Category: Early Republic
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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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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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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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