In this episode of Think Back, I speak with historian and writer Megan Kate Nelson about her new book The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. The book takes direct aim at one of the most durable stories Americans tell about themselves: the frontier myth, codified by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, which cast the westward march of white pioneers as the engine of American democracy. That myth, Nelson argues, has never really loosened its grip. When whole communities are erased from the national story, it becomes easier to treat them as un-American and to strip them of their rights.

To make that case, Nelson follows seven people traversing the 19th-century West, a cast that includes Sacajawea, the biracial fur trader Jim Beckwourth, the Hispanic gambling-saloon empire-builder María Gertrudis Barceló, the Northern Cheyenne chief Little Wolf, the Chinese immigrant Polly Bemis, and the Canadian-immigrant rancher Ella Watson. Together they reveal a West initially defined less by conquest than mobility, cultural encounters, and radical possibility, a place where people on the margins of society often found real opportunity, until the advance American law and settlement foreclosed those futures for good.

We discuss how Turner’s thesis came to dominate American historical writing and why popular culture keeps it alive today. We talk about what Sacajawea’s year in St. Louis reveals about the indigenous world she came from, how Jim Beckwourth “translated” himself across identities and cultures while staying one step ahead of laws designed to strip him of his rights, and why California’s 1850 constitution was a turning point in the racialization of the West. We also dig into the Northern Cheyenne’s extraordinary 1,500-mile flight back to their homeland from forced relocation in Oklahoma, and what Ella Watson’s story reveals about who gets to write the history of the West—and of the nation.

Nelson’s West was not a paradise of pluralism, but genuine possibilities existed there—for women, for people of color, for those living across cultural boundaries. The frontier myth distorts our understanding of the past, but it also limits our imaginations when it comes to the present and the future.

Music for this episode: “The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, performed by Akiko Sasaki; “Reel Delisle,” by Joel Zifkin; interlude by Zachary Solomon

Looking for more on the American West? See these previous episodes of THINK BACK.

All of which is to melodramatically say: my book is out in paperback! Pick up a copy! They are handsome things, with a rough-textured cover that I think is supposed to give readers a sense of the gritty texture of my historical reconstructions? Something like that. If you’ve had the thought that someone you know might want to read a book about American Jews arguing over matters of race and justice and equality, oppression and liberation and the perpetuation of world-historical traumas, but one in which the dreaded Z-word is not mentioned once (okay, once)—you can now share my book with them in a slightly less expensive format! Buy it at your local bookstore or at bookshop.org.

Most of my time these days is devoted to working on my book about the role(s) Canada has played in American history. I’m enjoying that work even more than I had suspected I would over the many years I had the project in mind. Obviously, current events have made the story even more relevant than expected, which helps in drawing out resonances between past and present. I’ve never been inclined to offer teases of my work, glimpses of surprising research finds—I’m pitiful at showmanship. TRUE NORTH. Out in 2028, or thereabouts.

I also, as you may or may not know, write two monthly columns about history. One is for The Nation, “Our Back Pages,” which digs around in the magazine’s archives for older pieces that speak to issues of our time. I’ve recently written about the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, about a long-shot left-populist running for mayor of New York (Fiorello LaGuardia), the military-industrial-complex origins of artificial intelligence, the history of food stamps, the radicalization (and racialization) of the US Border Patrol, the tortured history of US involvement in Venezuela, and the late Jesse Jackson’s influence on the Democratic Party. My most recent column drew on certain resemblances between Tucker Carlson and a pseudo-populist broadcaster of the distant past, Father Charles Coughlin. Here’s some from that piece:

I also write “Backstory,” a history column for Hudson Valley magazine, which gives me free rein to explore any aspect of my adopted region’s history. (“Backstory,” “Our Back Pages,” Think Back—don’t think I haven’t noticed…) I often use the column as an excuse to pay “site visits,” as I call these childless daytime excursions to interesting places or museums I’ve wanted to check out. This year I’ve focused every few columns on local angles to the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, with one piece on the early construction of forts to protect the river-passage through the Hudson Highlands, and another on General Richard Montgomery, one of the first Revolutionary martyrs, who died on New Year’s Eve in 1775 while trying to conquer Quebec. I especially enjoyed the site visit for a piece on the all-important Verplanck’s Point ferry crossing just south of Peekskill:

Other pieces have looked at Baxtertown, a long-disappeared village not far from my house where fugitive slaves built a remote backwoods community; a German-born hermit who lived in the Westchester woods; the surprising Catskills origins of the song “Guantanamera”; a long-lost mineral springs near Albany; a rare, foldable map of the Hudson River from the 1840s; the painter Thomas Cole’s first visit to the Hudson Valley; and a new book about the Bear Mountain Bridge.

I also contribute other pieces to the magazine that are just regular shoe-leather journalism, not necessarily about history. (This is the closest I have to a day job.) I often find that the less I know in advance about the topic of the assignment, the more I enjoy working on it. That was certainly true of this piece about an adaptive skiing school in the Catskills, which gives people with physical and cognitive disabilities the chance to experience a sense of freedom and accomplishment while hitting the slopes. I also wrote about the Byrdcliffe artists’ colony in Woodstock; change and continuity along three Main Streets in the valley; and the special homemade quality of college radio stations in the age of the algorithm and AI.

And, of course, I make this podcast. I hope you’ve been enjoying it. There will be a new episode next week—one of my favorite conversations yet—and many interesting and hopefully relevant ones ahead. Thank you so much if you have taken out a paid subscription to support my work. It means a great deal to me.

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Now, apropos nothing, here’s a picture of my first-ever outing in snowshoes—on Mount Beacon, in late February, when I had the great pleasure of breaking trail after one of those two-foot dumps of snow.

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Rather than focusing on the Revolution itself, Richards trains his attention on the decades that followed, tracing how the fights ignited in 1776 continued to reshape American life long after the guns fell silent. We move through a series of connected episodes—the drafting of the Constitution, the Whiskey Rebellion, the little-known story of women voting in New Jersey in the early republic, Gabriel’s Rebellion, and ultimately the Civil War—each illuminating how debates over the Revolution’s legacy were also battles over the future.

Our conversation touches on how enslaved people and other excluded groups turned the Revolution’s language against its architects, why the Constitution was seen by some as a betrayal of revolutionary ideals, and how the turbulent period of “manifest destiny” forced Americans to decide what kind of country they were actually building.

With America’s 250th anniversary now underway, and the official commemorations already looking appallingly thin or worse, The Unfinished Business of 1776 arrives at exactly the right moment—a serious, searching, and genuinely useful reckoning with what the Revolution was, what it wasn’t, and what it might still become.

Music for this episode: “The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, performed by Akiko Sasaki; “Reel Delisle,” by Joel Zifkin

Looking for more on the American Revolution? See these previous episodes of THINK BACK.

Our conversation explores how slavery both rose and fell through a series of piecemeal, improvised decisions—legal maneuvers, military necessities, human acts of courage that accumulated into an unstoppable revolution. We discuss Lincoln’s leadership, the messy realities of the contraband camps, the present-day politics of how this history is told, and why the struggle over emancipation’s meaning is far from over.

Music by Akiko Sasaki (“The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk) and Zachary Solomon

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My guest is Caleb Gayle, professor of history at Northeastern University and the author of Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State (2025). We talk about the nature and the limits of McCabe’s vision, and what this failed effort reveals about debates over Black politics, specifically regarding the conflict between separatism and inclusion, in post-Civil War America—and why the story still matters.

Music by Akiko Sasaki (“The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk) and Zachary Solomon

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Our conversation ranges from the rise and fall of vast Indigenous cities long before 1492 to the long periods in which Native nations and European empires dealt with one another as equals—or in which Native peoples clearly held the upper hand. DuVal challenges familiar narratives, showing instead a history marked by diplomacy, trade, adaptation, and resilience. We talk about why she uses the word “nation” to describe Indigenous societies, how Native history connects to global history, and how economic and political ties bound Native North America to Europe and the Atlantic world.

We also discuss how to balance stories of survival and continuity rather than erasure alone. It’s a deep, wide-ranging conversation about what American history looks like when Native nations are finally taken seriously.

• Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (2024)

• — , Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (2016)

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See also my conversation last year with Nicole Eustace about her book, Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America (2022)

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Music by Akiko Sasaki (“The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk) and Zachary Solomon

We now face a profound contradiction between democracy and the Constitution—a conflict present since the founding but increasingly acute. Skowronek outlines why partisan diagnoses fall short and why the country may be approaching a choice between abandoning constitutional forms to preserve democracy or risking the collapse of both.

The episode looks beyond day-to-day headlines to consider the structural forces shaping American politics and the challenges ahead. As we all struggle to make sense of our unsettled moment, Skowronek’s work offers a compelling framework for understanding, even as he rejects many of the usual prescriptions for how the country’s perilous political situation might be successfully addressed.

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• Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (1993)

• Richard Kreitner, “What Time Is It? Here’s What the 2016 Election Tells Us About Obama, Trump, and What Comes Next,” The Nation (Nov. 22, 2016)

• — , “What History Tells Us About Trump’s Implosion and Biden’s Opportunity,” The Nation (Oct. 12, 2020)

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Music by Akiko Sasaki (“The Union,” by Louis Moreau Gottschalk) and Zachary Solomon

Drawing connections between the monument’s origins, the dispossession of the Lakota, and Rushmore’s place in today’s culture wars, Davis explores how a democratic nation came to celebrate itself through a mountain-sized tableau of presidential faces—and what that says about the ongoing debate over American ideals.

The conversation delves into the symbols and rituals of America’s “civil religion,” and how Mount Rushmore fits into (and unsettles) that tradition. Davis recounts beginning the project during the early pandemic, spurred in part by President Trump’s 2020 speech at the site amid the George Floyd uprising. We talk about why the monument was built, whose stories it erases, and how its meaning continues to shift—especially in an age when national myths are being fiercely reconsidered.

A Biography of a Mountain offers a fresh, accessible look at one of America’s most iconic and misunderstood symbols. Tune in for a lively discussion about the mountain, the monument, and what both reveal about the country today.

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Thank you so much to Abaye Steinmetz-Silber for playing the music for this episode. Check out his songs at Apple or Spotify or (my preferred streaming service) Qobuz.

• Matthew Davis, “The Empire Makers,” Slate, March 13, 2025.

As the 250th anniversary of the Revolution heats up, Bell’s book stands out for how boldly it connects the struggle for independence to events unfolding in places like China, India, Ireland, and West Africa. We talk about the Hessian mercenaries who fought for the British and later settled in America, the Catholic monarchs who backed a generally Protestant rebellion, and why understanding the Revolution in this wider context changes how we think about what it really was and who it was for.

Bell teaches history at the University of Maryland and is also the author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home. I learned something new on nearly every page of his book, and really enjoyed this conversation—I hope you enjoy it too.

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If you can think of someone who’d enjoy this episode—or who might be curious about the overlooked sides of the American Revolution as we enter this fraught anniversary year—please share it with them. Thanks so much for helping spread the word.

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See also “The Hidden Origins of the American Revolution” (with Andrew Lawler), Think Back, April 16, 2025

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Why, 160 years later, does studying the Civil War still yield new insights? How does Ellsworth’s framing challenge and change what we thought we knew about Lincoln’s presidency and his death. We discuss the tension and fear gripping Washington as Confederate forces threatened the capital in 1864 and Lincoln’s re-election that fall seemed unlikely, and we follow Booth’s path to the balcony at Ford’s Theatre.

See also: “What Really Happened on Sherman’s March?” (with Bennett Parten), July 9, 2025

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In the meantime, I want to let you know about a few upcoming appearances I have scheduled to talk about my work, in the off-chance that you would like to come hear me mumble speak, live and in the flesh.

Wednesday, October 22, I will be interviewing The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal at the book launch for a new volume of Nation writings about the Supreme Court going back more than 150 years. The Nine Have Spoken: The Nation vs. the Supreme Court, 1870 to Today, edited by yours truly, gathers some material from across the magazine’s history focused on the Court, its major decisions, and various plans over the years for reforming it. The Nation’s publisher and editorial director Katrina vanden Heuvel will introduce the event, which starts at 6pm at a delightfully old-school Lower East Side bar called the Francis Kite Club. (The book’s publisher, OR Books, is headquartered in the backroom.) Come on out, pick up a copy of the book, and say hello. RSVP required.

Then, a month from now, on Sunday, November 16, I will be at the New York Jewish Book Festival at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in Battery Park, to talk about my book Fear No Pharaoh with Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call For Human Rights, a social-justice advocacy group whose work I admire. I will also sign copies of my book after the talk.

(No hard feelings if you instead go see the novelist Sam Sussman appearing at the same time — 11:30am — on a panel about new Jewish fiction; I’m greatly enjoying his moving new novel, Boy From the North Country, about his very likely being Bob Dylan’s son — and much more besides. But do come to mine instead.)

Hope to see some of you there. Also, friendly reminder to *please* leave a review of THINK BACK on Apple or on Spotify, which will help new listeners find the show. And if you have some private feedback for me on how I can improve the podcast, you can reply directly to this email. Thank you kindly!

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We explore what made Woodhull such a fascinating and contradictory figure: a radical reformer with a checkered past, a champion of women’s rights and free love who moved in elite social circles, and a political visionary who might feel right at home in today’s media-saturated, personality-driven politics. Even if Woodhull had no chance of winning in the 19th century, she might have a pretty good one in the 21st.

If you enjoy this episode, please consider sharing it. Thanks for listening.

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We also get into his creative approach to history writing, the ethical questions of telling stories about suffering across racial and gender lines, and the need to move beyond overly rigid ways of narrating the past. I found our conversation to be eye-opening and deeply thought-provoking, and I hope you will too.

If you enjoy this episode, please consider sharing it. Thanks for listening.

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Though set three centuries ago, Covered With Night sheds light on enduring questions of justice, diplomacy, and power—issues that still resonate in today’s debates over race, policing, and punishment. We also discuss Eustace’s creative choices in storytelling and historical writing.

Thanks very much for listening.

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One of my early gigs in journalism was helping to edit The Nation’s 150th anniversary issue. Founded by former abolitionists in 1865, the magazine long claimed the title of “America’s oldest weekly.” Now a monthly, the publication is still going strong. I’m a contributing writer. Every month, I write a column titled “Our Back Pages,” digging up some forgotten gem from the archives. Recent installments covered The Nation’s original 1925 review of The Great Gatsby and the magazine’s criticisms of the 1952 anti-immigration law that the Trump administration has invoked in its attempt to deport activists like Mahmoud Khalil.

Along with the outgoing editor of the magazine, D.D. Guttenplan, I recently edited a special forum in The Nation’s 160th anniversary issue, titled, “These Dis-United States.” I’m rather proud of the package we put together, which among the 50 contributors (one for each state) includes some of my favorite living writers, journalists, and illustrators. The theme of American disunion is dear to my heart (being the subject of my 2020 book Break It Up), and it was a thrill to be able to ask a contributor for each state to reflect on it in print. As I write in the introduction:

Here we get firsthand testimony, from Maine to Hawaii, of the acceleration of a decades-long project to hollow out government at every level—and of the devastating effects of that project on our national life. Among other things, these pieces tell a story of the aggressive erasure of difference. Still, as Judy Chicago puts it in the title of her hand-embroidered contribution, “We’re All in the Same Boat”—even if some of us are doing everything we can to keep it afloat, while others, for profit or pleasure, try to capsize it.

The print issue is on newstands now, and you can also check out the nicely produced online version here.

Since moving to the Hudson Valley four years ago, I’ve become profoundly interested in the history of the region. It’s got it all, from the formation of the Appalachian mountains some 400 million years ago through significant Revolutionary war battles to the postindustrial, arts-fueled revival of recent years. Plus, it’s absolutely stunning, which helped inspire the first significant American arts movement, the Hudson River School, exactly two centuries ago. In August of 1825, English-born painter Thomas Cole visited the area and painted his first Hudson Valley picture: an edenic woods scene with Storm King Mountain in the background, about four miles from where I’m sitting.

Channeling this interest, I write another monthly column, “Backstory,” for Hudson Valley magazine, where I’m also a contributing writer. Recent installments introduced readers to a forgotten nineteenth-century Black hamlet, the history of the Taconic Parkway, and the Peekskill Riots of 1949. It’s a great gig. I get paid to do the immersive dive into regional history I would want to be doing anyway. I very much enjoy researching and writing these columns, and I think I’ve done a decent job so far—a little more than a year in—of sharing that enthusiasm with readers. I maintain an ever-lengthening list of potential column ideas and am always looking for more.

Since moving here, I’ve also written a few more investigative-type feature stories about Hudson Valley topics, including one for a Kingston-based magazine, Chronogram, about a controversial proposal to build a trail through the stunningly beautiful territory between my hometown, Beacon, and nearby Cold Spring. Last year I wrote a two-part feature for our (unreasonably good) local newspaper, The Highlands Current, about the threat of wildfires in the Hudson Valley. Recently that series won an award for investigative reporting from the New York News Publishers Association. I always enjoy it when I leave the study, throw on my journalist hat, and venture out into the world.

I had a review in the print edition of The New York Times last month. It’s about a long and largely impressive new biography of Charles Sumner, the anti-slavery Massachusetts senator whose “caning” on the Senate floor by an irate Southern congressman is often cited as one of the landmark events in the lead-up to the American Civil War. Here’s a little taste from the piece:

A strange, special fate belongs to those famous Americans known not for what they did but for what was done to them. Think of Sonny Liston, photogenically flattened by Muhammad Ali’s “phantom punch,” or Rodney King, brutalized by the Los Angeles police. Such figures are remembered more as prostrate symbols than as living, breathing people.

Then there is Charles Sumner (1811-74), the antislavery Massachusetts senator “caned” by the South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks. The verb, rarely used in other contexts, masks the viciousness of the deed. In 1856, Brooks, offended by a speech Sumner had given, slammed his gold-topped walking stick into his colleague’s skull and body until he lost consciousness. Sumner was drenched in blood. His doctor was surprised he survived.

The attack inflamed the North and helped grow the new Republican Party, while white Southerners rallied around Brooks, an early hint there was a constituency for violence on behalf of slavery. But who was Sumner? What do we miss by remembering this fierce and visionary leader solely for his maiming on the Senate floor?

You can read the rest of the piece here. I got some lovely feedback on the piece, including from writers and scholars I greatly admire.

As for my own book, Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery, the reviews keep coming, albeit more slowly in recent weeks. I’m pleased not only that they’ve been overwhelmingly positive, but that outlets on both the left and the right seem to appreciate what I was trying to do. Following the left-leaning writer Benjamin Moser’s fairly effusive take in the New York Times, Stuart Halpern, writing in Commentary, the traditional house organ of Jewish neo-conservatism, called the book “engaging” and “fine” (but in the stronger Virginia Woolf-ish sense of the word, not the meh sense). The piece had a witty headline: “Battle Psalms of the Republic.” Similarly, Allan Arkush, in the Jewish Review of Books, called the book “comprehensively researched and vividly written,” adding: “Richard Kreitner’s excellent book…provides more food for thought than ammunition for debate.” Check it out for yourself—ideally at your local bookstore or through Bookshop.org.

If you prefer to listen to books, something I don’t seem to be capable of doing (started many, finished none), you can check out the audiobook version, read by Dean Gallagher, which came out a few weeks ago.

I’ve also continued to do interviews and book talks about Fear No Pharaoh, including fun little jaunts to the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in New Orleans and the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, as well as an online event with the famous Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago.

Finally, some news. I’ve started work on my next book. Titled TRUE NORTH, this one will be a centuries-spanning history of how Canada has shaped the United States—the surprisingly numerous times the US has invaded its northern neighbor, the various waves of refugees who fled across the border (loyalists, fugitive slaves, Vietnam draft dodgers, Yale professors), all the different ways Canada has figured in the American imagination: as bogeyman, exemplar, or appealing alternative. Like Break It Up, this book will trace one long-obscured idea throughout American history, teasing out a once-important but now largely forgotten aspect of the national past while at the same time hopefully helping to explain some of the more baffling aspects of the present.

All through the fall, as I worked on the proposal, I told my wife that I was really taken with the idea and that the work was going well—only, I wasn’t sure the topic was really relevant or equal to the moment. Thanks, Trump! I am beyond thrilled to again be working with Alex Star, the exceptional editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who also handled Fear No Pharaoh.

I’ll have much more to say about this project in the coming months and years, as my work on it progresses. In the meantime, don’t be alarmed if you hear more references to Canada in my conversations with historians than you might otherwise expect. I’m not moving (back) there—at least not yet. Instead, I’m striving, among other things, to tease out the backstory behind the impulse of those who are doing so. How did at least some Americans, who for the longest time tended to think of Canada as a backwards bastion of popery and conservatism, come to see it instead as a saner, more liberal America? Where did Trump’s cockamamie 51st state idea come from? Why was it such a prominent part of American politics for well over a century, and when and why did the annexation idea go away? Why on earth did it so suddenly return?

There’s been a lot of study in Canada devoted to the impact of living next to the behemoth of the United States, yet much less in the United States of how this northern neighbor (much smaller in population, though larger in land-mass) has shaped the development of our country—politically, culturally, economically, and otherwise. As we were reminded this past weekend by the Canada-borne wildfire smoke that hovered over the Hudson Valley, obscuring the view from Mount Beacon’s summit—though far from ruining our ambitious all-family hike—our two countries are inextricably connected, have always been, and will always remain so, whatever tensions occasionally break out between Washington and Ottawa. As the book will show, both those tensions and those ties can be tracked to a time long before there was a country rather ambiguously called the United States, much less the more recently cobbled-together Dominion of Canada.

Thanks for reading this long update, and for subscribing to this newsletter/podcast. As always, I’m grateful to those of you who have supported the show with a monthly donation, as well as to those who have shared an episode (or my books!) with anyone you think might appreciate my work. I’ll be back with more episodes in late August or early September. Adieu!

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We also delve into deeper questions about the craft of history writing itself. Come for the outlaws and six-shooters, stay for the serious reflection on how we tell the American story.

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In this episode, I speak with historian Bennett Parten about his powerful first book, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation. In just over 200 pages, Parten reframes the March as a defining moment in the history of slavery and freedom, focusing on the experiences of enslaved people who risked everything to follow Sherman’s army in search of liberation. It’s a gripping, deeply thoughtful work—and a much-needed corrective to long-standing myths.

If you enjoy this episode, please consider sharing it. Thanks for listening.

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Here we go deeper into the practical and political obstacles to such a convention—and why, in Van Cleve’s view, nothing else is equal to the scale of America's dysfunction. As he argues, the country’s most pressing problems didn’t begin with Trump and won’t end with him; they’re much older, and deeply embedded in the constitutional order itself.

If you’re new here, welcome; and if you’ve been listening a while, thanks—and please consider rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts to help others find it.

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George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union:  Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (2010)

— We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution (2017)

— Making a New American Constitution (2020)

*** NOTE: I erroneously stated in the introduction to this episode that George William Van Cleve has taught at Georgetown University. In fact, he was a Dean’s Visiting Scholar from 2020-2025, but as a researcher, not a lecturer.

Van Cleve followed that book in 2020 with Making a New American Constitution, a sweeping call to rewrite the U.S. Constitution for the present day. Unlike others who have floated the idea, Van Cleve outlines exactly how such a convention could work, where it would draw its legitimacy, and why it is urgently needed to address systemic dysfunction in American governance.

In this first of a two-part episode, we discuss the lessons of the 1780s and how that crisis spurred the drafting of an entirely new constitution. Next week, we’ll turn to the present—and what it would take to do the same today.

George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union:  Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (2010)

— We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution (2017)

— Making a New American Constitution (2020)