Enlisted For Life
Oliver Wendell Holmes was wounded three times in some of the worst fighting of the Civil War. But for him, the most terrible battles were the ones he had missed.Hiller B. ZobelJune/July 1986He was...
View ArticleA Few Parchment Pages Two Hundred Years Later
The framers of the Constitution were proud of what they had done but might be astonished that their words still carry so much weight. A distinguished scholar tells us how the great charter has...
View ArticleTaking Another Look At The Constitutional Blueprint
May/June 1987In this year of the bicentennial of the Constitution, American Heritage asked a number of historians, authors, and public figures to address themselves to one or both of these questions:1....
View ArticleInterview With A Founding Father
James Wilson was an important but now obscure draftsman of the Constitution. Carry Wills is a journalist and historian fascinated by what went on in the minds of our founders. The two men meet in an...
View ArticleNaming A Justice
IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN POLITICS AS USUALHiller B. ZobelOctober 1991Supreme Court vacancies have provoked fierce, colorful—and wholly partisan—battles since the earliest years of the RepublicWhen Thurgood...
View Article1954
America looked good to a high school senior then, and that year looks wonderfully safe to us now, but it was a time of tumult for all that, and there were plenty of shadows along with the...
View ArticleThe End Of Racism?
Nicholas LemannFebruary/March 1996 IT’S SAID THAT FLANNERY O’CONNOR WAS THE first graduate of a university writing program to stake a claim to major-writer status. Dinesh D’Souza is a similar figure...
View ArticleA Village Disappeared
On the sixtieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the granddaughter of a Japanese detainee recalls the community he lost and the fight he waged in the Supreme Court to win back the right to earn a...
View Article“You Have The Right To Remain Silent”
The strange story behind the most cited case in American history: THE MIRANDA DECISIONH. Mitchell CaldwellMichael S. LiefAugust/September 2006Suspect confesses, case closed. Confessions are frequently...
View Article1857 - The Dred Scott Decision
Frederic D. SchwarzFebruary/March 2007 On March 6 the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford . Scott was a Missouri slave, and Sanford (whose last...
View ArticleTime Machine
Frederic D. SchwarzFebruary/March 2007 50 Years Ago March 20, 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Great Britain meet in Bermuda. The purpose of the meeting is to...
View ArticleRiding The Circuit With Lincoln
A new picture of prairie lawyers coping with bad roads and worse inns on the Illinois frontier, drawn from David Davis’ lettersWillard KingFebruary 1955One of the most important periods in the life of...
View ArticlePresident Adams Appoints John Marshall
Critical decisions by the Chief Justice would save the Supreme Court's independence and make possible its wide-ranging role today Gordon S. WoodWinter 2009text tk
View ArticleAdams Appoints Marshall
Critical decisions by the Chief Justice saved the Supreme Court’s independence—and made possible its wide-ranging role todayGordon S. WoodWinter 2010Most jurists and constitutional scholars today would...
View ArticleThe Great Chief Justice
Neither the Constitution nor the laws but John Marshall made the Court SupremeFred RodellDecember 1955By every sensible standard, John Marshall deserves superbly his sobriquet of “the great Chief...
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