Colin Kidd

‘The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.’ The tweet came in the early hours of 7 November 2012, when it seemed likely that the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, who had lost the electoral college to Barack Obama, might end up ahead of Obama in the popular vote. In a further message, subsequently deleted, the same tweeter added that Obama had ‘lost...

The​ Presbyterian ministers of my Ayrshire childhood never harangued their congregations, and were almost to a man – they were all men – mellow and avuncular. Authority figures policed behaviour – all the way down to disciplining boys who walked around with hands in pockets or shirt-tails hanging out – but nobody propounded moral values; ethics tended to be intuited...

Most historians​ nowadays are suspicious of ‘constitutional history’, in part because they’re uneasy about its associations with the Anglocentric arrogance of what is sometimes called Whig history, a self-satisfied celebration of England’s relatively smooth progress towards liberal outcomes. The historical reaction against Whig triumphalism also exposed the...

Among​ the enduring riddles of American exceptionalism is the absence in the political mainstream of an overtly socialist party. Whereas in Europe socialist and social democratic parties emerged to tame the excesses of private enterprise, the much rawer, more carelessly exploitative forms of capitalism found in the United States failed to provoke a political response of a similar character...

Until​ the last half-century, reconfigurations of the literary and historical canon largely involved the insertion, repudiation or reordering of a cast of dead white males. Since then, there have been efforts to expand disciplinary canons to incorporate more women and greater racial and ethnic diversity. At first glance, the inclusion of Catharine Macaulay’s writings in the influential...