A grayscale drawing of a big blocky building with columns on the front, with people standing and walking in the street in front of it, and a church in the background.

Originalism and the Nature of Rights

Jud Campbell proposes a deeper originalism that uncovers how the founders understood the very nature of fundamental rights.
A picture of an elderly man taken from behind. He is wearing a cowboy outfit and firing two revolvers at a series of targets shaped like human torsos in a sandpit.

Home on the (Firing) Range: Gunfight Reenactments, “Old West” Competitive Shooting, and the Myth of Authenticity

Jennifer Tucker unearths the rituals that connect history and contemporary social and political life at events sponsored by the Single Action Shooting Society.
A line art engraving of a man with his back to the viewer holding a long knife and pistols in his belt facing an open cupboard with a small man cowering inside of it.

A Plague on All Our Houses: The Uses and Abuses of History in D.C. v. Heller

Robert Churchill confronts the intellectual dishonesty of the Supreme Court’s recent jurisprudence on gun rights.
A political cartoon showing a soldier labeled "White League" shaking hands with a KKK member in full robe and hood over a and image of a black man and woman and a baby cowering with the label "worse than slavery.”

Men and Their Guns: The Culture of Self-Deputized Manhood in the South, 1850–1877

Tracy L. Barnett traces a link between nineteenth-century gun manufacturers’ marketing strategies and the rise of a heavily armed style of white supremacy.
Engraving of two men dueling in a forest, each with a second in a topcoat trying to stop them, with a coach in the background half hidden in the woods.

Reflections on the American Gun Control Culture

Brennan Gardner Rivas unearths an emerging tradition of regulating access to guns as their availability grew in the nineteenth century.

Weapons of Work: Firearms and the Pre-Emancipation Black South

Antwain K. Hunter unpacks the complicated relationship between firearms and race by exploring Black people’s use of weapons as tools.
A pend and ink drawing of Indigenous people dressed for hunting.

What a Historical Analysis of Gunpowder Can Teach Us about Gun Culture in the United States

In the first essay in our new roundtable entitled “A People Armed,” Jennifer Monroe McCutchen argues that early Americans thought about gunpowder in similar ways to how we think about firearms today.
Print of a room full of men in 18th century dress sitting at desks deliberating the constitution.

Back to the Future; Or, Whenever I Show up to Talk about the Past, My Audience Can Only Hear about the Present

Todd Estes resists comparisons between political moderation in the constitutional era and political moderation in the present day.
A miniature portrait of a thin white man with dark hair wearing a formal black coat and a white shirt with a high collar.

The Creoles’ Magician: States’ Rights and Nullification in Louisiana

Joel Walker Sturgeon details Edward Livingstone’s political deftness in negotiating the complicated politics of 1830s Louisiana.
A line drawing of a large building set back from a grassy waterfront with small figures moving about in the foreground.

An “Asylum for Mankind”? Migration in the Early American Republic

Connie Thomas questions the old assumption that the postrevolutionary US was uniquely open to immigrants.