James Madison Archives - Public Seminar

History

The Case of the Hijacked Statue of the Great Abolitionist

What the fate of the monument to Edward Coles in Edwardsville, Illinois, can tell us about the ironies of hoping that statues might tell a new American story

July 29, 2020 • by Jeffrey Manuel

Recently, renewed efforts have been made to diversify the kinds of Americans commemorated by public monuments. A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an op-ed by David Blight, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer of Frederick Douglass; as the title of the piece put it, “There’s a Chance to Tell a ...

The Case of the Hijacked Statue of the Great Abolitionist

Politics

Expendable Bodies

What Sophocles can teach us about our political moment

June 25, 2020 • by Daniel Schillinger

An ancient Greek tragedy, Sophocles’s Philoctetes, can help us to think holistically about our own political moment. What Sophocles shows us is that the same bodies the polity dominates, annihilates, or consigns to suffering in isolation it also tends to use for its own ends. That political communities too often view ...

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Can There Be Dignity In A Vast Majority?

Democrats have the votes. Now we need to listen to each other.

December 27, 2018 • by Geoffrey Kurtz

What if the Democratic Party now has the support of the majority of American citizens? Certainly Democrats did well in the 2018 elections. More revealing than the tally of races won is the fact that Democrats received majorities of the overall votes cast for Senate candidates, for House candidates, and for gubernatorial candidates. In the House elections, Democrats ...

Can There Be Dignity In A Vast Majority?

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The Persons Among People in 1787

Why the U.S. Constitution contained within itself a promise that became a lie

October 12, 2018 • by Julie J. Miller

In the spring of 1787, a group of men met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to revise the Articles of Confederation and ended up drafting the United States Constitution. That convention dissolved itself about four months later, on September 17, when work, some said, was finished, and the paper signed at that ...

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Did Hamilton Write Too Much For His Own Good?

The publication history of the Federalist

November 9, 2017 • by Joseph Adelman

You probably know that line about the Federalist from the Act One finale of Hamilton, “Non-Stop,” in which Aaron Burr repeatedly asks Hamilton, “how do you write like you’re running out of time?” In the musical, his indefatigable pen is treated as a virtue (and yes, I have at times listened to ...

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Interposition in the Age of Trump

Rethinking States’ Rights

January 12, 2017 • by Matthew Filner

In 1798, Congress passed the famous Alien and Sedition Acts. These four bills made citizenship more difficult for new immigrants, gave the President expansive deportation powers, and turned criticism of the federal government into a criminal act. (Sound familiar?) In response, James Madison wrote a series of resolutions ultimately adopted ...

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The Invisible Constitutional Crisis

Options for the US Supreme Court’s Pending Vacancy

October 28, 2016 • by Matthew Filner

The United States is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. Yes, that’s right: one of the most important crises of our constitutional republic and it is going virtually unnoticed as a crisis. No, I am not talking about the Trump candidacy -- though reprehensible in multiple ways, it is ...