American Patriotism at 250

Charles Kesler is a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute, Editor of the Claremont Review of Books, host of Claremont’s The American Mind video series, and the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College.

Dr. Kesler also teaches in the Claremont Institute’s Publius Fellows Program and Lincoln Fellows Program. He received his B.A. in Social Studies and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. From 1989 to 2008, Dr. Kesler was director of CMC’s Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World.

He is the recipient of the prestigious 2018 Bradley Prize, a high honor bestowed upon distinguished individuals who have influenced American scholarship and debate.

From September 2000 to March 2001, he served as vice chairman of the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Congress’s James Madison Commemoration Commission.

He was selected in June 2000 as a member of the Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Issue sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society.

Dr. Kesler is the author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism (Broadside Books); the editor of Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding (Free Press); co-editor, with John B. Kienker, of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Ten Years of the Claremont Review of Books (Rowman & Littlefield); and co-editor, with William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought (HarperCollins). He has written extensively on American constitutionalism and political thought, and his edition of The Federalist Papers (Signet Classics) is the best-selling edition in the country.

Raphael Lemkin Distinguished Professor of Law

Jed Purdy re-joined the Duke Law faculty in 2022 from Columbia Law School, where he was the William S. Beinecke Professor of Law and co-director of the Constitutional Democracy Initiative. He previously served on the Duke Law faculty from 2004 to 2019, most recently as the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law.

A prolific scholar, Purdy teaches and writes about environmental, property, and constitutional law as well as legal and political theory. His two most recent books, from 2022 and 2023, are Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening, and Our Best Hope (Basic) and a new Norton College edition of Thoreau's writings, including Walden, "Civil Disobedience," and essays on slavery. He has recently completed a study of Raymond Williams’s thought, A World Worth Sharing, and is at work on a short book about the meaning of democracy.

In After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2014), he traced the long history of environmental law as a central feature of American political and cultural life. His other books include For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community and the Legal Imagination, and A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom. His legal scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, Nomos, and Ecology Law Quarterly, among others. He has published essays in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Dissent, Die Zeit, and Democracy Journal, among others.

Matt Welch is editor at large of Reason, and co-host of The Fifth Column podcast. He is the author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick (2007), and co-author of the 2011 book The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America.

Welch served as editor in chief of Reason, the magazine of “free minds and free markets,” from 2008-2016, and has written cover stories on the collapse of communism, do-something punditry, bipartisan fiscal incontinence, biased fact-checking, deregulation, COVID policy, John McCain, Rand Paul, Gary Johnson, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and the Ukraine War. He was co-host of The Independents on Fox Business Network from 2013-2015; assistant editorial pages editor for the Los Angeles Times from 2006-2007, and co-founded Central Europe’s first independent English-language post-communist newspaper in 1991.

His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, New York Post, Columbia Journalism Review, and scores of other publications. He is a regular guest on HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher, a frequent interlocutor on C-SPAN's Book TV, and a consistent presence on broadcasts and podcasts nationwide.

Welch lives in Manhattan and has two daughters.