Rhodey

How about a longish read on the history of democracy in the early days of Rhode Island and what it reveals about our modern political state?

Sounds super fun, right?

Rhode Island’s experiment in egalitarian democracy emerged from economic and political conditions that troubled all the newly independent American states during the 1780s. This is the moment that most textbook accounts of the founding skip quickly over. Ordinary citizens faced a combination of tax hikes and a scarcity of currency, as governments stretched to pay off wartime debts and urban elites passed the costs onto the underrepresented inhabitants of the rural hinterlands. In every state, the postwar economic slump sparked calls for reduced taxation and emissions of paper money to ease the impact of the crisis — measures that would redistribute economic burdens away from ordinary people and towards the wealthy.

If that gets your gears turning, the whole article is over here.