Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders
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…
Review: Radical Hamilton
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…
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Review: Colonel Hamilton and Colonel Burr
Colonel Hamilton and Colonel Burr: The Revolutionary War Lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr by Arthur S. Lefkowitz (Stackpole Books, 2020) Students of…
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Smells Like Teen Spirit: The Teenage Thomas Jefferson
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…
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Did Yellow Fever Save the United States?
To Thomas Jefferson, great plagues were within the genus of republican antibodies. Like the occasional popular insurrection that warned rulers “the spirit of resistance”…
John Marshall: Hamilton 2.0
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…
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Thomas Jefferson and the Public Benefits of Epidemics
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…
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Hamilton Versus Wall Street: The Core Principles of the American System of Economics
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,”…
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Strange Bedfellows: Adams and Franklin as Diplomatic Duo
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…
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Hamilton’s Revenge
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…
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The Counterbalance: Explaining James Madison
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…
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Jefferson’s Reckoning: The Sage of Monticello’s Haunting Final Years
It was a mountaintop idyll; a luxuriant bath in the affirming glow of acclaim; a sunset valediction. Or so it was to Saul K….
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From Wannabe Redcoat to Rebel: George Washington’s Journey to Revolution
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…
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Experience, Policies, Failures: President Washington & the Native Americans
Experience had taught George Washington a great many things. His father had passed away at a young age, denying him the chance for the…
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John Adams: Portrait of the Founder as a Young Schoolmaster
Before ever he was a president, vice president, ambassador, Continental Congressmen, or Massachusetts lawyer, John Adams was a schoolmaster in a rural hamlet in…
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Blame Canada: The Quebec Act & the American Revolution
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…
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Exploring Thomas Jefferson’s Love of Wine
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…