Liberty and the Republic
Free courses on the principles of liberty from the Garden to the Republic: natural law, the common law and Blackstone, economic systems, ordered liberty and lawful resistance, the founding of the United States, and the people who fought the Revolution and wrote the Constitution. Built on the founders' own words, with footnotes, sources, paintings and links to read further. Progress is kept in this browser only.
Foundations of liberty
The Principles of Liberty: The Garden to the Republic
Where the American idea of liberty came from, told mostly in the founders' own words: the Garden and the first law, natural law from Cicero to Aquinas, Magna Carta and the English charters, the common law, William Blackstone, Locke and Sidney, Montesquieu, and how the founders built all of it into the Declaration, the state constitutions and the Bill of Rights.
Economic Systems: Capitalism, Mercantilism, Socialism and Communism
How four economic systems answer the same questions about who owns, who decides and who gets what, drawing heavily on Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Adam Smith and Thomas Sowell, with the historical record of each system and the strongest criticisms answered. Each lesson ends with a short quiz.
Ordered Liberty: Civil Anti-Authoritarianism and Resistance
Pierson on ordered liberty: the shared duty to hold government accountable and to support legitimate government. What a breach of that order looks like, the Concord Principle of Resistance and its standards for self-defense and violent defensive resistance, and how Americans have answered breaches, from Lexington and Concord to slavery, the incarceration of Japanese Americans and the immigration fights of today.
Economic Thinkers: Friedman, Hayek, Mises and the Free-Market Schools
The economic ideas of Milton Friedman and the thinkers around him: Hayek and the knowledge problem, Mises and the Austrian school, the Chicago school, public choice, supply-side economics, and Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. Each school is stated in its own words, tested against the record, and answered by its best critics. Each lesson ends with a short quiz.
Institutionalism - Origins
What institutionalism is, where it comes from and what it costs: a clear definition and the scholars who described it, documented cases from indulgences to the Boeing 737 MAX, and then the institutions Americans are asked to trust, era by era, from royal charters and admiralty courts through the territorial governments, the bank, the railroad grants, the regulatory commission, the Insular Cases, the New Deal agency, Cold War bases, the federal land estate, neoconservatism and what Pierson calls modern mercantilism, read through his Ordered Liberty framework.
The founding and its people
The Founding of the Republic
From colonial self-government to the first peaceful transfer of power in 1801: the road to revolution, independence, the Articles of Confederation, the crisis of the 1780s, the Constitutional Convention, ratification, the Bill of Rights and the precedents Washington set.
People of the Revolutionary War
Short biographies of men and women who fought, spied, financed and wrote the Revolution, many of them names most Americans never learned: soldiers of color, a woman who enlisted under a man's name, a Spanish governor, a Polish engineer and a Prussian drillmaster.
People of the Constitution
Short biographies of the people who wrote, fought over and ratified the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, including delegates who walked out, Anti-Federalists who forced the Bill of Rights, and two Black Massachusetts residents who used the new language of liberty against slavery.
Culture, faith and the arts
Culture Comes First: Francis Schaeffer, Western Culture and Politics Downstream
Why so many thinkers say politics is downstream from culture: Francis Schaeffer and L'Abri, How Should We Then Live? and A Christian Manifesto, the roots of Western culture in Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, the writers who argued culture shapes law, and what the idea asks of citizens.
Art, Music and Writing from the Revolution to the Civil War
The paintings, songs, hymns, pamphlets, poems and novels Americans made between 1765 and 1865: Revere, Trumbull and Stuart, Yankee Doodle and Billings, Common Sense and Wheatley, the Hudson River School, Emerson and Whitman, spirituals and parlor songs, abolition in print, and the Civil War in photographs and anthems.
📚 Ideas and Values Since the Enlightenment
Francis Schaeffer's survey of Western thought and the thinkers around it: Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Darwin, Nietzsche, Dewey, the existentialists, the postmodernists, and the later voices who answered them, with the criticisms Schaeffer's own history has drawn.
Art and Politics in the 20th and 21st Centuries
How editorial art, line drawings and political cartoons, photography, modern art and music have shaped politics and been shaped by it from 1900 to today: the cartoonists from Kirby and Herblock to Telnaes, the posters and murals, the photographs that moved laws and ended wars, the fights over Guernica, the NEA and the flag, the protest songs and the campaign-song lawsuits, and how to read, use and report on political art now.
Read the sources
Modern political movements
Perot, the Libertarians and the Pauls: Third Paths in American Politics
Ross Perot and the 1992 and 1996 campaigns, the ideas and history of libertarian thought and the Libertarian Party, and a fair analysis of Ron Paul and Rand Paul: what they believe, how they have voted, where they differ, and how critics from the left, right and center answer them. Each lesson ends with a short quiz.
The Liberty Political Matrix: Beyond Left and Right
Pierson's Liberty Political Matrix and his case that the left-right line is a false paradigm: where left and right came from, why one line cannot tell a constitutionalist from a statist, the two axes of moral grounding and relationship to institutional power, the nine behavioral categories, and how to use the matrix honestly.
Idaho's Radicals and Extremists: Socialists, Communists, Nazis and White Supremacists, 1892 to 2026
The documented history of socialism, communism, Nazism and white supremacist organizing in Idaho, from the Coeur d'Alene mine wars to the Aryan Nations, The Order and Patriot Front, plus full histories of DSA, 50501 and the No Kings coalition, their people, money, philosophies and Idaho chapters, kept in their own category. White supremacy, white separatism and Nazism are defined and kept apart.