Know the founders as they actually were

If you've picked up this page, I'm going to guess something about you: you're not satisfied with the version of American history you were given.

Maybe the textbook version felt too tidy — all noble intentions and providential outcomes, the slavery and the dispossession tucked into a paragraph or softened into abstraction. Or maybe you've swung in the other direction and found the full-demolition version equally unsatisfying — every achievement canceled, every complexity flattened into a morality tale that somehow manages to be just as reductive as the hagiography it replaced. You're looking for something harder to find: an honest reckoning.

That's what I built this school to deliver. History done well isn't about making you feel good about the founders, or bad about them, or politically confirmed in whatever you already believed. It's about making you accurate — about what these men actually wrote, actually argued, actually did, and actually refused to do. That means reading Jefferson's Declaration and his slave ledgers in the same sitting. It means understanding that Madison's theory of faction was a genuine intellectual achievement and that it was also designed, in part, to prevent the propertyless majority from threatening the propertied minority. It means holding those two things at once without flinching, and then asking what they mean for us now.

The curriculum is organized to build your analytical capacity, not just your knowledge of facts. We start with the world that made the founders — the colonial hierarchies, the Enlightenment inheritance, the revolutionary fever — so you can read their ideas in context rather than in a vacuum. We move through the founding documents not as sacred texts but as contested political instruments, full of compromise and exclusion alongside genuine brilliance. We reconstruct the rivalries — Hamilton vs. Jefferson, Adams vs. Jefferson, Hamilton vs. Burr — not as historical gossip but as ideological collisions whose fault lines you can still trace in contemporary American politics. And we end by looking honestly at the failures: the slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the exclusion of women and the propertyless from the "We" in "We the People."

The capstone asks you to write your own balanced verdict on a founder of your choosing — using the primary-source evidence and analytical tools we've built throughout the course. Not a screed, not a eulogy. A verdict. Evidence in, judgment out. That's the skill, and it travels well beyond this school into every civic argument that matters.

Come in skeptical. Come in with questions. Bring your disagreements — that's precisely the spirit the founders themselves, at their best, were after. I'll see you inside.