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Ashbrook Center

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Ashbrook Center

Educating students, teachers, and citizens in the history and Founding principles of our country. Follow us on twitter

The Ashbrook Center, located on the campus of Ashland University, seeks to restore and strengthen the capacities of the American people for constitutional self-government. Through undergraduate, graduate, and civic programs, the Ashbrook Center is the nation’s largest university based educator in the enduring principles and practice of free government in the United States. Dedicated in 1983 by Pre

sident Ronald Reagan, the Ashbrook Center is an independent center governed by its own board and responsible for raising all of the funds necessary for its many programs.

08/26/2026

Every empire in history had treated its outer provinces as something to extract from. Americans had just fought a war because they believed Britain intended exactly that for them. So in 1787, when Congress had to decide what to do with the enormous territory north and west of the Ohio River, the obvious answer was to build colonies and rule them from a distance.

The Northwest Ordinance did something else. It laid out a path by which territories would govern themselves, write their own constitutions, and enter the union as equals. It guaranteed religious liberty before the First Amendment existed. It banned slavery, imperfectly, and gave a generation of opponents of slavery a line worth defending.

Peter Onuf, one of the country's leading historians of Jefferson and the founding, joins Jeff Sikkenga on this episode of The American Idea to explain how a law most Americans have never read shaped the country they live in.

Listen now. Link in comments.

08/24/2026

This week: why you should care about a 239 year-old law.

Every empire in history had treated its outer provinces as something to extract from. Americans had just fought a war because they believed Britain intended exactly that for them. So in 1787, when Congress had to decide what to do with the enormous territory north and west of the Ohio River, the obvious answer was to build colonies and rule them from a distance.

The Northwest Ordinance did something else. It laid out a path by which territories would govern themselves, write their own constitutions, and enter the union as equals. It guaranteed religious liberty before the First Amendment existed. It banned slavery, imperfectly, and yet gave a generation of opponents of slavery a line worth defending.

Peter Onuf, one of the country's leading historians of Jefferson and the founding, joins Jeff Sikkenga on this episode of The American Idea to explain how a law most Americans have never read shaped the country they live in.

Subscription link in the comments.

08/19/2026

Our special bonus episode is live today. Young Washington does something unusual for a founder film: it spends most of its running time on failure. Washington wants a royal commission he will never get. He builds a fort in a location he has been told is indefensible. He refuses to move. He loses.

Dr. Stephen Knott, emeritus professor at the Naval War College and one of the scholars who reviewed the screenplay, joins Cara Rogers Stevens to sort the record from the invention. The class contempt the British showed colonial militia was real. Washington's self-education after his father's death was real. The death of Christopher Gist at Fort Necessity was not, and neither was the romance. What the film gets right is the character, and Knott makes the case that this is the standard historical film should actually be held to.

Have a listen and tell us whether you think a filmmaker owes us the details or the essence. Link in comments.

08/17/2026

Special bonus episode this week. Young Washington recently became available to stream, and it does something unusual for a founder film: it spends most of its running time on failure. Washington wants a royal commission he will never get. He builds a fort in a location he has been told is indefensible. He refuses to move. He loses.

Dr. Stephen Knott, emeritus professor at the Naval War College and one of the scholars who reviewed the screenplay, joins Cara Rogers Stevens to sort the record from the creative license. The class contempt the British showed colonial militia was real. Washington's self-education after his father's death was real. The death of Christopher Gist at Fort Necessity was not, and neither was the romance. What the film gets right is the character, and Knott makes the case that this is the standard historical film should actually be held to.

Link in comments.

08/12/2026

In 1783, at Newburgh, Continental Army officers proposed marching on Congress to demand the back pay they were owed. Their grievance was real. Washington could have led them and become the arbiter of American politics. Instead he gathered the officers, told them he had grown old and nearly blind serving his country, and the whole thing dissolved.

That was the first of three times he walked away from power. Dr. Stephen Knott, emeritus professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, joins host Cara Rogers Stevens to explain what made a young officer who once begged for a British commission into the man Europe could not understand.

New episode of The American Idea, available now. Link in comments.

08/10/2026

What made George Washington our first citizen?

On this episode of The American Idea, host Cara Rogers Stevens talks with Dr. Steven Knott, emeritus professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, about the character behind the marble statue.

Washington had a ferocious temper as a young officer. He was thin skinned enough that he once drafted a bitter farewell address lashing out at his critics, then threw it away. What set him apart was not the absence of flaws but his willingness to see them and work on them for the rest of his life.

Knott also explains why Washington walked away from power three separate times, what he learned from the soldiers he commanded, and why he ranks Washington above Lincoln as our greatest president.

07/29/2026

It's live. Our new episode asks a question most of us think we can answer until we're pressed on it: what is a republic, and why did the founders choose one?

In 1776, choosing a republic meant rejecting both the monarchy the founders were born under and the direct democracy of the ancient world, the kind Rome had tried before collapsing into civil war and empire. Professor James Stoner of LSU walks through what representation actually solved, why the founders trusted a broad citizenry the ancients would have feared, and the civic habits they believed a republic cannot survive without.

Listen now. Link in comments.

07/27/2026

Ask most Americans whether we live in a republic and the answer comes fast. Ask what a republic actually is, and things get quieter.

The founders faced a world where monarchy was simply assumed to be the natural order, and where the one great republican experiment everyone knew, Rome, had ended in civil war and empire. Choosing a republic in 1776 was closer to reckless than obvious. So what did they see that made the risk worth taking, and what did they believe it would ask of ordinary citizens?

Professor James Stoner of LSU joins us on the new episode of The American Idea, dropping Wednesday. Link in comments.

07/15/2026

Is it true that gridlock in Congress is proof that 'the system' is broken? And is there anything wrong with our tendency to see virtually every issue as national, instead of local? Here's the twist — James Madison would tell us the first complaint is misguided and the second one is dead right.

In Federalist 10, Madison argued that a slow, contentious, gridlocked government is exactly what protects a free people from the tyranny of any single faction. What he never envisioned is a politics where every question, from schools to speed limits, gets settled in Washington, raising the stakes of every election until half the country dreads the outcome.

The new episode of The American Idea is out now, featuring Professor Joe Postell of Hillsdale College on factions, human nature, and what a Madisonian fix might look like. Link in comments.

07/13/2026

The Anti-Federalists said a republic as large as America could never survive. Too many competing interests, too much conflict, no common good. James Madison read that argument and made a stunning reply: the conflict isn't the problem. It's the protection.

This Wednesday on The American Idea, we dig into Federalist 10 with Professor Joe Postell of Hillsdale College: what a faction actually is, why Madison believed the causes of division are "sown in the nature of man," and whether his 18th-century solution can handle our 21st-century politics.

Subscribe now so you don't miss it. Link in comments.

Address

401 College Avenue
Ashland, OH
44805

Opening Hours

Monday	8am - 5pm
Tuesday	8am - 5pm
Wednesday	8am - 5pm
Thursday	8am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 5pm

Telephone

+14192895411

Website

http://www.ashbrook.org/

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