The quest for original intent has dominated Second Amendment scholarship, a trend further solidified in the Supreme Court's recent gun case, District of Columbia v. Heller. In the majority opinion, Justice Scalia insisted that the "normal meaning" of the words of the Second Amendment must be used to understand the...

Historically, the popular fascination with American Indian baseball players in the Major Leagues has contained an underlying strain of bigotry. Recently, however, sportswriters have been enthralled by the development toward stardom of three such baseball players—Kyle Lohse, Jacoby Ellsbury and Joba Chamberlain. And today researchers and fans can trace the...

In 1807, French intervention in Spain and Napoleon's puppet government in the Iberian Peninsula propelled many Hispanic intellectuals to the young American Republic. There, they translated into Spanish the U.S. Constitution and the ideas of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe. These translations were published by early...

If American history students can name any victim of the Boston Massacre, it is almost certainly Crispus Attucks. He became a symbol of African-American patriotism for the Abolitionists of the 1800s and for civil rights activists of the 1900s. Yet Attucks' name doesn't appear in the first newspaper reports about...

Throughout our past, rivers have expanded commercial and manufacturing opportunities, influenced settlement patterns and acted as boundaries—effectively shaping the history, politics and geography of nations across the globe. The U.S. Congressional Serial Set illustrates the important role of rivers through its collection of more than 50,000 maps, many in full...