Civics: The founder you were never assigned
Transcript, slides & audio:
On October 26 at the UW–Madison Law School, Kirstin Birkhaug of Hope College made a case for reading Mercy Otis Warren. The men we call the founders wrote almost nothing systematic about civic virtue; the people who did were mostly women, excluded from office and writing instead. Warren’s argument was that liberty is only ever learned by not having it — so a republic survives exactly as long as it keeps remembering what being unfree felt like. She doubted the Constitution could do that work, pressed for what became the Bill of Rights, and when that was settled, wrote a two-volume history of the Revolution as an act of public memory.
