- There is a startling image of James Madison wearing Google Glass in the Sunday New York Times (19-Jan-2014). In an opinion piece titled Madison’s Privacy Blind Spot, the 1816 portrait of Madison by John Vanderlyn is updated to show him sporting the futuristic monocle. Jeffery Rosen, the current president of the National Constitution Center, states that Madison — the Father of the Constitution and champion of the Bill of Rights — was
more concerned with abuses of legislative and executive power than of unregulated commercial power.
Rosen scans Mandison’s views towards abuses of power and concludes that the Constitution may need to be amended to protect the people from both corporate and government surveillance.
James Madison’s Blind Spot
Loyalism was a siren call for the British. They were constantly bending their strategy to conform to the chimera of Loyalist support that was assumed to be there but somehow never materialized. Howe’s Philadelphia campaign and Burgoyne’s invasion from Canada, as well as the British strategy in the South, were based on the assumption that large numbers of Loyalists would rise in support, if only sufficiently encouraged and protected ...
Patriot Battles: How the War of Independence Was Fought (2007)