Michael Haddam

speaker

274 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 22 Jan

Michael Haddam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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American History Hit · Origins of the First Amendment · 22 Jan 2026 podcast

He totally dismisses even the notion that, you know, an island, a small island 3,000 miles away should rule a continent, right?

It's that the volume of criticism of the powers that be and of questioning of authority, the volume of that grows so immensely in the 1760s and 1770s that there's no way to effectively treat it

like they had in decades before.

You couldn't prosecute every newspaper printer.

Well, so the English Bill of Rights from 1689...

It's a part of the story.

It's not necessarily the origin of the story because it's a very limited granting in the English Bill of Rights.

It grants freedom of speech to members of parliament so that they can freely express themselves and, you know, debate legislation.

It doesn't grant freedom of speech to all English people.

And so it's a very limited first expression of freedom of speech in the sort of Anglo-American context.

Yeah, the idea, you know, because of the Enlightenment is that everybody deserves that right to debate what's going on and what the government is or should be doing.

So, you know, there's a process that occurs over 1789, which is once the constitution, the ratification is finished, there is, you know, anti-federalists everywhere.

Many Anti-Federalists conceded to the ratification of the Constitution, but with the concession that a Bill of Rights would be amended to it.

And so over the course of the first Congress in 1789, the Congress invites –

suggestions from the states for what should be among these enumerated rights in the Bill of Rights.

And so, obviously, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press are so fundamental in their historical experience that that's why they make up the First Amendment.

I mean, a lot of the states had Bill of Rights, bills of rights in their constitutions, their state constitutions, right?

And so in some sense, some of these rights were protected in state constitutions.

But this prevalent fear of a more powerful centralized federal government

All they had to do was look to the European past to see what could happen if you had a very powerful centralized government.

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