It is a very great honor and a high privilege, Governor Godwin, to come to the Commonwealth of Virginia and to this beautiful and significant home and to participate in this wonderful ceremony.

Like an atom, a polity consists of different elements, one of which is that there has to be some underlying principle of unity.

The 14^th Amendment is back in the news, which typically means something is afoot somewhere in this country, but is also an opportunity to review one of the most important provisions in our Constitution

This series concerns itself with our American heritage, and in particular to make contemporary readers more appreciative of the “blessings of liberty” that have been vouchsafed to us.

America is facing demographic decline. Whether it rises to the level of a crisis is open to debate (although you can put me squarely in the “uh oh” camp, and not only because I’m in my 60’s and devoid of grandchildren, which, in historical terms, is an anomaly of a high order).

We’ve drawn the reader’s attention in a prior essay to Lincoln’s “Lyceum Address,” one of his more interesting speeches.

My freshman year in college a professor placed in my hands G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy, and my life was never the same after.

Our Heritage series typically focuses on American writers, but every now and then I am reminded of something from the non-American past that I think interesting.

Most of our readers will know about the Philadelphia Convention in the summer of 1787 and assume that it had to replace the ineffectual Articles of Confederation.

In our enthusiasm to declare our independence from England, we Americans often forget that the American Revolution is a development of English political history and not a rejection of it.

That there are “forgotten Founders” is a truth universally acknowledged among students of the American Founding.

For many college professors, especially in the humanities, reading books is more than a habit, it’s compulsory.

As modern Americans, a resistance to monarchy is more or less bred in our bones.

In this nearly ten-year old essay, the philosopher Paul Bloom makes an argument against empathy (he subsequently published a book by the same title, but I’ve not read it).

On the 50th anniversary of our Constitution, and at the unripened age of 28, Abraham Lincoln took the stage at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield IL to address the topic “On the perpetuation of our political institutions.”

Colin Woodard in his Eleven Nations identified the deep regional differences that divide this country.

On September 17, 1787, the Constitutional Convention, after much discussion and deliberation, completed its work.

No gravestone marks the place of Phillis Wheatley’s rest. Of course, this is not unusual.

Among the many temptations that undermine democratic citizenship, getting something for nothing would have to be near the top of the list.