Jeff Broadwater is professor emeritus of history at Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina. His recent publications include Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution (2019), and a collection of essays, which he co-edited with Troy L. Kickler, North Carolina’s Revolutionary Founders (2019)
BOOK REVIEW: New Jersey’s Revolutionary Rivalry: The Untold Story of Colonel Tye & Captain Huddy by Rick Geffken (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2025) $24.99 Paperback Rick Geffken’s New Jersey’s Revolutionary Rivalry revolves around two antagonists. Titus was an enslaved man who escaped to British lines and, as the leader of a mixed group of […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Scientist Turned Spy: Andre Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the Conspiracy of 1793 by Patrick Spero (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2024) $34.95 Hardcover Dreary as they may have been, the COVID lockdowns had a few positive consequences; they did give some historians, among them Patrick Spero, the Chief Executive Officer of the […]
BOOK REVIEW: No Longer Subjects of the British King: The Political Transformation of Royal Subjects to Republican Citizens, 1774-1776 by Shawn David McGhee (Yardley, PA: Journal of the American Revolution Books/Westholme Publishing, 2024. $34.95 cloth.) As Continental Congresses go, the Second Continental Congress, which adopted the Declaration of Independence, is clearly the star, but Shawn […]
BOOK REVIEW: Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions by Katlyn Marie Carter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023) In our age of freedom of information acts, C-Span, and a never-ending news cycle, we tend to equate transparent government with democracy and sensible public policy. In Democracy in Darkness, however, […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Whiskey Rebellion: A Distilled History of an American Crisis by Brady J. Crytzer (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2023) In late July 1794, at least 1,500 armed rebels assembled at Braddock’s Field, about eight miles southeast of Pittsburgh, in what Brady Crytzer, a professor of history at Robert Morris University, describes as “the largest […]
BOOK REVIEW: Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York by David N. Gellman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2022) America’s Founders are routinely criticized for creating a republic that tolerated, and often defended, African slavery, but at least one of the Founders, New York’s John Jay, inaugurated a family tradition of anti-slavery […]
BOOK REVIEW: Two Revolutions and the Constitution: How the English and American Revolutions Produced the American Constitution by James D. R. Philips (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2021) In his concise Two Revolutions and the Constitution, the Australian lawyer and law professor James D. R. Philips traces the roots of the American Founding back to England’s Glorious […]
Political Thought and the Origins of the American Presidency edited by Ben Lowe (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2021) In Political Thought and the Origins of the American Presidency, historian Ben Lowe of Florida Atlantic University has assembled an attractive collection of scholarly essays that began as presentations to the university’s 2019 Alan B. and […]
