David O. Stewart

Having spent a good deal of my life exploring problems with the U.S. Constitution, I have a generally high tolerance level for governmental and constitutional confusions. The current mess in Canada, a nation that enjoys an enviable reputation for levelheadedness and civic virtue, underscores that even the best among us can contrive a constitutional structure…

When Barack Obama takes the oath of office, he will be acclaimed as our 44th president, but that calculation omits a true footnote in history, the one-day presidency of David Rice Atchison of Missouri. Atchison was Senate President pro tempore on March 4, 1849, and served as president for 24 hours because the new president,…

Doing our bit to keep the country in recession, we passed up the sales on Black Friday to check out the renovated Smithsonian Museum of American History. The museum, which just reopened after two years of renovations, is a great resource, though I can’t say that the renovation improved my experience very much. There was…

For the last three weeks, some of the really interesting films coming out of Europe have been playing in Silver Spring, at the amazing AFI Silver, which brings the magic of the movies to lower Montgomery County. For a history hound, it has been a dazzling buffet. With various members of my indulgent family, I…

Historians are glowing over the reports that the president-elect is considering the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. By reaching out to his toughest adversary for the Democratic nomination at the same time he says he is reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent Team of Rivals, the history profession has received a real boost.…

I am about to write a sentence I never expected to write. Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist wrote an interesting piece the other day. Former Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist That doesn’t mean I agree with everything he said, but he points out that our president-elect and vice-president-elect both come from the U.S.…

The settlement of two lawsuits last week — between publishers and Google, and between authors and Google — marked a landmark success for copyright holders and a look at part of the future of books. The dispute focused on Google Book Search. Google started out by trying to reach agreements with publishers to scan and…

As we set off to elect a new president, I offer a quick reminder of how strange (by today’s standards) was the first presidential election in 1788. — There were no political parties. — There was only one candidate for president, George Washington. — Of the thirteen original states, North Carolina and Rhode Island had…

Sen. Barack Obama has bought the same 30 minutes on four television networks on Wednesday night to make his “closing argument” to the electorate, six days before voting day. I expect he’ll employ a lot of high-minded rhetoric about pulling together as a nation, joining hands, taking care of each other, and generally keep on…

In the long, tragic story of this country’s mismanagement of the prisoners held at Guantanamo, the story of 17 Uighurs (pronounced “wee-grrs”) stands out. Imprisoned for seven years and counting, these Turkic Muslims come from the westernmost province of China (Xinjiang). The U.S. Government, having been forced to admit that the Uighurs were not “enemy…