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Bill of Rights
To find out what the Founding generation said about "well-regulated militias" and the right to bear arms, we researched all the colonial and state constitutions enacted before 1791.
Many current interpretations largely the first half of the Second Amendment, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The first ten amendments prevent majorities from exercising power at the expense of individuals. But they weren’t called a “bill of rights” until more than a century after ratification.
On December 15, 1941, America was at war. Just one week earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned the nation that “our people, our territories, and our interests are in grave danger” after the “unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan” on Pearl Harbor.
A diminutive, persuasive Virginian hijacked the Constitutional Convention and forced the moderates to accept a national government with vastly expanded powers.
On May 5, 1787, James Madison arrived in Philadelphia.
We tend to see the Constitution as permanent and inviolable, but we’re always wild to change it.
Six weeks into the 104th Congress, the balanced budget amendment (the BBA) that had passed the House almost made it through the trickier procedural shoals of the Senate with the two-thirds majority needed to propel it on to the state legislatures.
Every one of the founders was a historian who believed that only history could protect us from tyranny and coercion. In their reactions to the long, bloody pageant of the English past, we can see the framers’ intentions.
Jefferson and Madison led a revolutionary fight for complete separation of church and state. Their reasons probed the basic relation between religion and democracy
Long before Lexington, James Otis’ fight for civil liberties gave heart to the rebel cause. But why did he behave so strangely as the Revolution neared? Which side was he on?
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