In times of political instability, readers have repeatedly turned to Hannah Arendt, more often for clarity than for comfort. Her work resurfaces whenever democratic norms begin to erode, insisting on the importance of learning how to think when familiar categories collapse. That task feels newly urgent today.

The 1735 trial of printer John Peter Zenger is remembered as a foundational moment in the history of press freedom in colonial New York. Far less known is the case of Juan Miranda, the first enslaved man to take his enslaver to the colony’s Supreme Court to fight for his own freedom.