Muslim Slaves in the American South

We don’t often think about the variety of African cultures thrown together by the Atlantic slave trade in the Americas. The unfortunate tendency is to assume that all the Africans who were enslaved came from more “primitive” cultures, similar to what we saw brought to life at the beginning of the movie Amistad. This may [...]

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Capitalists in Eden

The vision of America as a new Eden began as soon as the first ship made it back to Europe. It is one of those rare historical thoughts that makes its way down through time and allows us to feel the texture of our link to previous generations, a thought that we don’t just read [...]

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Liberty’s Missing Link

“No man,” wrote Nathaniel Macon, “should live where he can hear his neighbor’s dog bark.” This is more than a nineteenth century version of suburbia. Macon was a distinguished member of a group of politicians in the early national period who came to be called the Tertium Quids, or just quids for short. This group, [...]

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