The three most famous words in American government — We the People — were written by a founder most Americans have never heard of.

Host Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey sits down with author and journalist Jesse Wegman to recover the story of James Wilson: a Scottish immigrant who arrived in 1765, signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, drafted the Constitution's opening words, and sat on the first Supreme Court — then vanished almost entirely from national memory. Wegman's new book, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution, is the first full-length biography of Wilson in more than seventy years.

Wilson was the convention's fiercest advocate for popular sovereignty. He pushed for proportional representation, one-person, one-vote, and the direct election of the president — positions bold enough to unsettle many of his peers. We owe to him not only We the People but the Necessary and Proper Clause and the Supremacy Clause, the architecture of a strong national government. His 1768 essay on parliamentary authority reached Thomas Jefferson's desk and echoes in the Declaration itself.

His end was as dramatic as his rise. A ruinous addiction to land speculation left Wilson holding four million acres he could not pay for. He was jailed twice for debt — the only Supreme Court justice ever imprisoned — and died in 1798 in the back room of a North Carolina tavern, delirious and destitute, with no funeral and scarcely a mention. Wegman explains why Wilson's ideas about equality and self-government still matter, and what we lose when the stories we tell about the founding get too simple.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison agreed on almost everything when it came to religious freedom. But they talked about it in completely different ways. Historian Dr. John Ragosta joins Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey to unpack that difference — Jefferson's intellectual, almost deistic case for separating church and state, and Madison's surprisingly reverential, scripture-laced language defending the same principle. Ragosta walks through the Memorial and Remonstrance, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and Madison's presidential vetoes on church matters, showing how two founders reached identical conclusions from very different starting points. The conversation closes on why that distinction still matters — and why separation of church and state was never, for either man, an attack on religion itself.

We know James Madison as the Father of the Constitution. But who was he before that? In this special episode, Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey takes the guest seat to explore the formative years that made Madison who he is.
At 25, Madison was the youngest major figure of the founding era — small, sickly, quiet, and easy to overlook. He never commanded armies or delivered rousing speeches. What he had were ideas, and a framework for thinking about power, human nature, and government that no one else in the room quite possessed. Where did that framework come from?
The answer lies in three Scottish Enlightenment-influenced teachers, a frontier Virginia upbringing, and an unconventional choice to attend the College of New Jersey — the institution we know today as Princeton — rather than William and Mary, where every other wealthy Virginia man of his generation enrolled.
Dr. Crawford-Lackey traces Madison's intellectual development from the schoolroom of Donald Robertson, where a 70-mile horseback journey opened a young boy's mind to Locke, Milton, and Montesquieu, through his years under John Witherspoon at Princeton — where he experienced the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party not as distant news, but as live confirmation of everything the Scottish Enlightenment had taught him about human passion and the limits of reason.
Madison wasn't born a Founding Father. He was made — by a rigorous education, a world in crisis, and the hardest question anyone could ask on the eve of a revolution: What kind of people is government meant to govern?
The answer he arrived at still shapes American democracy today.

What does the Constitution actually say — and why haven't most of us read it? Ben Sheehan, bestselling author and award-winning digital creator, joins host Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey to talk about the civic knowledge gap and how he used his background in comedy to make one of the most important documents in American history genuinely readable.

Ben traces his own constitutional education — from dinner table civics lessons with his mom, a Senate staffer, to his years at Funny or Die and the Upright Citizens Brigade, to writing OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say? He makes the case that Congress is more powerful than we're taught, that the Bill of Rights is the work of one person who lived on the very land where this episode was recorded, and that civic engagement doesn't have to mean doomscrolling — just ten minutes a day across the federal, state, and local level.

Ben is also the host of Civics Made Easy on PBS, now being taught in 40,000 classrooms nationwide.

The words are familiar — life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness — but do we really know what they meant to the men who wrote them? As America marks 250 years of independence, Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey sits down with Dr. Lynn Uzzell, Julia Van Geest, and T.C. Le, co-authors of the forthcoming book Locking and Unlocking the Declaration of Independence: An Introduction to Jefferson's Philosophy on Revolution, to trace the ideas behind America's founding document back to their source: 17th-century English philosopher John Locke. The conversation unpacks how Jefferson both borrowed from and departed from Locke on consent, revolution, property, and happiness — and why those differences still shape how we understand American democracy today.

Before the Declaration of Independence, before the Constitutional Convention, colonists were already debating the meaning of a constitution — and it didn't look anything like the document we know today. Dr. Zachary Deibel, assistant professor of history at the Virginia Military Institute, joins Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey at Montpelier to trace the constitutional ideas that shaped the American Revolution. Drawing on the writings of John Dickinson, the legacy of the Glorious Revolution, and the colonial charters that defined the relationship between the King and his American subjects, Deibel unpacks why the dispute with Britain wasn't simply about taxes — it was a fundamental disagreement over the meaning of liberty itself. He also explores a theme that resonates well beyond the 18th century: when two sides decide there is nothing left to learn from each other, that's when the shooting starts.

This episode is supported in part by the Virginia Law Foundation.

This episode is part of a special five-part miniseries examining James Madison's role in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States. As part of Montpelier's commemoration of the 250th anniversary of American independence, this series is funded by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission, in partnership with Virginia Humanities.

In this final installment, Dr. Katie Crawford-Lackey sits down with Chris Pasch, Montpelier's archaeology field director, to examine one of the property's most symbolically charged structures: the Temple. Built around 1810 while Madison was serving as president, this open-air classical structure draws on Greco-Roman architectural tradition to embed the ideals of Enlightenment, liberty, and self-government directly into the landscape.

Pasch brings both archaeological evidence and architectural history to what the Temple reveals about Madison's world. This episode closes the miniseries with a reminder that the Temple's meaning endures: informed, active citizenship is the foundation on which the American experiment still stands.

This episode is supported in part by the Virginia Law Foundation.

When the Constitution was drafted in 1787, women weren't explicitly excluded — they were simply not addressed. Dr. Catherine Allgor, historian and former President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, joins host Dr. Katie Crawford Lackey at Montpelier to unpack what that silence actually meant — and why it wasn't accidental.

At the center of the conversation is a word every listener will want to know: coverture. The legal doctrine that erased a woman's identity at marriage — subsuming her personhood, her property, her wages, even her children into her husband — was never abolished by the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Dr. Allgor traces coverture from the founding era through Abigail Adams's famous "Remember the Ladies" letter, the suffrage movement, and the ERA debate, arguing that its legacy is still very much alive today.

A bracing, eye-opening conversation for the 250th anniversary year — and a reminder that the republican experiment is still a work in progress.

This episode is supported in part by the Virginia Law Foundation.