Tag Archives: political history

The Stage and the Argument: Political Geography of the Lincoln-Douglas Debate Sites and Their Place in Antebellum Illinois Politics

Posted on September 16, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary The seven joint debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in the late summer and autumn of 1858 are usually remembered for what was said. Where it was said matters just as much. The debates were held … Continue reading →

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The Long Bargain: Tlaxcala from Independent Polity to Mexican State

Posted on September 11, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction In the autumn of 1520, Hernán Cortés sent Charles V a long letter. In it he stopped his account of the march inland to describe a city he judged larger and stronger than Granada, with busier markets and more … Continue reading →

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Testable Absences: An Evidentiary Program for Bronze Age Aegean Hegemony and Corporate Identity: A Counterfactual Companion to “The Name That Was Not There”

Posted on August 22, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The argument that Late Bronze Age Greece lacked a collective political name, and possibly lacked a hegemonic state, rests substantially on absence: the Linear B archives preserve no ethnonym for the Greeks, no correspondence between palaces, and no vocabulary … Continue reading →

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From Conservative Democrats to Republican Defectors: Florida and the Disappearance of Cross-Partisan Political Space

Posted on August 19, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Florida’s political transformation during the past half-century provides an unusually useful case study in American partisan realignment. During much of the twentieth century, Florida possessed a Democratic Party broad enough to encompass politicians and voters ranging from relatively … Continue reading →

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The Governable Interval: A Typology of the Conditions Under Which Afghanistan Governs Itself, and Why Their Conjunction Is Rare

Posted on August 15, 2026 by nathanalbright

I. The Question Stated Properly The familiar phrase “graveyard of empires” gets the problem backward. Afghanistan has been conquered often and successfully — by Cyrus, Alexander, the Mauryas, the Kushans, the Sasanians, the Hephthalites, the Arabs, the Samanids, the Ghaznavids, … Continue reading →

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Making Absence Findable Without Making Fabrication Admissible: Institutional Design for the Recovery of Unnamed Maternity

Posted on August 9, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The four preceding papers in this series established an evidentiary typology for founding-era paternity claims, demonstrated that the standard applied to the Jefferson–Hemings case was anomalously strict relative to like claims, proposed a genetic-genealogical program for identifying the mother … Continue reading →

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Identifying the Mother of William Franklin: A Proposal for a Genetic-Genealogical and Documentary Research Program

Posted on August 9, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The maternity of William Franklin (c. 1730–1813), illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin and royal governor of New Jersey, has never been resolved. No contemporary document names the woman; no family tradition survives naming her; the historiography has produced candidates … Continue reading →

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Evidentiary Standards and the Jefferson–Hemings Question: Distinguishing Genetic Findings, Circumstantial Inference, and Family Tradition

Posted on August 9, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract Public and institutional discourse increasingly treats three distinct propositions as a single settled fact: that Thomas Jefferson fathered the children of Sally Hemings, that the 1998 Y-chromosome study demonstrated this, and that Jefferson and Hemings concluded a negotiated agreement … Continue reading →

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Writing the Mycenaeans: The Evidentiary Constraints on Reconstructing a Bronze Age Society and the Case for the Non-Palatial Turn

Posted on July 7, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The Mycenaean Greek world occupies a peculiar and instructive place among the literate societies of the Late Bronze Age. It left behind a decipherable script, monumental architecture, a dense material record, and a cultural memory that survived into the … 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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