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The Jury, Self-Government's Smallest Room
Most self-government happens at a distance, through people we elect. The jury is the exception, the one place the government's power is handed directly to twelve ordinary people in a room. Why the…
The Summer of 1787, Behind Closed Windows
The Constitution was written in a sealed room, through one of the hottest summers anyone could remember, with the windows shut on purpose. Why the Convention's secrecy rule, unsettling as it first…
The Five Freedoms of the First Amendment, Counted
The First Amendment is the most quoted line in American civic life and one of the least carefully read. It is forty-five words long, and inside them are not one freedom but five. Counting them,…
Filibuster, the Word That Began as a Term for Piracy
Before it meant a senator talking a bill to death, the word filibuster meant a pirate. Following it from the Dutch and Spanish words for a freebooter to the floor of the United States Senate is a…
The Lunch Counter in Greensboro
On February 1, 1960, four freshmen sat down at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro and asked to be served. It looks like spontaneous courage. It was planned, down to the receipts in…
The Tennessee Vote That Finished the Nineteenth Amendment
On August 18, 1920, a 24-year-old Tennessee legislator wearing a red rose, the color of a vote against, walked in with a letter from his mother in his pocket. Harry Burn cast the vote that finished…
Why Some of the Founders Feared a Bill of Rights
The Bill of Rights is the part of the Constitution most Americans can name, so it is surprising that some of the ablest framers argued against having one at all. Their objection was serious: that…
Marbury, and the Case That Built a Power
The case that gave American courts their defining power was, on its surface, a quarrel about a job, and the man who brought it lost. How Chief Justice John Marshall, boxed in by a political crisis…
The Printer, the Jury, and a Morning in 1735
In 1735 a German immigrant printer sat in a New York jail for setting the type of a paper that criticized the royal governor. By every rule of law then in force, the governor was going to win. How…
Near v. Minnesota, the Case That Buried Prior Restraint
On June 1, 1931, the Supreme Court ruled for a newspaper almost nobody would want to defend, a scandal sheet, by a single vote, and settled one of the most important questions in American press…
A Republic, If You Can Keep It
A republic, if you can keep it, the line attributed to Franklin at the close of the Convention. Historians treat the anecdote with caution, but the second half is true and easy to forget. The whole…
The Idea of a Loyal Opposition
The party out of power in Britain is called His Majesty's Loyal Opposition, and the phrase only sounds like a contradiction. It is one of the most important ideas a free country ever worked out: that…
How Americans Came to Vote in Secret
Picture an American election in the mid-nineteenth century: no booth, no curtain, often a party-printed ballot handed over in full view of a watching crowd. The private ballot is not a founding…
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Field Notes on the Republic has published 13 episodes since May 2026, covering topics in Government, History.
Field Notes on the Republic is currently highly active with new episodes daily. Average episode length is 7m.
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