Category: Early Republic

“Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution” by Jack Rakove is one of the most challenging books I’ve ever read. Normally, I plow through books like this in a week or two. I found that I could only read “Original Meanings” for maybe six to ten pages before my eyes glazed…

Normally I don’t pay much attention to the endorsements on the back cover of a book. “The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern Word, 1788-1800” (2007) by Jay Winik was an exception. Some of the most distinguished historians and biographers in the country lined up to heap lavish praise on this book:…

It was commonly assumed in Revolutionary America that a republican form of government could only survive in an extraordinary society of distinctly moral and independent people. The political economy of the nation played a central role in either fostering or destroying that morality and independence. Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans each had clear and sharply…

Gordon S. Wood is an American institution. He is one of the most influential historians of early America that has ever lived. In “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic,” the third volume in the epic Oxford History of the United States, Wood explores the tumultuous decades between the ratification of the Constitution…