§ The Archive
Essays & Dispatches.
Long-form essays, interviews with our authors, dispatches from the road, and the occasional re-reading of a document worth re-reading.
- April 12, 2026Essay
Why We Still Read the Federalist Papers — and Why That's Not Enough
Hamilton, Madison, and Jay wrote for a very specific crisis. Two and a half centuries later, we treat their arguments like scripture. That habit has costs — but abandoning them would cost more.
by Nicolas D. Ware
7 min - April 5, 2026History
The Forgotten Delegates of Seneca Falls
In July 1848, three hundred people signed a declaration that rewrote American citizenship. Most of them disappeared from the record within a decade.
by Henry Ashford
7 min - March 28, 2026Interview
A Conversation with Henry Ashford
On writing 250 stories in two years, the year he almost quit, and why he kept Frederick Douglass's 1852 Fourth of July address open on his desk throughout.
by the editors
6 min - March 15, 2026Dispatch
The Long Memory of a Republic
What Gettysburg remembers, and what it still refuses to. Notes from a weekend on the ridge.
by Nicolas D. Ware
7 min - March 1, 2026Review
The Problem with "Founding Father" Biographies
The genre has calcified into hagiography. What might it look like to write about the founders the way they wrote about themselves — ambivalently, furiously, in letters?
by Jane Everett Calloway
7 min - February 22, 2026Archive
A Letter from Valley Forge, Re-read
Washington's correspondence with Congress in the winter of 1777–78 is usually quoted for its despair. The fuller record is something stranger.
by Henry Ashford
8 min