Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in 1856. He published his autobiography, Up from Slavery, in 1901. The word “up” implies rising from lower to higher. In his writings, Washington frequently ...

James Winthrop, writing under the pseudonym Agrippa, argues against the Constitution, suggesting ratification will lead inevitably to the abuse of federal power. Many inconveniencies and difficulties ...

An exploration of how the idea of individual freedom has shaped not only politics and economics but also the arts—from pop music to poetry, from Star Trek to the blues, and from Western novels to ...

Prosperity and property rights are inextricably linked. The importance of having well-defined and strongly protected property rights is now widely recognized among economists and policymakers. A ...

Blanks argues that there is no good libertarian reason to support the South’s secession prior to the Civil War. There is a strain of libertarian contrarianism that holds that the Confederate States of ...

Libertarianism, and the classical liberalism from which it sprang, supports a strictly limited state, if indeed its adherents recognize the legitimacy of the state at all. The minimal state is a ...

The origin of the idea that liberty could be preserved through the separation of powers endures through the arguments of Polybius. Paul Meany is the editor for intellectual history at Lib er tar i an ...

As the debate around guns becomes increasingly divisive, it is important to know the original purpose of the Second Amendment. Paul Meany is the editor for intellectual history at Lib er tar i an ism ...

Anoba’s second of three pieces covers Egypt’s powerful southern neighbor(s): Nubia and Kush. Ibrahim Anoba is the Editor of African Lib er ty .org. He is an expert in the African political economy ...

Having previously discussed abolitionist black women, Presley highlights some of the white women in the movement to end slavery. The valiant efforts of abolitionist men like William Lloyd Garrison, ...

Paul Meany is the editor for intellectual history at Lib er tar i an ism .org, a project of the Cato Institute. Most of his work focuses on examining thinkers who predate classical liberalism but ...