry has been so oft-repeated that it is almost a cliché.