First Liberty

When the United States government passed the Bill of Rights in 1791, its uncompromising protection of speech and of the press were unlike anything the world had ever seen before. But by 1798, the once-dazzling young republic of the United States was on the verge of collapse. Suddenly, the First Amendment, which protected harsh commentary of the weak government, no longer seemed as practical. So that July, President John Adams and the Federalists in control of Congress passed an extreme piece of legislation that made criticism of the government and its leaders a crime.

The bestselling author of The Pursuit of Happiness shows how the opposing constitutional visions of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton have defined our country for 250 years, influenced presidents from Washington to Trump, and continue to drive the debate over the power of government today...

The framers of the Constitution were very concerned about limiting the power of government and in securing the liberty of citizens. To strike a balance between authority and liberty is the central purpose of American Constitutional Law. To this end, they created three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial with separation of powers, and there were checks and balances of each branch against the other. This was to assure the guarantees of individual liberty. The Death of America occurred on November 5, 2024 as the fatal blow will culminate on January 20, 2025 with the ...

For 30 years, Liberty DeVitto was the driving force behind one of the biggest pop artists of all time. With his intense drive, endless creativity, and New York swagger, Liberty created the grooves for 13 platinum Billy Joel albums that have sold over 150 million copies, and wrote and performed the drum parts on 22 of Billy's 23 top-40 hits and all of his six GRAMMY@ Award-winning recordings. He toured the world multiple times as one of the most well-known drummers of his era. The amazing success did not come without a price.

In For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Rothbard proposes a once-and-for-all escape from the two major political parties, the ideologies they embrace, and their central plans for using state power against people. Libertarianism is Rothbard's radical alternative that says state power is unworkable and immoral, and ought to be curbed and finally overthrown.

This is the story of how America's first women soldiers helped win World War I, earned the vote, and fought the US Army. In 1918 the US Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France. They were masters of the latest technology: the telephone switchboard. General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, demanded female "wire experts" when he discovered that inexperienced doughboys were unable to keep him connected with troops under fire.

In a world teetering on the edge of chaos, Sienna Nealon is the unrelenting force keeping the worst of humanity in check. But after years of sacrificing everything—her freedom, her relationships, her very soul—to hunt metahuman criminals, the cost is catching up. As she delivers justice with a ferocity that borders on vengeance, Sienna grapples with a chilling truth: she may never escape the cage of her own making.

Caleb Hanson assumed the most exciting part of his field trip scouting in Northern Minnesota would be a rare bird sighting. Instead, he was abducted by hive-minded hexapods and forced to be their children's teacher. Not the worst way to ride out the end of the world. Two years later, the apocalypse has finally come for Caleb. His savior-captors are murdered, leaving him as the last line of defense for the alien kids he's grown to know and love. Now, he'll have to bend his values or watch his students die.

We have been taught what to think, but not how to think. Our political landscape is a battlefield of noise. Every debate is filtered through a partisan lens designed to inflame, not inform, leaving citizens armed with talking points but starved of principles. This book is the remedy. As Volume 2 of the "U.S. Constitution: Our Common Ground" series, THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE is not another voice in the choir of chaos; it is a tool for clarity. It systematically strips away the partisan spin and emotional rhetoric to return to the source: the foundational texts of our republic, examined ...

The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states, claiming the authority to maintain the domestic peace, enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling their boundaries and restricted the rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws.

The Practical Guide to Free Speech turns one of America’s most misunderstood freedoms into an engaging, surprisingly fun exploration of how the First Amendment actually works. Imagine a world where an off-color joke or unpopular opinion could land you in jail. For most of human history, that wasn’t imagination — it was reality. The First Amendment changed everything.

Sacred Liberty offers a dramatic, sweeping survey of how America built a unique model of religious freedom, perhaps the nation’s “greatest invention.” Steven Waldman, the bestselling author of Founding Faith, shows how early ideas about religious liberty were tested and refined amidst the...

Legal luminary Burt Neuborne argues that the structure of the First Amendment as well as of the entire Bill of Rights was more intentional than most people realize, beginning with the internal freedom of conscience and working outward to freedom of expression and finally freedom of public association. This design, Neuborne argues, was not to protect discrete individual rights - such as the rights of corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections.

Free speech as we know it comes less from the First Amendment than from a most unexpected source: Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A lifelong skeptic, he disdained all individual rights, including the right to express one's political views. But in 1919, it was Holmes who wrote a dissenting opinion that would become the canonical affirmation of free speech in the United States.

Lake Wobegon is in a frenzy of preparations for the Fourth of July. The town is dizzy with anticipation - until they hear of Clint's ambition to run for Congress. They know about his episodes with vodka sours, his rocky marriage, and his friendship with the 24-year-old who dresses up as the Statue of Liberty for the parade and may be buck naked beneath her robes. In Keillor's words, "It is Lake Wobegon as you imagined it - good loving people who drive each other crazy."

“A historical demonstration of the indispensability of the First Amendment [and] … an earnest and timely argument for [its] enduring value.” —Kirkus Reviews "Great storytelling about the history and importance of the First Amendment, from someone who has spent his life...

Christians are often thought of as defending only their own religious interests in the public square. They are viewed as worrying exclusively about the erosion of their freedom to assemble and to follow their convictions, while not seeming as concerned about publicly defending the rights of Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and atheists to do the same. Andrew T. Walker, an emerging Southern Baptist public theologian, argues for a robust Christian ethic of religious liberty that helps the church defend religious freedom for everyone in a pluralistic society.

I believe it is the focus on religion that represents one of the major problems of the First Amendment. If you focus only on protecting freedom of religion, you ignore the other areas of expression, especially the opposite of religion which is atheism. Shouldn’t there be a freedom to unbelief? By ignoring the wider concept of freedom of philosophy, you set the stage for a distorted perspective on freedom of speech. This ignores the freedom of people not to believe as well as the freedom of people to create entirely new fields that are influenced by science and the pursuit of new knowledge...

Charles Coffin's The Story of Liberty, originally published in 1879, is not America's story alone. It belongs to all those who are enjoying freedom and liberty in any part of the world. And it belongs to all nations that will yet serve Him. As we reach back into the records of history to observe the hand of the Great Author of all liberty, we will find direction for the days ahead and discover the keys we need to understand and interpret the future.

Highlighting forgotten Black and White civil rights pioneers and weaving in the story of the author's own great-grandfather's crimes as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Freedom on Trial tells a gripping story of a moment pregnant with promise when race relations in the United States might have taken a dramatically different turn.