This is the contemporary-application episode for Week 7 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, and it takes Grotius off the page and holds him against our own moment — then follows the free-sea question to a harder one, closer to home. When the sea is contested and America turns to military force over it, who decides that we fight? The Constitution begins with a plain answer: Article I, Section 8 gives the power to declare war to Congress, not the President. This hour measures ou

This is the story of how a revolt became a republic almost by accident, how toleration and commerce fed each other until a small waterlogged country surpassed a vast empire, and how the men who built it also built, on the far side of the world, a machinery of conquest and slavery that cannot be edited out of the account of it.