Category: Early Republic
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The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005) by Sean Wilentz
Princeton University’s Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of American Democracy (2005) is an ambitious work of U.S. political history. It is a dense but readable and deeply researched account of how democratic politics took shape from the age of the Revolution through the Civil War. At nearly a thousand pages, the book is far more than…
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John Marshall: Definer of a Nation (1996) by Jean Edward Smith
Long before he was a controversial commentator on NPR and then FOX News, Juan Williams was a distinguished chronicler of the US Civil Rights era. “Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary” was published in 1998, a half-decade after the legendary civil rights lawyer (but rather forgettable Supreme Court justice, according to this book) passed away at age…
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Amateurs, to Arms!: A Military History of the War of 1812 (1991) by John Elting
“The United States swaggered into the War of 1812 like a Kansas farm boy entering his first saloon. And, like that same innocent, wretchedly gagging down his first drink, the new nation was totally unprepared for the raw impact of all-out war.” So begins this no-holds-barred military history of one of the most purposeless, indecisive,…
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William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (1995) by Alan Taylor
“William Cooper’s Town” isn’t a great book – it’s three great books. As the author, Alan Taylor, spells out in the introduction, “‘William Cooper’s Town’ is a hybrid of three usually distinct genres: biography, social history, and literary analysis.” The first is a fascinating biography of an eighteenth century social climber and speculator, William Cooper.…
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Washington: A Life (2010) by Ron Chernow
The year 2020 is a rough time to be a slaveholding Founding Father. As the mob indiscriminately tears down statues across America, I would argue there is no better time to read a book like this, an honest, richly textured Pulitzer Prize-winning biography from the celebrated Ron Chernow that brilliantly puts George Washington’s enormous contributions…
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Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (2012) by Jon Meacham
I must confess: I’ve never been much of a Thomas Jefferson fan. Much of my understanding of our third president has come by way of his generally unfavorable presentation in popular biographies of his esteemed contemporaries, such as Washington & Hamilton (Chernow), Adams (McCullough), Franklin (Isaacson) and Marshall (Smith). From the perspective of these prominent…
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The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West (2017) by David McCullough
“The Pioneers: The heroic story of the settlers who brought the American ideal west” traces the epic migration of hearty Americans who settled the Ohio River valley from the end of the American Revolution to the Civil War. Author David McCullough uses the obscure town of Marietta, Ohio as his focal point and uses the…
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John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (1949) by Samuel Flagg Bemis
Samuel Flagg Bemis was Sterling Professor of Diplomatic History at Yale for decades in the mid-twentieth century. In 1950 he won the Pulitzer Prize for “John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy,” an incisive portrait of perhaps the greatest diplomat in American history. Bemis charts Adams’s early days as ambassador to many…
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The Anti-Federalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781-1787 (1961) by Jackson Turner Main
It is astounding that the United States Constitution has survived 235 years. No doubt the Founding Fathers would find the powers of the modern American presidency and the extensive system of federal taxation terrifying, but overall I think they’d be impressed and proud to see how well their handiwork has stood up over the centuries.…
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