By the Author of WANTED: Eight Critical Skills You Need To Succeed
The enslaved man whose lawsuit removed the law from beneath slavery in Massachusetts. This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed. Quock Walker needs to be remembered. * * * On […]
Read More…The Editor Who Learned Criticism Had a Price Tag. In 1799, Vermont editor Anthony Haswell reprinted an advertisement defending jailed Congressman Matthew Lyon — words he did not write. The federal government charged him with seditious libel, convicted him before a stacked jury, and imprisoned him while his daughter died. When he walked free, two thousand people delayed the Fourth of July to welcome him home. His trial was later cited by the Supreme Court in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.
History remembers the congressman who spoke. This is the story of the editor who printed — and paid.
In 1799, Vermont editor Anthony Haswell reprinted an advertisement defending jailed Congressman Matthew Lyon — words he did not write. The federal government charged him with seditious libel, convicted him before a stacked jury, and imprisoned him while his daughter died. When he walked free, two thousand people delayed the Fourth of July to welcome him home. His trial was later cited by the Supreme Court in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. History remembers the congressman who spoke. This is the story of the editor who printed — and paid.
Read More…Arrested for Speaking Out! In 1799, New York State Assemblyman Jedediah Peck circulated a petition calling for the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts. For exercising the most basic right guaranteed by the First Amendment, he was arrested under the Sedition Act, shackled in irons, and marched across the New York countryside to stand trial. He never went to trial. The spectacle of a Revolutionary War veteran in chains for carrying a petition helped destroy the Federalist Party and sweep Thomas Jefferson into the presidency. This is the story of the Plough-Jogger — the forgotten farmer-legislator who bet his freedom on a piece of paper and won.
Read More…When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!
America is not being overthrown. It is drifting — and drift is harder to fight than attack.
This six-article series draws on Polybius’s Anacyclosis, Madison’s constitutional engineering, Marx’s economic mechanics, and the V-Dem Institute’s empirical data to build a single, unflinching diagnostic: republics decay from within. Not through conquest. Through accumulated neglect.
The instrument panel is readable. Wealth concentration. Civic illiteracy. Captured institutions. Collapsing public trust. Three nations faced identical pressures and chose three different roads. America has not chosen. The machine is still running. Barely. The operators are the question.