Geoff is a native of western Washington and is a lifelong student of the American Revolution. He received a degree in History from Pacific Lutheran University and a M.Ed from the University of Washington. He currently teaches 8th grade social studies outside of Seattle and blogs on historical topics at geoffsmock.substack.com.
It was not just an affirmation of him and his principles by the American people, nor a rejection of his opponents. Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800 was, above all else, an opportunity. Up to this moment, he had been a writer, theorist, legislator, ambassador, secretary, and vice president. But except for a […]
BOOK REVIEW: Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic by Lindsay M. Chervinsky (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024) $34.99 hardcover It was the January term of my final year at Pacific Lutheran University. Thoroughly over the college experience (man cannot live on Hot Pockets and Diet Mountain Dew alone), […]
It is in those first frenzied moments of war fever when declarations of patriotism are their most ardent. So it was for the “Young Men of the City of Philadelphia” in the spring of 1798, when the United States stood within a hair’s breadth of war with France. These young Americans, “anxious to preserve the […]
BOOK REVIEW: King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father by Brooke Barbier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023) To my mind, there are three main currents of historiography of the American Revolution in the present day. The first is the de-deification of the Founding Fathers, seen in both published works and in the […]
BOOK REVIEW: Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders by Dennis C. Rasmussen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021) I feel dutybound to confess something, before I tempt the reader further into this review of Dennis C. Rasmussen’s Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders. I am somewhat embittered—envious even. […]
BOOK REVIEW: Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons From a Misunderstood Founder by Christian Parenti (New York: Verso, 2020) Alexander Hamilton’s legacy has undergone a radical shift among historians over the last twenty years—never mind among the broader public (thanks, Broadway!). In that way, the title of Christian Parenti’s reassessment of Hamilton is as appropriate as reassessing Hamilton […]
Colonel Hamilton and Colonel Burr: The Revolutionary War Lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr by Arthur S. Lefkowitz (Stackpole Books, 2020) Students of history (and fans of Broadway) know Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton as one of America’s fiercest political rivalries. What began as an intense competition in the hurly-burly of New York politics […]
Within the pantheon of Founding Fathers, only George Washington was more impenetrable than was Thomas Jefferson—then and now. The man who would come to be known as the “Sage of Monticello” was also the man who slouched in the back of every session of the Continental Congress; a spectator outwardly disinterested in opening his mind […]
To Thomas Jefferson, great plagues were within the genus of republican antibodies. Like the occasional popular insurrection that warned rulers “the spirit of resistance” still existed, a few hundred deaths or so before the pathogenic scythe of a virus discouraged “the growth of great cities in our nation, & I view great cities as pestilential […]
Celebrated for his stirring words in the Declaration of Independence, and having profited upon the popularity since, Thomas Jefferson was now America’s chief magistrate—and its most self-satisfied citizen. To him, the Washington and Adams years had been a “reign of witches”—a sudden reversion from the ideals he had laid out in that document—a dark age […]
An epidemic that violently attacks public health—that sickens and takes lives; that cripples our economy; that forces us into our homes; that turns cities into ghost towns—may be unprecedented to the present generation of Americans, but was as commonplace to the Revolutionary generation as was revolution itself. The War of Independence, Shays’ Rebellion, the French […]
Hamilton Versus Wall Street: The Core Principles of the American System of Economics by Nancy Bradeen Spannaus (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2019) “The purpose of this book,” Ms. Spannaus declares, “is simple: to establish once and for all that the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, was the founder of an American System of Economics which provided the […]
Close the window. No, leave the window open. Cold night air can be toxic to one’s health. No, what’s truly toxic is stifled, fetid air . . . . What has for centuries been an argument between couples long-married was, on one evening in September 1776, an impassioned dispute between temporary bedfellows John Adams and […]
Having just attained his thirteenth (or eleventh) birthday, he found himself confined to a bed on the second floor of a small two-story house on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, gripped by a violent fever now in its second week.[1] Next to him was his mother, who had been the first to come down […]
The charge was leveled often in his own time, as it has been ever since: James Madison is and was a hypocrite—a man inconstant in principles; “a mind mired in confusion and inconsistency, or perhaps even one suffering from schizophrenia or tainted by dishonesty.”[1] This judgment is only a recitation of the verdict first rendered […]
It was a mountaintop idyll; a luxuriant bath in the affirming glow of acclaim; a sunset valediction. Or so it was to Saul K. Padover, who described the retired Thomas Jefferson as “that most rare of human species, a balanced and harmonious man capable of viewing the world with detached compassion and serene wisdom.” Cushioned […]
From the ministry’s point of view, affairs in America really were quite appalling. The unpardonable brashness of a cocksure young provincial had instantly escalated a minor diplomatic dispute in the wilderness fringe of North America into a war between the world’s two great powers – a war for which His Majesty’s government was woefully unprepared. […]
Experience had taught George Washington a great many things. His father had passed away at a young age, denying him the chance for the college education in England that he had been promised. Instead of lecture halls and libraries, his factories of learning were to be the wildernesses of the Virginia frontier, the battlefields of […]
Before ever he was a president, vice president, ambassador, Continental Congressmen, or Massachusetts lawyer, John Adams was a schoolmaster in a rural hamlet in Colonial Massachusetts. And he was in a state of torment. “I find myself very much inclined to an unreasonable absence of mind, and to a morose and unsociable disposition,” he lamented […]
Ask a group of my 8th grade U.S. History students what the causes of the American Revolution were and they are likely recite a catalogue of British actions: the Navigation Acts, the Stamp Act, “No Taxation without Representation,” the Proclamation of 1763, and the Boston Massacre, among others (or at least their teacher would hope […]
Thomas Jefferson is said to have quipped that, “Good wine is a necessity of life for me.”[1] It was more than his beverage of choice though. Based on a foundation of love and a refined expertise, wine consciously assumed other diverse functions for him. Among these, it was an inviting target for scientific inquiry and […]