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About a hundred and two passengers were aboard. Some had come out of a separatist congregation that had spent a decade in exile in Holland; others had been recruited in England by the merchants financing the voyage, and the separatists called them strangers. William Bradford, who would govern the colony for most of the next thirty-five years, later wrote down what some of the strangers said once they understood where they were: that when they came ashore they would use their

This is the interview episode for Week 15 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, "The Fork in the Road": Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Two Enlightenments. Tuesday's episode ended on the levy of February 1793 and the revolt in the Vendée: "they have killed our king, chased away our priests, and now they want to take our bodies."

This December, Selective Service registration becomes automatic. The duty to sign up moves from the man to the government, and the agency that has to run it withdrew its implementing rules in July without ever publishing them.

The five nations of the Haudenosaunee — the people of the longhouse, known to the French and the English and through them to almost all the scholarship as the Iroquois — occupied a band of country running east and west across what is now upstate New York.⁸ They described that country as a single longhouse, the bark-covered dwelling in which several related families lived along a central row of fires. The Mohawk, farthest east, were the keepers of the eastern door. The Seneca,

What is covered: the Calas affair and the four arguments of the Treatise on Tolerance; the general will versus the will of all; the real limits Rousseau set on his sovereign, and the question he did not clearly answer, which is who applies them; the "noble savage" phrase that is not his, and the famous Voltaire line that Voltaire never wrote; what Americans actually read of each man; how Robespierre invoked Rousseau, and why invocation is not derivation; how Edmund Burke and

The last American troops are leaving Iraq’s bases. The road that put them there began with a decade of war loans, a set of mixed signals from Washington, and a threat to Saudi Arabia that the satellite photographs did not show.

Voltaire reached them early and reached them as a historian and a dramatist more than as a philosopher. His histories were in colonial libraries; his plays were performed; Candide circulated. The part that bears on this article is the toleration argument, which also circulated, and which arrived in a colonial world already working out its own settlements between churches and civil authority.³⁰ None of that makes a French book the source of any American measure, and the surviv

This is the interview that closes Week 14 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776. Saturday’s episode read Montesquieu’s chapter on England and followed his design into Madison’s hands. Tuesday’s watched the House of Representatives stop checking the executive. Today Jared takes the judicial side of the same question, and his answer is that the courts have been handing the executive power too.

This contemporary-application episode takes the question Episode 14 ended on — what happens to a constitutional design when the parts stop resisting each other — and puts it to the House of Representatives this month. In Federalist 51, Madison connected the interest of the man to the constitutional rights of the place. In his chapter on England, Montesquieu gave the legislature the means of examining how its laws are executed, and warned against a legislature a considerable t

This episode goes into the sixth chapter of the eleventh book — the most quoted passage of political writing produced in the eighteenth century, and among the least accurately remembered. Read to the halfway mark it says what everyone thinks it says: three powers, three sets of hands, keep them apart. Read past that point and Montesquieu dismantles both prohibitions. He does not want a permanent judiciary at all. He wants occasional tribunals of ordinary men, assembled for th

Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient to direct the industry of a nation. A century and a half later, other men turned that sentence into a formal argument. Carl Menger argued in 1871 that value sits in the person valuing, not in the object. Ludwig von Mises argued in 1920 that without private ownership of producer goods there are no exchange ratios for them, and so no way to weigh one use of a ton of steel against another.

The men who opposed ratification had the small-republic doctrine, and they used it hard. Brutus opened his first essay to the citizens of New York with it; Cato used it; it was the ground of the objection the leading Anti-Federalists put first, that a territory as large as the American states together could not be governed on free principles.⁴⁶ Hamilton answered, in the ninth number, by turning to another part of the same book. The opponents of the plan, he writes, have with

Two men were born in Scotland in 1723, a county apart. They joined the same Edinburgh club, kept the same friends, and worked from the same premise about what commercial life does to a people. They never agreed about the remedy, and the disagreement is more specific and more difficult than it is usually made to sound.

Paul Greengrass has made a film about the English rising of 1381, and it opens this week. It is historical fiction. The protagonist is a composite rather than a documented individual, the dialogue is invented, and the dramatic shape of the film belongs to the screenwriter rather than to the chroniclers.² None of that is a complaint. It is the reason a primer is useful.

David Evans is the founder and managing partner of Sentiero Ventures, an early-stage venture fund outside Dallas that invests in business software where artificial intelligence is the core of the product rather than a feature bolted onto it. Before the fund he was an operator. He has been writing software since the early 1990s, built and sold a national digital signage network, and founded EasySeat, an online ticket resale business that reached the Inc. 500 and sold in 2015.

Three cases, in ascending order of how hard they are to correct. The Rent Guidelines Board voted seven to one on June 25 under Order 58 to set adjustments at zero percent for both one-year and two-year renewal leases beginning October 1, covering roughly a million rent-stabilized apartments. The board is not a mob; it is a technical body that publishes seven separate research documents, one of which produced commensurate adjustment figures running from 3.4 to 8.5 percent. It

Adam Smith came home to Kirkcaldy in the spring of 1767, at forty-three, having resigned a professorship at Glasgow to travel through France as tutor to a young duke. He had met Voltaire at Ferney and Quesnay and Turgot in Paris. He came back to a small port town with a life pension and a manuscript, and stayed roughly six years.⁴ The letters from those years are the letters of a man in difficulty.

Episode 12 of Self-Evident opens Arc Four and the Scottish arc. It begins with the conditions: a kingdom that lost Darien and then argued itself into a union it did not agree about, a Kirk that put a schoolmaster in nearly every lowland parish because Presbyterian doctrine required ordinary people to read Scripture themselves, and that in the same generation urged the vigorous execution of the law against a twenty-year-old student named Thomas Aikenhead, hanged for blasphemy

Interview Episode for Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 11i I Asked a Forty-Year Appellate Lawyer What a Court Is For. He Said It Is a Bureaucracy. This is the Thursday conversation that closes week 11 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776. Saturday traced the Glorious Revolution and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Tuesday set a written bill of rights against an unwritten one. Both stopped short of the arms clause, because that argument belongs to somebody who has carr

Covers the fourth declaratory clause in full, the 1689 revenue settlement and the four-year customs grant, the first Mutiny Act and its seven-month life, Learning Resources v. Trump and the three-justice major questions plurality, Section 122 and Section 307, and the two bills now sitting in the Senate Finance Committee.