The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli has been used by some to counter arguments that
the United States is a “Christian nation.” The treaty, aimed to protect
American ships from the Muslim Barbary pirates, assures that the United
States was not founded upon Christianity.
Documents
Not long after Americans declared their independence of Great Britain, General Willaim Howe invaded New York with more than 30,000 troops, which included some 9,000 Hessian mercenaries. Hoping to encourage desertion among them, the Second Continental Congress, which had adopted the Declaration of Independence, adopted another resolution on August 14, 1776. It indicates that, even prior
A number of the Puritans who came to America immigrated from Holland, which had a much more liberal policy toward Protestant religious freedom than many of the Pilgrims themselves established in America. In 1645, Governor Willem Kieft of New Netherlands (today’s New York) granted a charter to settlers in Flushing (in today’s Queens) “to have and
In addition to being twice impeached during his first term in the presidential office, Donald J. Trump was the subject of multiple legal investigations after he left office in 2021. He faced prosecutions in Georgia for election tampering (now on hold because of possible conflicts of interest in the district attorney’s office), faced and lost
Amid a politically tumultuous period, the University of Chicago in 1967 issued the Kalven Report, which laid down guidelines for a university in making pronouncements about controversial political issues. The report was named after the chair of the committee that developed it, Harry Kalven Jr., a noted First Amendment scholar and law professor. In recent years,
In 2020, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia commissioned three groups of scholars to draft new versions of the U.S. Constitution, all of whom chose to reform rather than abolish the current document. Professors Robert George of Princeton University, Michael McConnell of Stanford University (a former federal circuit judge and frequent writer on the First