Author: Tim Graczewski
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The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution (2007) by David O. Stewart
In March 1785, Virginia planter George Mason traveled to George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon to discuss a matter of shared concern: fishing, taxation, and toll rights on the Potomac River. A royal charter issued by Charles I of England in 1632 had defined Maryland’s boundary as extending to the far bank of the river,…
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James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (2014) by Lynne Cheney
Mid-nineteenth-century Democratic U.S. senator from Illinois and presidential candidate Stephen A. Douglas was known as the “Little Giant.” It seems to me that James Madison is far more deserving of that title. The principal architect of the U.S. Constitution, a driving force behind the Federalist Papers, a former Secretary of State, and a wartime president,…
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The Story of Art (1955) by E. H. Gombrich
“There really is no such thing as Art,” E. H. Gombrich famously declares at the opening of his 1955 classic The Story of Art, “there are only artists.” Art with a capital “A,” he continues, “is a bogey and a fetish.” For Gombrich, art is ultimately about feeling and expression rather than abstract definitions or…
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Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (2002) by Leonard Richards
Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (2002) by Leonard Richards is one of those rare books that genuinely surprises. I can’t recall being as engrossed by a monograph on early American history since reading The Elusive Republic (1980) by Drew R. McCoy. Richards takes a familiar yet often overlooked episode – the 1786 uprising…
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American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (2007) by Joseph J. Ellis
How did the American founding actually happen? That is the central question Joseph Ellis takes up in American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (2007). Rather than treating the founding as a single moment, Ellis stretches the period across twenty-eight formative years – from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to…
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Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (2006) by J. H. Elliott
J. H. Elliott’s Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 is a sweeping comparative history that attempts something both ambitious and intellectually disciplined: to explain not simply how two empires conquered and colonized the Americas, but why they produced such profoundly different societies – and why those differences endured long after…
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The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest (2022) by Edward Chancellor
Some books are good, fewer are great, and only a rare handful amount to an education. These are the works that fundamentally reshape how you see the world—how you understand the past and imagine the future. The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest (2022) by Edward Chancellor is one of those rare books.…
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The World of Copley: 1738-1815 (1970) by Alfred Frankenstein
John Singleton Copley stands as the foremost American artist of the eighteenth century. At a time when Americans were widely regarded in Europe as provincial brutes, he nonetheless earned an honored place among the leading artists of the continent. His life was divided almost evenly between two worlds: the first thirty-seven years in Boston, and…
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Colonial America: A Very Short Introduction (2013) by Alan Taylor
American Colonies: The Settling of North America (2001) by Alan Taylor is a sweeping and authoritative narrative of the European colonization of the Americas from 1492 to 1830. A decade later, the UC Davis historian distilled that expansive work into Colonial America: A Very Short Introduction (2013), part of Oxford’s acclaimed series of concise scholarly…
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