Skip to main content

The Press

March 2023
1min read

Peter Andrews states that Alexander Hamilton “inveighed against the liberality” of the First Amendment. I understand that to mean that Hamilton asserted that the then-proposed amendment would give the press too much freedom. However, Hamilton opposed the amendment because it could weaken the press. In Federalist No. 84, the very issue that Andrews quotes from, Hamilton said that the new federal government would lack the power to control the press, but adopting the First Amendment would imply that it held that power. Hamilton argued that adopting the First Amendment was “dangerous,” because the amendment could subject the press to control rather than keep it free. He also said that the concept of “liberty of the press” is so vague that it would carry little real meaning and that the real protection for the press lies in public opinion and the “general spirit of the people and of the government.”

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "February/March 1995"

Authored by: The Editors

Hundreds and hundreds of letters have been left at the wall. This one carries a date that almost certainly is the day the event that haunts the writer took place.

Authored by: The Editors

Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific

Authored by: The Editors

George Wallace American Populist

Authored by: The Editors

The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry From Whitman to Walcott

Authored by: The Editors

The White House in Miniature

Authored by: The Editors

Soul in the Stone Cemetery Art From America’s Heartland

Authored by: The Editors

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

Authored by: The Editors

Eastern State Penitentiary Crucible of Good Intentions

Authored by: The Editors

Dan Stuart’s Fistic Carnival

Authored by: The Editors

Forever Barbie The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.