In the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Congress and the administration of President George W. Bush quickly took steps they believed would help protect the nation, including passage of the U.S. Patriot Act. These steps, however, had the effect of limiting civil liberties. In this excerpt from Chris Finan’s book “From the

A vigorous exercise of speech and press that the British considered to be treasonous preceded the American Revolution. Even before the revolt, American air seemed freer than that in England, which was as free as that of any nation. Almost uniformly Protestant, the American colonies nonetheless contained an increasing number of religious sects; settler communities

While the Cold War era produced McCarthyism, communist prosecutions, and other curtailments of First Amendment freedoms, another movement presented the Court with the ideal opportunity to expand these freedoms. In “The Negro and the First Amendment” (1965), Harry Kalven wrote that “we may come to see the Negro as winning back for us the freedoms the Communists

From 1948 through the mid-‘50s, America saw widespread efforts to limit political speech and popular culture. The former was fueled by the Red Scare and fear of Communist infiltration. The latter stemmed from public concerns about morality and potential influences on children. Comic books were among the earliest targets.Burning comic booksThe smell of burning comic

In Federalist No. 10 of the Federalist Papers, James Madison argued that the diversity of a people spread throughout a geographically expansive republic would help secure liberty. Madison recognized that the positions of a majority and a minority race had led to injustice and that over time these injustices had become more geographically concentrated. Northerners, as

Scholars have documented the serendipity of why what is now the First Amendment became the first among the amendments of the Bill of Rights. James Madison, the chief author of the First Amendment, had actually hoped to incorporate the texts of the amendments within the Constitution rather than attaching them at the end as Connecticut’s

America’s founding fathers, contrary to some of their own expectations, soon divided into rival political parties under the new governing system. It is one of the great historical ironies that many who had helped to ratify the powerful language of the First Amendment ignored its principles in seeking to silence political speakers with whom they

This excerpt from Christopher Finan’s “From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act” is published here with the kind permission of the author and Beacon Press. Copyright 2008.  On the evening of November 7, 1919, Mitchel Lavrowsky was teaching a class in algebra to a roomful of Russian immigrants at the Russian People’s House, a building

Contrary to the hopes of Woodrow Wilson, World War I did not make the world safe for democracy. Indeed, communists took power in Russia, leading to the first red scare in the United States and creating fertile soil for the rise of Nazism in Germany. As soon as the Allies had defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II,