A few years ago now, Sheryl Sandburg of Facebook wrote a book called Lean In, which I certainly did not read, since I am a respectable academic and people like me do not read best-selling self-help books by business gurus, especially when the business is social media.

Americans are like members of a quarrelsome family, so intent on arguing their petty grievances around the kitchen table that they don’t smell the rising smoke from the oven.

If you want to understand our contemporary politics and culture, you must have a working knowledge of the major revolutions of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

In March of 1785 the Continental Congress entertained a motion to amend section 9 of the Articles of Confederation, giving Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign powers and among the states.

Election season in the United States. For even the most politically-involved Americans, the time between January and November every four years is filled with heightened cortisol levels…

Having dealt with the disease of faction attendant to republican forms of government, Hamilton, in Federalist #11 returns to the issue of unity.

Since the populist surge that gave us Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, politics in the Western world has polarized into a distinctive stalemate

The assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump on July 13 is a stark reminder that the specter of political violence casts a long shadow over our democratic ideals.

In my last essay, part 1 of a reflection Federalist #10, I dealt with Madison’s definition of faction.

One of the greatest challenges facing the administration of US President Gerald Ford when he assumed office in 1974 was the poor state of the US economy, which was suffering from a condition dubbed stagflation – stagnation and inflation.

When it comes to celebrating Constitution Day, it may be considered atypical to think of the Declaration of Independence.

Federalist 10, along with 51, are the two best-known of the 85 essays.

The main source we have for information on the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention, occurring in the summer of 1787, is James Madison’s notes on the convention.

After directing his attention to the problems of internal dissolution, Hamilton expands on the problem in Federalist #9, one of his most carefully thought through essays, and one that draws on a number of different sources for his argument.

I have spent weeks trying to write something arguing that empathy is the answer to everything…

In 1967, Pepperdine College commissioned the historian and conservative man of letters Russell Kirk to write a history textbook for the southern California Christian college.

Outside the screened-in porch and downwind from us fourteen lambs graze in the dark.

John Jay fell ill after he completed the fifth Federalist, contributing only one more to the series (No. 64).

Like so many other Americans, I was captivated as a child by the stories in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House novels and in Michael Landon’s TV show inspired by the books.

Among Gerald Ford’s firsts was to be the first Republican to make a place in the White House for a full-time scholar.