Leadership and the Constitutional Convention

Business guru Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence) has a new book out titled The Little Big Things, 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence.  For me, what’s interesting about this book is that he reports that his inspiration to write it was my book, The Summer of 1787, The Men Who Invented the Constitution.  What he writes is…

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Impeachment — It's Back!

Just when you thought it was safe to go in the water, impeachment is back in the news.  Yesterday the House of Representatives unanimously approved four impeachment articles calling for the removal of District Judge G. Thomas Porteous of New Orleans.   Porteous is accused of taking payments from lawyers who appeared in front of him while…

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The Benefits of Fellowship

I am halfway through a remarkable opportunity, the Hodson Trust/John Carter Brown Library Fellowship.  The grant supported me for two months of research at the library in Providence (where there was a lot less snow than in Maryland!), about Aaron Burr’s conspiracy of 1805-07.  The grant also will cover two more months of writing at Washington…

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Treason, American Style

Nattering on about Aaron Burr’s 1807 treason trial this week, I was brought up short by a very simple question:  How many treason trials have there been in the United States?  I resolved to investigate the question, which yielded the following. The Framers of the Constitution mistrusted treason prosecutions, seeing them as an easily abused tool of political…

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You Never Know

So this reporter from the Washington Times — yes, the Moonie newspaper — makes a connection between the deals made for Senate votes on health care reform and those made for votes in the Andrew Johnson impeachment trial in 1868.   And he cites my book, in an article on Christmas Eve. What a world!…

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