October 2025

Editor’s Note: Joseph Ellis is the author of numerous books on the Founding Era and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Award, among other honors. Portions of the following essay appeared in his book, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us, which explores the relevance of the views of the Founders to issues in America today.

Along with Alfred P. Sloan, president and chairman of the board of General Motors, Peter Drucker, theorist and lifelong student of the science and art of management, extolled Marshall as an exemplar of its most successful practices. He was, in short, an austere prince of the Industrial Age. Like Sloan, Marshall was responsible for the transformation and extraordi­nary growth of his organization. How he effected that transformation and oversaw that growth, and how the American army fulfilled the purposes for which he was preparing it, constitutes an unexampled testimony to Marshall’s leadership.

Editor’s Note: Richard Bell is a professor of history at the University of Maryland. His book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. In his most recent book, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, Prof. Bell provides a view of the War of Independence as a sprawling struggle that upended millions of lives and inspired freedom movements around the world. Portions of this essay appeared in the book.

In November 1773, few could have imagined that the fleet of ships carrying Chinese tea to ports across America would send the world to war and transform so many lives beyond recognition. The American Revolution did not involve just thirteen of Britain’s dozens of New World colonies. It was a global event that drew participants from all over the world., and in its consequences, both immediate and long range, shook every quarter of the globe. 

ESG note: This is a scan of the introduction but it has too much George Washington and needs to focus more on John Marshall, how he changed the court, and his legacy. 

John Marshall is the greatest judge in American history. As chief justice of the Supreme Court for thirty-four years — a record that still stands — he impressed, charmed, and defied colleagues, skeptics, and enemies, transforming an institution to which the Founding Fathers had given relatively little thought into a pillar of the nation. In 1801 when Marshall became chief justice, the job lacked “dignity,” as one contemporary put it, while the judiciary was, in the words of another, the “weakest” branch of the federal government. When Marshall died in 1835, he and the Court he led had rebuked two presidents, Congress, and a dozen states and laid down principles of law and politics that still apply. Now, when the Supreme Court makes the news every day it sits, and every time a new justice must be appointed, there is no question of its prominence—a prominence it owes, in the first instance, to Marshall, the man who made it.

Editor's Note: Eric Lane is a professor of constitutional and public law at Hofstra University and the author of three books. Michael Oreskes held senior editorial positions at The New York Times and the Associated Press before joining NPR as senior vice president of news. Together they published The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved Our Country – and Why It Can Again which looked at the document that made our country the longest surviving democracy in the history of civilization. Portions of this essay appeared in that book.