Like Dickinson and Franklin, Jefferson was one of the big talking heads in the room when the Continental Congress created the Articles of Confederation. A plantation owner and slave-owner, he was a...

And now for something completely different…History is chock-full of people who criticized the Articles of Confederation. To Patrick Henry, they were right as rain. A Virginian orator who famously...

Washington was a general before he was a politician, so he was used to being in a system with a strong central authority. After he defeated the British with a little help from the French, the soon-...

Though he had a reputation for a personality that was pricklier than a hedgehog wearing hairgel, Adams' career in early American politics spanned decades. Along with Thomas Jefferson, he was one of...

You know the story by now. The nation dipped out on the Articles and adopted a Federalist system under the Constitution. Here's the gist, Shmoopers: under the Articles, states had almost all the po...

It wasn't all ice cream sundaes and cherry pies when the framers were creating the Constitution. A lot of people, especially Anti-Federalists, were attached to the Articles system because they fear...