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The colonial period of American statehood was characterized by the unification of religious and political power in the emerging communities and parishes, and the dominant Anglican and Protestant churches laid down in the legal system of the young state the features of many institutions that continued the traditions of the first settlers. The purpose of the study is to determine the evolutionary path and specific features of the legal regulation of religious freedom in the American states from the founding of the first settlements to the adoption of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Such methods of research are used as historical method of cognition, comparative-legal, formal-legal, abstraction and analysis. Conclusions: specific features of the social structure and cultural traditions of the first settlers from Western Europe, expressed in the religious nature of power and the dominance of the Christian Church in the legal regulation of marriage and family relations, property rights, justice, taxation, became determinants of the reflection of the Protestant and Anglican principles and traditions in the U.S. legal system. At the same time, the religious segregation, which became widespread in the sixteenth century and raised the issue of legal enshrinement of religious freedom in the states, was overcome only at the end of the eighteenth century thanks to the activities of social movements and politicians. It is noteworthy that the provision of the First Amendment to the Constitution on the separation of Church and State is still the subject of litigation, reflecting the retained religious motive of the A merican state foundation.

This article critically examines the different ways in which American Enlightenment thinkers confronted the future of being white in the early republic as political economists, natural historians, physicians, and anatomists of the mind. Just as philosophes experimented on the nature of blackness in Bordeaux's Royal Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society supported novel approaches to the racial classification of whiteness. An appeal to Scottish Enlightenment racial theories connected the diverging thought of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Benjamin Rush as prominent members of this society between 1743 and 1826. In doing so, Franklin industrialised the political economy of a 'purely white' nation. Jefferson naturalised the language of whiteness. Smith universalised the intellectual and moral cultivation of whiteness. And Rush medicalised an architype of a healthy mind and body as white. This article argues that Scottish philosophy informed radically different ideas about how to become white in the early American republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The foundation of new centers for civic education has sparked a new round of debate over the political independence of the public university. Do legal mandates by state legislatures undermine academic freedom? The underlying debate concerns alternative visions of elite formation, as comparing Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson's arguments during the Founding period makes apparent. Both believed that the American constitutional order depended on educated citizens of a certain character, requiring coercive authority in education to instill moral and political commitments. But whereas Jefferson made an exception for educational coercion, Rush viewed education as an aristocratic element that could complement democracy. Rush's prioritizing of duties over rights offers a more helpful framework for the task of reforming elite education today to restore trust between leaders and people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The American Midwest with its own architectural histories and topologies may be termed a land of few walls. Architect Kevin Erickson examines Lebbeus Woods's relation to this landscape and the genesis of his preoccupation with walls, not as protectors of boundaries, but as sites of dialogue and collaboration. Rather than mere surfaces for large paintings, walls – new or abandoned – invite reflection on the relationship between art and architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both authorship and spelling of the extinct giant sloth genus Megalonyx and its type species, M. jeffersonii (Mammalia, Xenarthra, Pilosa, Megalonychidae), have been inconsistent. The genus-group name has been cited with two different authorships and three dates, and it has been spelled with two different suffixes. The species-group name has been cited with four different authors and dates, and it has been spelled with two different endings. Megalonyx Jefferson, 1799 is the first valid use of the genus-group name; the correct original spelling has the –onyx suffix. The type species of Megalonyx is Megatherium jeffersonii Desmarest, 1822; the correct original spelling has an –ii ending. A vernacular word, megalonyx, refers to species classified in the genus Megalonyx Jefferson, 1799. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The foundation of new centers for civic education has sparked a new round of debate over the political independence of the public university. Do legal mandates by state legislatures undermine academic freedom? The underlying debate concerns alternative visions of elite formation, as comparing Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson’s arguments during the Founding period makes apparent. Both believed that the American constitutional order depended on educated citizens of a certain character, requiring coercive authority in education to instill moral and political commitments. But whereas Jefferson made an exception for educational coercion, Rush viewed education as an aristocratic element that could complement democracy. Rush’s prioritizing of duties over rights offers a more helpful framework for the task of reforming elite education today to restore trust between leaders and people.

Thomas Jefferson’s fame as an advocate of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, equal rights of men, religious freedom, and democracy has been frequently questioned. For many scholars, his racist statements, his scant concern for women’s rights, his apparently unrealistic anti-slavery policies, and his anti-Federalist politics suffice as proof of the very opposite of his reputation. This article argues that politics can be viewed as the centerpiece of Jefferson's worldview, according to which all purposes needed to be brought into compliance, to the effect that one ended up with different politics for advocating democratic institutions, for progressive science, for personal self-development, and for socioeconomic issues, including slavery. The never-ending process of creating policies for bettering American society also gave politics its own character as a moral concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The formation of Whitman's poetics can be explained from various perspectives: mystical experience, Transcendentalism, politics, sexuality, and so on. Among these factors, the essay aims to study Whitman's poetics in the context of politics, especially concerning the continuation of the spirit of '76 -- the American Revolutionary spirit. The essay emphasizes the influence of Jefferson on Whitman, particularly Jefferson's ward system -- the link so far overlooked -- and argues that it has bearing on Whitman's poetics. Jefferson sought the continuation of the American experiment of self-government, and, in this context, proposed a ward system -- the county subdivision into smaller units. I will demonstrate that Whitman the Journalist showed great interest in Jefferson's ward system, and that this new link puts Whitman's poetics in a new light; Whitman's "interior American republic" is a further subdivision of Jefferson's "ward republic." Before Whitman sought to solve the paradox of the individual and mass as well as the states and federal government -- as the essay argues -- Whitman, like Jefferson, needed to grapple with the paradox of the revolutionary spirit which includes contradictory elements, i.e. the spirit of the new and the concern with stability based on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, they were continuing a tradition of white Americans figuring themselves as victims, a narrative whose connection to the American Revolution would be crystalized in The 1776 Report , released just days later. This article argues that responsible teaching of Phillis Wheatley's poetry can reframe for contemporary students their understanding of the Revolutionary period, of African Americans' role in the nation, and of crucial issues still at the center of public debate. Wheatley's very existence as an enslaved Black woman poet at the nation's founding—one who was in literal conversation with the vaunted Founding Fathers, no less—gives the lie to the myth of a white national origin story. Made from within a space of belonging as a moral voice in a religious community, her critique of the new nation's most privileged casting themselves as victims reminds us to assess such claims skeptically and to bring the weight of history to bear on them. Reading Wheatley as a Revolutionary poet, I point out how Wheatley's identification with the Patriots was conditional, predicated on her wariness about white colonists' claims of "slavery" at the hands of the British and her full-throated critique of literal slavery. Drawing from Koritha Mitchell's notion of "homemade citizenship," the article emphasizes Wheatley's literary accomplishments not as efforts to counter racist notions of her intellectual limitations as expressed by Thomas Jefferson—as Henry Louis Gates has argued—but, rather, outlets to pursue her own genius and inventiveness, which she used to imagine an artistic space beyond Black victimhood. Study of Wheatley's oeuvre reveals clearly that critique of the nation has been part of the nation since its founding, and we need not fear it or label it un-American. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1802 to 1804, under orders from Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, and under the supervision of William Henry Harrison, first governor of Indiana Territory and superintendent of Indian Affairs, Thomas Freeman surveyed two tracts of land at or near Fort Wayne, Indiana, as specified in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, and the boundary of the "Vincennes Tract," as specified in the 1803 Treaty of Fort Wayne. Author Thomas Jandebeur examines existing scholarship on Freeman's surveys and, using correspondence and other documents from Freeman's time, corrects both the dates and sequence of Freeman's surveying in Indiana Territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Settler accounts of the Cayuga Native American Soyeghtowa (Logan), such as Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia , interpret his famous mourning speech, "Logan's Lament," as the words of a melancholic, noble savage and vanishing Indian. This essay decolonizes settler accounts of Logan's words and deeds such as Jefferson's book by considering Indigenous relationships to a once-living memorial on Shawnee land in central Ohio, the Logan Elm, which nineteenth-century settlers apocryphally identified as the site of Logan's speech. Drawing on scholarly work on Indigenous writing and historical media by Native American and settler intellectuals, as well as local knowledge keepers, sections focus on Indigenous memories of Logan recorded in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century textual archives, early twentieth-century Native American orations, and twenty-first century interpretations of Logan by enrolled members of the Seneca Cayuga Nation. These interpretations, rooted in the sacred and political significance of trees in the Haudenosaunee treaty protocol, the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the oral tradition of the Haudenosaunee Constitution, figure Logan's speech as an Indigenous history oriented toward Indigenous futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I consider the "Jeffersonian problem": whether one generation has the right to bind future generations to an inherited constitutional order. Thomas Jefferson's challenge rests on fundamental democratic principles of equality and consent, and therefore—while there may be substantial pragmatic reasons to be wary of his argument—any response must also remain true to those moral ideals. I argue that through the crisis of slavery and the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was compelled to revisit the basis of the American political regime, and in doing so articulated a conception of democratic politics that answers Jefferson's challenge. He does so in two ways: first, Lincoln's political religion revives reverence for the ancestral in a democratic context; second, Lincoln's concept of rededication allows each generation to affirm that revered past while simultaneously manifesting its own sovereign power through novel applications of past principle. I conclude by arguing that the inclusion of generational obligations is essential to democratic politics and that Lincoln's approach provides the best means of doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Jefferson is famous for his advocacy of equal rights of men, religious freedom, and democracy throughout the United States. He is equally (in)famous for his racist statements, for his little concern for women's rights, for his apparently unrealistic anti-slavery policies, and for his strongly anti-Federalist politics. This article will make clear that his political solution to the problem of slavery was not as far-fetched at the time as many scholars still tend to think it was. His fame as the high priest of minimal government also needs to be reconsidered given his hugely expensive, governmental solution to the problem of slavery. It is also important to grasp how very restricted a role Jefferson attributed to the federal government in putting his abolition plan into effect. The only aspect concerning the federal government in Jefferson's plan had to do with financing and sending slaves abroad after each state's individual decision of emancipation.

Drawing from archival research, this article explores Thomas Jefferson's understanding of property and his embrace of a political community defined by communal sharing. Tracing the evolution of Jefferson's view on property holdings from the Anglo-Saxons to the American colonies to his speculative vision of ward republics, this paper argues that fears concerning economic and property inequities in the early republic compelled the principal author of the Declaration of Independence to endorse small, communal experiments. Importantly, this reading of Jefferson problematizes strict liberal or republican interpretations of his thought, further calling into question the philosophical heritage of the American republic. By evaluating personal letters from 1804 to 1824, this article offers an alternative reading of Jefferson, one that carefully showcases his wholly original, compelling, and radical democratic thinking. The significance of this heterodox interpretation has far-reaching implications on our understanding of the foundational principles of the early republic as well as how we address the issue of economic inequality in the modern-day United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rembrandt Peale's Rubens Peale with a Geranium (1801) is a well-known and much-studied painting, but the story of the flowering plant Rubens Peale cradles opens a new avenue of research. Commonly known as the scarlet geranium, Pelargonium inquinans is indigenous to southern Africa; its prominence in this painting invites questions about non-native plants in late-colonial and early republican America. Much attention has been given to the Anglo-American passion for North American flora in the long eighteenth century. However, an increasing flow of plants from Africa, China, and Australia shifted botanical interest and horticultural taste, changing the character of garden-making permanently within the next few decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Garden historians have often emphasized the divergent development of designed landscapes in America and England in the course of the eighteenth century. This essay argues that the extent of that divergence in the period before about 1760 has been exaggerated, largely as a consequence of misconceptions about the real nature of English gardens. Only after 1760 did landscape design on both sides of the Atlantic really follow different trajectories, for reasons that were essentially social and ideological in character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the contingent relationships between landownership and status in Britain, the Caribbean, and the East Coast of North America across the long eighteenth century. In Britain, where land was scarce, land was the measure of wealth and status, and the creation of landed estates bound the ruling elite together. As the global economy expanded, driven by colonialism, new relationships were embedded within very different cultural landscapes. In the Caribbean, plantation landscapes were high-risk investments that relied on enslaved labor to ensure returns on highly capitalized production. In America, the availability of land recast the relationship between improvement, landownership, and labor. Land played an important role in defining newfound freedoms increasingly at odds with coercion and enslavement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]