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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Another feather in the cap for the Unitary Executive Theory, showing the president acting with vigor, energy, dispatch, and secrecy, but sadly neglecting, abusing, and obliterating his principal duty, which is to act responsibly.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Read this article and just try to imagine how much litigation will grow out of these kinds of claims and counterclaims. Thankfully we know that only the highest standards of ethics will guide AI entrepreneurs

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Once the archives become available decades from now, long after I've gone to that great study carrel in the sky, future generations of diplomatic historians will form on the topic of Trump studies, examining how foreign governments analyzed our mad king problem. What is Xi thinking?

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

In breaking news on another subject, for all you Madisonians and Cubs fans PCA 40-40

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

An informative if truly depressing article, once again illustrating how rotten is the corruzione that now dominates our politics. And in the meantime, g'mar chatima tova! www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

theatlantic.com

MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption

Far-right ideologues have transformed American foreign policy into a tool of private gain and antidemocratic reaction.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

This is on point. Saw a Stanford colleague yesterday who described referring to Charles Lindbergh in class. Students know nothing about his trans-Atlantic flight, the kidnapping, his America First affiliation, or his Nazi sympathies. Yet they are great students. www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2...

gocomics.com

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 20, 2026 | GoComics

Read Doonesbury—a comic strip by creator Garry Trudeau—for today, September 20, 2026, and check out other great comics, too!

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

My wife and I were in Pompeii on our "empty nest" tour and only learned of it when we got back to our hotel in Sorrento. Even then it was hard to grasp completely because of the way in which CNN cycled earlier and current footage, so you saw the Towers standing and burning and then collapsing.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I was tickled to notice last night that I've reached 10k subscribers and I'm equally happy to make this my first skeet since. It is a fabulous discussion of problems of governance both in 2001 and today. (And the fact that we once hosted the Clintons at our house has nothing to do with it.)

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Or perhaps an opera would be even better, a la Nixon in China. I do not think a ballet would work, however.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I do not think I have read anything more stupid, even at the WSJ editorial page (which must be distinguished from its news page).

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

It is also a scandal of another kind that we have a whole constitutional amendment designed in part to give us a remedy to the mad king problem and it lies there inert because no one has the balls to deal with the manifest debility and sheer zaniness of the sole holder of the executive power.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

For fellow historians of the Revolution, I've always thought that Reed was one of the its keenest observers of men and events.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

How is it that we are simultaneously living some absurdist science fiction novel based on rogue AI in real time while our civic life as a nominally democratic polity is taking either a dystopian or authoritarian form, where Orwell and 1984 are abetter guide than Publius and The Federalist?

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Great cartoon--but if that's Gorsuch in the background, where's the Chief, who was the author of the Trump v. U.S. opinion? And I hope to post my article on Trumped-up Presidential Immunity: A Constitutional Debacle very soon, because it is due out from the Journal of Constitutional Law. Stay tuned.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Clinical diagnosis is far above my pay grade (though George Conway seems good at it) but I have long wondered whether Trump is not indeed clinically delusional in his thinking, which may also be true of other authoritarian leaders. Occam's Razor (a personal favorite) would point in that direction.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Really nice piece, particularly in (1) explaining the issue of standing, where the five conservatives in the White House case are stiffing their archdeacon, Scalia; and (2) in ridiculing the idea that the presidency suffers "irreparable harm" when barred from doing something illegal.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Just read it and was thinking of reposting it myself. Somehow it makes me happy that I spend most of my waking hours in the 18th century.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Probably Timothy Pickering's best moment, as opposed to his conduct during the "reign of witches" under the Sedition Act of 1798. (Your Trivial Pursuit fact for today).

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

And deeply sobering if not downright depressing.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

I often wonder how later generations will write the history of the U.S. in this period, moving beyond the constitutional issues that preoccupy me. This shameful stuff suggests we'll be compared to Germans in the 1930s. But anti-ICE protests do weigh on the other side. No one protested Kristallnacht.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Good article and a great view of the arcade just outside my office of several decades. But it is important to distinguish free press issues from other forms of behavior that were overtly inimical to university/collegiate environments--e.g. my alma mater (Haverford) was a complete disaster here.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Speaking for Madison, this badly misstates the classic argument best known from Federalist 10 but present in his other writings. "Actively pursue republican virtue" is rather strong language, after all.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Rolling Boulders Kingston Quintuplets and on the Canadian side Ian and Sylvia and Bib and Carol and Ted and Alice (dating myself as a 60s guy, obviously)

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Heidi is right--except that "very good" is almost an understatement. I've never been a great fan of Peggy Noonan, but when you're right, you're right--and here she is absolutely on point.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

The apotheosis of this event will be a mass crash in the tight turn around the National Archives which will lead to a raging fire that will incinerate our sacred documents, bringing the semiquincentennial to a singeing conclusion. (Trace the map of the course in the article.)

nytimes.com

See Where Indy Cars Will Race Around Washington, D.C. (Gift Article)

Explore the 1.7-mile course that Indy drivers will compete on Aug. 22 and 23.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Reductio ad absurdum: One could not possibly understand the origins of the American Revolution without tracing it back to a Lockean theory of resistance pivoting on the idea of the appeal to heaven linked to the story of Yiftach in Judges 11:27.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Additional proof for my proposition that PCA is the most exciting Cubs player ever.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I am not defending the practice, but doesn't that make the classification of this trove as "rare books" highly problematic? They came out of the stacks, no, and all were published since 1970.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

As a serious problem of constitutional design or correction, this cartoon is a wonderful prompt, especially when the justices conjure up novel doctrines from who knows what source to justify unsettling established norms and expectations.

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Hakeem Jefferson @hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Must-read piece from @adambonica.bsky.social on how Democratic committees and consultants built a fundraising machine that runs on a captive pool of elderly donors. Bonica discusses that and more in this piece a bunch of lawyers for these committees didn’t want you to read. Incredible work, Adam!

data4democracy.substack.com

Hook and Squeeze

How Democratic consultants, committees, and party leaders built a fundraising spam pipeline that funnels money from a captive pool of elderly donors into their own operations.

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Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Adam Zyglis, Buffalo News

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. But I speak only metaphorically, not out of any distaste for our canine friends. Plus the Cubs have helped to inflict the Dodgers' just rewards.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

As a Cubs fan who goes back to the Jackson-Miksis-Serena-Fondy-Kiner-Baumholtz-Sauer-McCulloch-Rush-Minner years and who recalls when Ernie came up in 1953 (and I attended his induction at Cooperstown): PCA this year has to be the single most exciting Cubs player, ever.

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Jonathan Gienapp @jgienapp.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

The book won the 2025 Order of the Coif Book Award from the Association of American Law Schools. orderofthecoif.org/book-award

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

The new cover on its 30th anniversary.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Having contributed to this Forum, there are many great things one can say about it. One of the most important is that it enables readers to view the deepening crisis of 1775 from a genuinely Anglo-American perspective, illuminating the calculations and miscalculations on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Tom “T.M.” Wolf @tomtmwolf.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Both Chief Justice Roberts' majority opinion and Justice Jackson's concurrence drew heavily on arguments and sources that historians @marthasjones.bsky.social and @katemasur.bsky.social presented to the Court in an amicus brief. www.brennancenter.org/media/15301/...

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Jonathan Gienapp @jgienapp.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

The issue is out! Once it’s available online (it’ll be open access for thirty days!), I’ll post about the forum on the Dickinson documents discovery that I was so excited to help organize.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

I'll just note that my own contribution really is about two contingencies: a brief debate in the 2nd Continental Congress in April 1775 over modifying the positions the 1st Congress had adopted in Oct. 1774; and a counterfactual speculation over what would have happened had the North ministry /1/

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

This recalls Prof. Bailyn having his legendary seminar read Lord Denning's report on the Profumo scandal (I was on my first trip to the UK when it broke). What did this have to do with Early American history, we wondered? What did Christine Keeler or Mandy Rice-Davies have to with the Revolution?

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

This is a crucial point and I did the same thing, especially when giving instructions on writing papers. State a problem or a question. No hypotheses to test; no thesis statements about what the paper will prove; no first person either. And define the problem in its own narrative terms.

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Jim Ambuske @jimambuske.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

"Ours is a beautiful, ancient craft essential for any society's needs for self-understanding. We are equipped with a host of modern methods, but guided ethically by very old rules that no authoritarian political project ought to be allowed to profane." www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbz2...

youtube.com

WATCH: David Blight makes opening statement in hearing on how Smithsonian presents history

YouTube video by PBS NewsHour

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Christina gave a terrific presentation on this project at a conference held at the American Philosophical Society in early June and I can testify that this is an amazing exhibit, especially if (thinking of the late Pauline Maier's book), one treats the Declaration as American Scripture.

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Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

An as yet unwritten chapter in American constitutional history, but one that is on my to-do list: How the U.S. Flunked Its Mad King Problem: A Post Mortem.

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