History: American History 
Essential
The Constitution of the United States of America
As the supreme law of the land, the American Constitution acts to limit the role of government to the defense of our rights against foreign and domestic threat.
The Declaration of Independence
As one of America's founding documents, the Declaration is one of the most influential pieces of libertarian thought ever written
The Tide in the Affairs of Men
By Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman: "The aim of this brief essay is to present a hypothesis that a major change in social and economic policy is preceded by a shift in the climate of intellectual opinion. The intellectual tide is spread to the public by all manner of intellectual retailers: teachers and preachers, journalists in print and on television, pundits and politicians. "
Declaration of the National Anti-Slavery Convention
By William Lloyd Garrison: "Every man has a right to his own body—to the products of his own labor—to the protection of law—and to the common advantages of society."
Associations in Civil Life
By Alexis de Tocqueville. "Thus the most democratic country on the face of the earth is that in which men have, in our time, carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires and have applied this new science to the greatest number of purposes."
What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have To Fear
By Alexis de Tocqueville. "It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them."
National Emergency and the Erosion of Private Property Rights
By Robert Higgs and Charlotte Twight: The scope of private property rights in the United States has been greatly reduced during the 20th century. Much of the reduction occurred episodically, as governmental officials took control of economic affairs during national emergencies—mainly wars, depressions, and actual or threatened strikes in critical industries."
A Different Story
By Stephen Davies: "Politics and power do indeed have far-reaching effects on people’s lives in a dramatic way. However, the view of history, and of human social life more generally, that we get from the classic lists of important dates is partial and distorted."
"To Begin the World Anew" - Politics and the Creative Imagination
By Bernard Bailyn: "The creative reorganization of the world of power and all its implications has happened at various points in history, but rarely, if ever, I believe, as quickly, successfully, and -- so it seems to me -- mysteriously as by a single generation on the eastern shores of North America two hundred years ago."
The Sixteenth Amendment: The Historical Background
By Arthur A. Ekirch,Jr.: "One of the briefest amendments, it has also been one of the most important and far-reaching in our history."
Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History
"A collection of eighty documents which demonstrate how local government in colonial America was the seedbed of American constitutionalism."
Lectures on Modern History
By Lord Acton: "These are the lectures given by the great English classical liberal historian, Lord Acton, in the academic years 1899-1901 at Cambridge University. It is a survey of modern history from the rise of the modern nation state to the American Revolution. The book also contains his “Inaugural Lecture” of 1895."
Nation, State, and Economy: Contributions to the Politics and History of Our Time
By Ludwig von Mises: "Examines and compares prewar and postwar economic conditions and explicates Mises’s theory that each country’s prosperity supports rather than undercuts the prosperity of other countries."
The Federalist No. 10
By James Madison. "Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction."
The Writings of James Madison
"This volume contains his public papers and his private correspondence, including speeches in the First Congress and Address to the General Assembly to the People of the Commonwealth of Virginia."
The Writings of Thomas Paine
"The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected, and in the event of which their affections are interested."
Recommended
Gene Healy on the Presidency
In this video Cato VP Gene Healy discusses the growth of the imperial presidency.
Banished: 'The Forsaken' by Tim Tzouliadis
Reviewed by Richard Pipes: "Most of these expatriates, not intellectuals but simple working men, were quickly disenchanted and wanted to return home, only to find that Moscow considered them Soviet citizens and barred them from leaving. Ignored by the American government, many of them ended in the gulag."
Crying Wolf: Are we all fascists now?
By Michael C. Moynihan: "To anyone that has attended a political demonstration, trawled a blog, or attended a Western university in the past half century, the scattershot use of 'fascist' will ring familiar. And almost as clichéd as accusing an ideological opponent of fascist sympathies is the accurate observation that such charges often demonstrate an utter lack of understanding of just what qualifies as fascist, other than 'someone I vehemently disagree with.'"
The Klein Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Polemics
By Johan Norberg: "To make her case, Klein exaggerates the free-market reforms that take place in times of crisis, often by ignoring central events and rewriting chronologies. She uses loose metaphors and wild distortions to claim that free markets are a form of violence. She confuses libertarianism with corporatism and neoconservatism and blames Milton Friedman for encouraging reform by stealth. To do so, she engages in one of the most malevolent distortions of a thinker that has been done in a major work in recent years."
Narcissists With Nukes
By Shawn Macomber: "Should Cato Institute Senior Editor Gene Healy's wonderfully informative, perception shifting examination of the wayward American executive, The Cult of the Presidency, receive the attention it so richly deserves, however, it may serve as a perfect literary tonic for our historical and cultural amnesia. Perhaps Healy, armed with a persuasive, good-natured outrage, will even inspire some among us toward a more narrow definition of presidential virtuousness and, by extension, broaden the conception of our own."
Bernstein on the History of Trade
"William Bernstein talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the history of trade. Drawing on the insights from his recent book, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, Bernstein talks about the magic of spices, how trade in sugar explain why Jews ended up in Manhattan, the real political economy of the Boston Tea Party and the demise of the Corn Laws in England."
Inventing Alexander Hamilton: The troubling embrace of the founder of American finance
By William Hogeland: "Now, a Hamilton revival is not only under way but an accomplished fact. Wrestling anew with Hamilton’s contributions to national politics and economics could be both fascinating and worthwhile. But Neo-Hamiltonians, like the latter-day Jeffersonians of the ’30s and ’40s, have been eagerly chopping up the past to make it conform to their political aims."
What FDR Had In Common With the Other Charismatic Collectivists of the 30s
By David Boaz: "When economic crisis hit — in Italy and Germany after World War I, in the United States with the Great Depression — the anti-liberals seized the opportunity, arguing that the market had failed and that the time for bold experimentation had arrived."
Alexis de Tocqueville
A site about the life and work of Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the great modern political thinkers and an inspiration to classical liberals ever since. This site gives detailed biographical information as well as images and text in English and in French.
'Knowing' Industrial Pollution: Nuisance Law and the Power of Tradition in a Time of Rapid Economic Change, 1840 – 1864
Experience shows that Common Law and Private Property Rights can be an alternative to top-down regulation on air pollution. In this essay, Christine Meisner Rosen examines nuisance law "from the perspective of an environmental historian who is interested in how people made sense of industrial pollution problems in the past."
The Common Law: How it protects the environment
"The purpose of this PERC Policy Series paper is to show, by examining specific cases in American and English history, that strong legal traditions enabled ordinary citizens to protect their air, land, and water, often against politically potent parties."