Category Archives: American History

Fort Brooke and Tampa in the Civil War: The Blockaded Storehouse (1861–1865)

Posted on July 18, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper examines the role of Fort Brooke and the town of Tampa in the American Civil War, arguing that the bay’s importance in these years was economic before it was tactical. Tampa was a small and remote Gulf … Continue reading →

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Fort Brooke and the Seminole Wars: The Making of a Military Town (1824–1858)

Posted on July 18, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper traces the founding of Fort Brooke at the mouth of the Hillsborough River in 1824 and its central role across the three decades of conflict known collectively as the Seminole Wars. It argues that Fort Brooke was … Continue reading →

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Pirates, Privateers, and the Contested Gulf: Maritime Predation off Tampa Bay (1700s–1820s)

Posted on July 18, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper examines maritime predation in the Gulf waters off Tampa Bay across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and it does so with a deliberate methodological aim: to separate what the documentary record supports from what later civic … Continue reading →

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The Spanish Entrada: Conquest, Resistance, and Failure at Tampa Bay (1528–1600s)

Posted on July 18, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper examines Tampa Bay as the landing ground for the two earliest large armed European expeditions into the North American interior—those of Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528 and Hernando de Soto in 1539—and as the setting for the … Continue reading →

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Warfare and Defense in Pre-Columbian Tampa Bay

Posted on July 18, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper reconstructs the organization of conflict and defense among the indigenous peoples of the Tampa Bay estuary in the centuries before sustained European contact. Drawing on the archaeology of the Safety Harbor culture, the political geography implied by … Continue reading →

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Constitutional Founding and the Emoluments Quarrel

Posted on July 10, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract. The constitutional case supplies what the university case could not: a founding documented in enough contemporaneous detail that the gap between the idealized origin and the operational norms can be measured rather than merely alleged. This paper names that … Continue reading →

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The Rarity of Endurance: Regime Longevity, the 250-Year Threshold, and the Barriers to Institutional Permanence: A White Paper

Posted on July 5, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract On the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of American independence, this paper examines a claim easy to assert and hard to defend: that the United States has “lasted 250 years,” and that such longevity is exceptional. Both halves of … Continue reading →

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“I’m Your Huckleberry”: Doc Holliday, the Fragile Gunman, and What America Asks of Its Violence

Posted on June 27, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract In George P. Cosmatos’s Tombstone (1993), the nominal hero is Wyatt Earp, the lawman who restores order to a lawless silver town. Yet the character who has lodged most durably in the American imagination is not the lawman but … Continue reading →

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Prolegomenon III — On the Understudied Institutions of Union and Confederacy

Posted on June 17, 2026 by nathanalbright

Part I. The Problem Stated: Where the Attention Has Gone The second prolegomenon ended by pointing past the proclamations and the speeches to the place where the test of an order’s strength was actually passed and failed—the concrete working of … Continue reading →

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Prolegomenon II — On Civil War as the Ultimate Test of Institutions, and the Leader’s Burden of Sustaining a Cause

Posted on June 17, 2026 by nathanalbright

Part I. The Problem Stated: When the Cushions Are Removed The first prolegomenon ended by pointing beneath the surface of the war—beneath the campaigns and the commanders that have drawn the most attention—to the conditions that decided what the surface … Continue reading →

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