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Tom Paine's Americaexplores the vibrant, transatlantic traffic in people, ideas, and texts that profoundly shaped American political debate in the 1790s. In 1789, when the Federal Constitution was ratified, \"democracy\" was a controversial term that very few Americans used to describe their new political system. That changed when the French Revolution-and the wave of democratic radicalism that it touched off around the Atlantic World-inspired a growing number of Americans to imagine and advocate for a wide range of political and social reforms that they proudly called \"democratic.\" One of the figureheads of this new international movement was Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense. Although Paine spent the 1790s in Europe, his increasingly radical political writings from that decade were wildly popular in America. A cohort of democratic printers, newspaper editors, and booksellers stoked the fires of American politics by importing a flood of information and ideas from revolutionary Europe. Inspired by what they were learning from their contemporaries around the world, the evolving democratic opposition in America pushed their fellow citizens to consider a wide range of radical ideas regarding racial equality, economic justice, cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, and the construction of more literally democratic polities. In Europe such ideas quickly fell victim to a counter-Revolutionary backlash that defined Painite democracy as dangerous Jacobinism, and the story was much the same in America's late 1790s. The Democratic Party that won the national election of 1800 was, ironically, the beneficiary of this backlash; for they were able to position themselves as the advocates of a more moderate, safe vision of democracy that differentiated itself from the supposedly aristocratic Federalists to their right and the dangerously democratic Painite Jacobins to their left.

The Declaration of Independence is usually celebrated as a radical document that inspired revolution in the English colonies, in France, and elsewhere. InEnemyship, however, Jeremy Engels views the Declaration as a rhetorical strategy that outlined wildly effective arguments justifying revolution against a colonial authority-and then threatened political stability once independence was finally achieved.Enemyshipexamines what happened during the latter years of the Revolutionary War and in the immediate post-Revolutionary period, when the rhetorics and energies of revolution began to seem problematic to many wealthy and powerful Americans.To mitigate this threat, says Engles, the founders of the United States deployed the rhetorics of what he calls \"enemyship,\" calling upon Americans to unite in opposition to their shared national enemies.

The Burr treason trial, one of the greatest criminal trials in American history, was significant for several reasons. The legal proceedings lasted seven months and featured some of the nation's best lawyers. It also pitted President Thomas Jefferson (who declared Burr guilty without the benefit of a trial and who masterminded the prosecution), Chief Justice John Marshall (who sat as a trial judge in the federal circuit court in Richmond) and former Vice President Aaron Burr (who was accused of planning to separate the western states from the Union) against each other. At issue, in addition to the life of Aaron Burr, were the rights of criminal defendants, the constitutional definition of treason and the meaning of separation of powers in the Constitution. Capturing the sheer drama of the long trial, Kent Newmyer's book sheds new light on the chaotic process by which lawyers, judges and politicians fashioned law for the new nation.

Chronicles the efforts of the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court to establish a federal court system during the country's uncertain early years. Finalist for the 2022 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the History Category The first Chief Justice of the United States, John Jay faced many unique challenges. When the stability and success of the new nation were far from certain, a body of federalized American law had to be created from scratch. In The First Chief Justice, New York State Appellate Judge Mark C. Dillon uncovers, for the first time, how Jay's personal, educational, and professional experiences-before, during, and after the Revolutionary War-shaped both the establishment of the first system of federal courts from 1789 to 1795 and Jay's approach to deciding the earliest cases heard by the Supreme Court. Dillon takes us on a fascinating journey of a task accomplished by constant travel on horseback to the nation's far reaches, with Jay adeptly handling the Washington administration, Congress, lawyers, politicians, and judicial colleagues. The book includes the history of each of the nine cases decided by Jay when he was Chief Justice, many of which have proven with time to have enduring historical significance. The First Chief Justice will appeal to anyone interested in the establishment of the US federal court system and early American history.

Born in 1755 on a small Caribbean island to unmarried parents, Alexander Hamilton did not enjoy the privileges of wealth or heredity by which so many of his contemporaries advanced to the highest levels of power.

Probably no American statesman displayed more constructive imagination than did Alexander Hamilton. Prodigal of ideas, bursting with plans for diversifying the economy, and obsessed by a determination to make the United States a powerful nation under a centralized government, he left an imprint upon this country that time has not effaced. Alexander Hamilton and the Growth of the New Nation is the premier biography of Alexander Hamilton written by one of the foremost scholars of early American history. Hamilton's career was at times contradictory: born, in John Adams's words, the \"bastard brat of a Scotch peddler,\" he rose to high social, political, and military position in the newly born country. He dreaded divisiveness, yet his strategies and actions aggravated political sectionalism. Miller weaves together the complex facets of Hamilton's life to make a vivid, absorbing biography.

This book presents an overview of the brilliant, flawed, and quarrelsome group of lawyers, politicians, merchants, military men, and clergy known as the “Founding Fathers” — who got as close to the ideal of the Platonic “philosopher-kings” as American or world history has ever seen. The book reveals Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and the other founders not as shining demigods but as imperfect human beings — people much like us — who nevertheless achieved political greatness. They emerge here as men who sought to transcend their intellectual world even as they were bound by its limits, men who strove to lead the new nation even as they had to defer to the great body of the people and learn with them the possibilities and limitations of politics. Bernstein deftly traces the dynamic forces that molded these men and their contemporaries as British colonists in North America and as intellectual citizens of the Atlantic civilization's Age of Enlightenment. It analyzes the American Revolution, the framing and adoption of state and federal constitutions, and the key concepts and problems — among them independence, federalism, equality, slavery, and the separation of church and state — that both shaped and circumscribed the founders' achievements as the United States sought its place in the world.

Most Americans believe that the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 marked the settlement of post-Revolutionary disputes over the meanings of rights, democracy, and sovereignty in the new nation. In The Citizenship Revolution, Douglas Bradburn undercuts this view by showing that the Union, not the Nation, was the most important product of independence. In 1774, everyone in British North America was a subject of King George and Parliament. In 1776 a number of newly independent \"states,\" composed of \"American citizens\" began cobbling together a Union to fight their former fellow countrymen. But who was an American? What did it mean to be a \"citizen\" and not a \"subject\"? And why did it matter? Bradburn's stunning reinterpretation requires us to rethink the traditional chronologies and stories of the American Revolutionary experience. He places battles over the meaning of \"citizenship\" in law and in politics at the center of the narrative. He shows that the new political community ultimately discovered that it was not really a \"Nation,\" but a \"Union of States\"-and that it was the states that set the boundaries of belonging and the very character of rights, for citizens and everyone else. To those inclined to believe that the ratification of the Constitution assured the importance of national authority and law in the lives of American people, the emphasis on the significance and power of the states as the arbiter of American rights and the character of nationhood may seem strange. But, as Bradburn argues, state control of the ultimate meaning of American citizenship represented the first stable outcome of the crisis of authority, allegiance, and identity that had exploded in the American Revolution-a political settlement delicately reached in the first years of the nineteenth century. So ended the first great phase of the American citizenship revolution: a continuing struggle to reconcile the promise of revolutionary equality with the pressing and sometimes competing demands of law, order, and the pursuit of happiness.

The personal side of this Founding Father is revealed through his writings.

Gain an intimate understanding of one of the key figures in American history in this detailed biography of Thomas Jefferson. It is virtually impossible to overstate the influence that Jefferson exerted during and after the formation of the United States, ranging from his stint as president to his formation of the American system of higher education and beyond. Author Gilbert Chinard offers an exhaustively researched account of Jefferson's life and work that will please fans of American history and biography lovers alike.