Tag: Thomas Jefferson

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Partly National, Partly Federal: James Madison, the Amphictyonic Confederacy, and the Republican Balance

Following the Constitutional Convention’s completion of the United States Constitution in the Fall of 1787, many of those involved in its creation embarked on a campaign to ensure its ratification among the several states. The most significant effort was the publication of the Federalist in New York, published anonymously in a long series of newspaper articles […]

by James A. Cornelius
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Congress’s “Committee on Spies” and the Court-Martial Policies of General Washington

In the weeks before it declared independence, the Continental Congress was already hard at work building the institutions it would need to maintain the new republic. In June 1776, a committee was appointed to explore articles that would link the thirteen provincial legislatures in a loose confederation. A second was tasked to consider how the […]

by Richard Willing
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This Week on Dispatches: Thomas E. Ricks on First Principles

On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews Pulitzer-prize winning historian Thomas E. Ricks on his new book, First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country, recently reviewed in JAR. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, […]

by Editors
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First Principles

First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned From the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country by Thomas E. Ricks (New York, NY: Harper Colins Publishers, 2020) Author Thomas E. Ricks (Churchill and Orwell, 2017; Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006) started his work on First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned From the […]

by Timothy Symington
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The First Efforts to Limit the African Slave Trade Arise in the American Revolution: Part 3 of 3, Congress Bans the African Slave Trade

In October 1774, in a stunning and radical move, delegates of the First Continental Congress signed a pledge for the thirteen mainland colonies not to participate in the African slave trade. Perhaps equally astounding, Americans largely complied, turning the pledge into an outright ban. Congress’s ban and widespread compliance with it during the Revolutionary War […]

by Christian McBurney
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The First Efforts to Limit the African Slave Trade Arise in the American Revolution: Part 1 of 3, The New England Colonies

The American Revolution changed the way Americans viewed one of the world’s great tragedies: the African slave trade. The long march to end the slave trade and then slavery itself had to start somewhere, and a strong argument can be made that it started with the thirteen American colonies gaining independence from Great Britain, then […]

by Christian McBurney
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Margaret Eustace and Her Family Pass through the American Revolution

John L. Smith, Jr. introduced readers of the Journal of the American Revolution to Margaret Eustace in his article, “The Scandalous Divorce Case that Influenced the Declaration of Independence.” She had a second act in the American Revolution. In Georgia, late in the war, she made a name for herself. In November 1772, Thomas Jefferson represented Eustace’s […]

by Robert Scott Davis
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The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University

The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University, edited by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, (University of Virginia Press, 2019). Revered by many for years, the University of Virginia boasts both of its academic reputation as well as its distinctive founder, Thomas Jefferson. As the collection of essays that comprise The Founding […]

by Kelly Mielke
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An American Bolingbroke: John Taylor of Caroline’s Republican Opposition, 1792–1794, Part 1 of 2

From 1792 to 1794, John Taylor of Caroline, a senator from Virginia, was engaged in a heated party struggle between Jeffersonian Republicans and Hamiltonian Federalists over the implementation of the latter’s new economic program. Taylor, despite being largely unknown by non-specialists today, has been called by Gordon S. Wood “the conscience of the Republican party” […]

by James A. Cornelius
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This Week on Dispatches: Jett Conner on Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and the Louisiana Purchase

On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews political scientist, historian, and JAR contributor Jett Conner on his recent article about Thomas Paine’s and Thomas Jefferson’s interpretations of the role of presidential powers used by Jefferson to justify the Louisiana Purchase. Thousands of readers like you enjoy the articles published by the Journal of the American […]

by Editors
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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” 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 […]

by Geoff Smock
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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 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 […]

by Geoff Smock
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This Week on Dispatches: Geoff Smock on the Influence of the Enlightenment on Thomas Jefferson

On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews teacher and JAR contributor Geoff Smock on Thomas Jefferson’s enlightenment-influenced views on pandemics, the French Revolution, Shays’ Rebellion, and other events of his time. Thousands of readers like you enjoy the articles published by the Journal of the American Revolution. Dispatches is a free podcast that puts a […]

by Editors
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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 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 […]

by Geoff Smock
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Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship That Helped Forge Two Nations

Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship That Helped Forge Two Nations by Tom Chaffin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019) There are countless streets, monuments, and other features in the United States named for the Marquis de Lafayette. However, despite this prevalence of tributes, Tom Chaffin asserts that most Americans know […]

by Kelly Mielke
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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,” 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 […]

by Geoff Smock
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The Fear of Domination: Resistance Against Tyranny

The threat of continued oppression and an encroaching condition of slavery was central to the American colonists’ call for separation from Great Britain and the corresponding shift to direct resistance. While the lack of effective political representation was crucial, importantly the colonists held other more acute concerns than the issue of representation in Parliament. Crucially, […]

by Dean Caivano
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Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History

Thomas Jefferson’s Lives:  Biographers and the Battle for History edited by Robert M. S. McDonald.  (Charlottesville, VA:  University of Virginia Press, 2019) Robert M. S. McDonald’s previous book, Confounding Father:  Thomas Jefferson’s Image in His Own Time (2016), portrays the Virginian as a multifaceted character who is extraordinarily difficult to understand. Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the […]

by Timothy Symington
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This Week on Dispatches: John L. Smith, Jr. on Thomas Jefferson and French Fries

On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews educator, US Army and US Air Force veteran, and JAR contributor, John L. Smith, Jr., about the role Thomas Jefferson may have played in introducing fried potatoes—“French Fries”—to American cuisine. Thousands of readers like you enjoy the articles published by the Journal of the American Revolution. Dispatches is […]

by Editors
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Picking Up the Pieces: Virginia’s “Eighteen-Months Men” of 1780–81

The first half of 1780 had gone disastrously for Virginia. The surrender of Gen. Benjamin Lincoln’s army at Charleston and the destruction of Col. Abraham Buford’s detachment of Virginia continentals at the Waxhaws virtually eliminated Virginia’s continental line. A force that once boasted sixteen regiments and thousands of men was now reduced to a handful of […]

by Michael Cecere
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The Tragedy of Henry Laurens

It wasn’t really their fault, they said. Slavery, men of the founding generation liked to argue, was brought to the colonies by Britain. It came via Barbados and the other sugar islands of the Caribbean. Thomas Jefferson and Henry Laurens both blamed Britain and wished the colonies could free themselves of the practice. It was […]

by Gabriel Neville
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This Week on Dispatches: Geoff Smock on Alexander Hamilton’s Childhood in the Caribbean

In this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor and Seattle-area middle school history teacher Geoff Smock about how Alexander Hamilton’s difficult childhood experiences in the Caribbean helped shape his future political ideology. As your host Brady Crytzer says, “Sit back, relax, and enjoy the interview. . . .” New episodes of Dispatches are available […]

by Editors
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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 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 […]

by Geoff Smock
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Contributor Question: Best Strategic Defeat?

This month, we asked our contributors to consider the many changes of fortune that occurred over the tumultuous four decades that transformed thirteen British colonies into the nascent United States: What was the best strategic defeat, whether political or military, of the American Revolution and the founding era (roughly 1765 thru 1805)? That is, what […]

by Editors