
Originalism and the Nature of Rights
Jud Campbell proposes a deeper originalism that uncovers how the founders understood the very nature of fundamental rights.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

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.