Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in 1856. He published his autobiography, Up from Slavery, in 1901. The word “up” implies rising from lower to higher. In his writings, Washington frequently ...

Writing under the pseudonym Cato, Trenchard and Gordon argue against the Constitution, warning that it will lead to a new corruptible aristocracy. John Trenchard was an English writer and ...

James Winthrop, writing under the pseudonym Agrippa, argues against the Constitution, suggesting ratification will lead inevitably to the abuse of federal power. Many inconveniencies and difficulties ...

An exploration of how the idea of individual freedom has shaped not only politics and economics but also the arts—from pop music to poetry, from Star Trek to the blues, and from Western novels to ...

Prosperity and property rights are inextricably linked. The importance of having well-defined and strongly protected property rights is now widely recognized among economists and policymakers. A ...

As the debate around guns becomes increasingly divisive, it is important to know the original purpose of the Second Amendment. Paul Meany is the editor for intellectual history at Lib er tar i an ism ...

Blanks argues that there is no good libertarian reason to support the South’s secession prior to the Civil War. There is a strain of libertarian contrarianism that holds that the Confederate States of ...

Paul Meany is the editor for intellectual history at Lib er tar i an ism .org, a project of the Cato Institute. Most of his work focuses on examining thinkers who predate classical liberalism but ...

The origin of the idea that liberty could be preserved through the separation of powers endures through the arguments of Polybius. Paul Meany is the editor for intellectual history at Lib er tar i an ...

George H. Smith was formerly Senior Research Fellow for the Institute for Humane Studies, a lecturer on American History for Cato Summer Seminars, and Executive Editor of Knowledge Products. Smith’s ...

Presley gives a rundown of some of the many black women, both famous and lesser- known, who worked toward the abolition of slavery. Black women were in the forefront of abolitionist lecturing and ...