One Lincolnshire gentlewoman. Three arrests for heresy. Both shoulders pulled from their sockets by the Lord Chancellor of England. A condemned prisoner racked illegally by two of the highest officers of the realm, with their own hands, to extract the names of the queen’s friends. Anne Askew named no one.… More⇢

A miller in a Friulian mountain village. A wife and eleven children. Eleven books, mostly borrowed. A cosmology of the universe built from cheese and worms. A pope who signed his death warrant in the same year he signed Giordano Bruno’s. They warned him to keep his mouth shut. His… More⇢

An old woman, deaf and sick. Thirty-nine neighbors who signed their names to defend her, knowing they could be accused next. A jury that heard the case and acquitted her. Then a judge who refused the verdict and sent the jury back until it returned the word he wanted: guilty.… More⇢

Eighty-one years old. A wife awaiting the noose. A court that had already hanged eleven. A field beside the Salem jail and two days of stones. On September 17, 1692, Giles Corey was asked to plead before the Court of Oyer and Terminer. He pled innocent. Then he refused the… More⇢

Two figures, fifty years apart, tell the story of an American republic that cannot bring itself to decide. The top one percent now holds 31.7 percent of household wealth — the highest concentration since records began in 1989. Federal debt has crossed 99 percent of GDP, on track to break… More⇢

Nineteen years old. No lawyer. Could neither read nor write. Sixty trained theologians and a bishop who was both judge and accuser. Four months of cross-examination at Rouen in January 1431. That was what the English Crown assembled to break Joan of Arc. They could not. Day after day she… More⇢

A roof-tiler from Kent. A fourteen-year-old king. An army of commoners arrayed in formation outside London. A dagger taken from another man’s belt. Eight days from chosen captain to severed head on a pole. That was the price Wat Tyler paid for stating his terms at Smithfield on June 15,… More⇢

What the Founders Knew, What They Read, and Why It Still Matters The literature on republican failure spans two and a half thousand years. Polybius diagnosed the cycle of constitutions before Rome had fallen. By 1787, the American Founders had read every authority who had written on the question. The… More⇢

A Prison Diary Written Toward the Arena A twenty-two-year-old mother. An infant son still nursing. A pagan father who came to the prison four times, weeping, with the child in his arms. A pinch of incense for the emperor — that was all Rome wanted. She refused. She wrote it… More⇢