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Featured Essays
Congress forbade living persons from appearing on paper currency in 1866, after an unpopular Treasury Department official put himself on the five-cent note.
The extravaganza celebrating the nation’s first century was the greatest cultural event of America’s Gilded Age.
At the nation’s pivotal moment — the Civil War — two seventeenth-century vessels kept sailing through the American mind: the Mayflower and the slaver White Lion. Their wakes still cut our waters.
Our Founders profoundly transformed the way people participate in government.
America 250!
America 100: The Great Centennial Fair | Summer 2026, Vol 71, No 3
By Fergus M. BordewichThe extravaganza celebrating the nation’s first century was the greatest cultural event of America’s Gilded Age.
Memory and America’s Birthday | Winter 2026, Vol 71, No 1
By Wilfred M. McClayWhile we “know” more and more about the American past, too many of our citizens are ignorant of who we are and where we came from.
Discovered: First Maps of the American Revolution | Spring 2025, Vol 70, No 2
By Edwin S. GrosvenorPreviously unknown, a map drawn by Lord Percy, the British commander at Lexington, sheds new light on the perilous retreat to Boston 250 years ago this month.
Rethinking the Boston Massacre | Special Issue - George Washington Prize 2018, Vol 63, No 2
By Eric HinderakerIt is one of the most notorious incidents in American history, and also one of the least understood.
Leadership of the Founders | Winter 2026, Vol 71, No 1
By Joseph J. EllisOur nation came into being thanks to an unexpected explosion of political talent in an emerging nation on the fringe of the Atlantic world.
Classic Essays from the Archives
Did Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson Love Each Other? | Fall 2008, Summer 2025, Vol 58, No 5
By Annette Gordon-ReedTo call it a loaded question does not begin to do justice to the matter, given America’s tortured racial history and its haunting legacy.
A Few Parchment Pages Two Hundred Years Later | May/June 1987, Summer 2025, Vol 70, No 3
By Richard B. MorrisThe framers of the Constitution were proud of what they had done but might be astonished that their words still carry so much weight. A distinguished scholar tells us how the great charter has survived and flourished.
America: Experiment or Destiny? | June 1977, Summer 2025, Vol 28, No 4
By Arthur Schlesinger Jr.We can take pride in our nation, not as we pretend to a commission from God and a sacred destiny, but as we struggle to fulfill our deepest values in an inscrutable world.
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