Richard Alan Ryerson

1 month ago | lawliberty.org | Richard Alan Ryerson |John O. McGinnis |John C. Pinheiro |Daniel Mahoney

Four spirited responses to my short essay in Liberty & Law on the battles at Lexington and Concord at their 250th anniversary prove that no significant historical event, no matter how limited in time and space—in this case, to a single day, in a single Massachusetts county—can ever be fully explained or appreciated in ten pages, or in a hundred pages, by a single historian. If it could be, history would be a much simpler and much duller enterprise than it is.

2 months ago | lawliberty.org | Richard Samuelson |Richard Alan Ryerson |John O. McGinnis |John C. Pinheiro

Richard Ryerson’s essay on the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord ends extremely provocatively. Ryerson quotes “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “published,” he notes, “on the eve of the Civil War,” commenting on the poem’s “lesson, always timely in any free republic, has never been more urgently needed than in 2025.”But what was this lesson? Given when he published, and the actual events of Lexington and Concord, the answer seems obvious.

2 months ago | lawliberty.org | Michael Auslin |Richard Alan Ryerson |John O. McGinnis |John C. Pinheiro

While the combatants’ blood surely boiled when the first shot rang out in the misty dawn on Lexington Green, almost exactly 250 years ago, many also likely felt a disbelief, if not horror, that things had come to this pass. It must have seemed to most on both sides that, in ways large and small, the descent into what was a civil war was not foreordained and could have been avoided with but some luck and wisdom.

2 months ago | lawliberty.org | Aaron Coleman |Richard Alan Ryerson |Daniel Mahoney |Titus Techera

Richard Alan Ryerson’s excellent opening essay starts this forum off on a firm footing by explaining the immediate causes of Lexington and Concord. This is not a shock as no scholar has studied the coming of the Revolution in Massachusetts and the role of its famous son, John Adams, more than Ryerson.

2 months ago | lawliberty.org | Hans Eicholz |Richard Alan Ryerson |Titus Techera |Graham McAleer

In his bracing account of the reasons for the clash of American and British forces at Lexington and Concord, Richard Ryerson has touched on several of the most vital themes of both British and American constitutional history, running from Magna Carta (1215) to the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) to the American Revolution (1776).